Arkane Studios almost didn’t make it to Dishonored.
Speaking on The Game Business Show, Arkane veterans Harvey Smith and Raphaël Colantonio looked back at the years before the studio’s breakout hit. The picture they painted was grim.
“I think we had four months of money left,” Harvey Smith recalled. “We were working on Boom Blox with EA.”
Boom Blox shipped in May 2008, which places the cash crisis years before Dishonored ever launched. Arkane wasn’t a hit studio at that point. It was a small independent developer surviving on contract and support work for bigger publishers.
Founded in 1999 by Colantonio, Arkane had built a cult reputation with Arx Fatalis in 2002 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2006. Critical respect, yes. Financial stability, no.
Before Dishonored existed, both leads were chasing personal dream projects. Smith was working on a possible Blade Runner game. Colantonio was pushing for a Thief sequel: fitting, since Looking Glass games were Arkane’s biggest influence.
Neither licensing deal came together. Both projects died, and the studio burned time and money on prototypes that went nowhere.
Then Bethesda came calling with a simple offer: build us a new game and a new IP. Arkane already had ideas that fit. Smith and Colantonio decided to team up as co-creative directors, and the design thinking from that dead Thief pitch, first-person stealth, multiple routes, vertical movement, and systems that let players improvise, flowed straight into the new project.
ZeniMax Media, Bethesda’s parent company, acquired Arkane in August 2010. Dishonored arrived in October 2012 after roughly two and a half years in production.
From dead prototypes to Dunwall
Early concepts reportedly explored medieval Japan and 17th-century London before landing on Dunwall, the plague-ridden whaling city built from Victorian London and Edinburgh, with art direction by Sébastien Mitton and visual design input from Viktor Antonov.
The result was a hit. Players controlled Corvo Attano, framed for the Empress’s murder, armed with Blink, Possession, and Bend Time, free to solve missions loudly or without spilling a drop of blood. The chaos system tracked how much you killed and changed the world accordingly.
Dishonored got two Daud expansions in 2013, The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, followed by Dishonored 2 in 2016 and Death of the Outsider in 2017. Arkane also delivered Prey in 2017 and Deathloop in 2021.
Colantonio has since left to run WolfEye Studios. Smith stayed at Arkane Austin and directed Redfall, and Microsoft shut that studio down in 2024. Arkane Lyon is still open and working on Marvel’s Blade.
