Dishonored Saved Arkane From Bankruptcy With Four Months of Cash Left, Series Co-Creator Says

Harvey Smith now heads his own studio, but the project that defined his previous tenure at Arkane Studios started under severe financial pressure.

Released over a decade ago, Dishonored remains widely regarded as one of the finest stealth games ever made. According to co-creator Harvey Smith, Arkane Studios had only about four months of runway remaining when development on the game began.

Before starting Dishonored, Arkane spent years doing contract work that rarely brought the team the results they wanted. To stay solvent, the studio juggled as many as nine projects at the same time, collaborating with publishers including Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. Their internal pitches included several different zombie games.

The developers eventually concluded that spreading their resources so thin was unsustainable. Arkane decided to drop the scattershot approach and dedicate all its efforts to a single game.

That gamble resulted in Dishonored. The decision to commit entirely to one game reshaped Arkane’s path, earning broad acclaim from critics and players alike. The release established itself as a landmark stealth-action title of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation and gave the studio the stability to continue creating its own original games.