Harvey Smith is back. The co-creative director of Dishonored and director of Deathloop, and one of the original minds behind Deus Ex back in 2000, has teamed up with former Arkane Austin lead producer Ben Horne to launch a new studio: Black Pony Immersive, per the announcement covered by Shacknews.

If you've been playing games for more than a decade, Smith's name means something. Deus Ex basically invented the modern immersive sim, or at least the version we still argue about today. Then he landed at Arkane and helped build Dishonored into something special, a game where the systems did the storytelling and every guard in Dunwall might drown because you possessed a rat. I want to say I put 60 hours into the first Dishonored just running no-chaos ghost runs. I'd do it again.

Horne's resume is less flashy on paper but matters just as much on the production side. He was a lead producer at Arkane Austin through the Redfall years, which means he knows what happens when a studio gets squeezed between a corporate acquisition and a live-service mandate nobody asked for. That era ended badly when Microsoft shut Arkane Austin down in 2023. Two of the people who lived through that coming back to start something new is the kind of story I never get tired of writing about.

Details on the actual project are thin right now. The studio's name and founding team are the announcement, which is standard for a first-day reveal. No platform, no engine, no release window. What we do know is the mission sitting right there in the name: "Immersive." Smith has spent his entire career on games that hand you a toolbox and let you break the level design in half, from System Shock's spiritual descendants through Prey and Deathloop. Hard to imagine him founding a studio built around, say, a battle pass.

The immersive sim has had a rough couple of decades commercially, and I say that as someone who bought every one of those commercial disappointments at full price. Arkane's games reviewed well and sold modestly for years. Thief, the original Deus Ex, the Looking Glass era, all of it lived on that edge between beloved and money-losing. But the genre keeps producing studios that punch above their weight, and veterans keep circling back to it, because once you've made a game where the player's creativity is the real content, going back to scripted corridors feels like quitting.

Worth watching: where this lands publisher-wise. Smith's recent work shipped under Bethesda and then Xbox Game Studios, and those corporate parents are a lot more risk-averse now than they were when Dishonored got greenlit around 2010. A studio this size, founded by leads rather than acquired as headcount, has options. A mid-budget publisher deal feels like the natural fit, and the AA space has been quietly carrying the genre lately anyway.

I'll be following this one. A new studio from the person who helped give us both Deus Ex and Dishonored earns the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. First screenshot drops and I'm there day one, toolbox ready.