Arkane Veterans Harvey Smith and Ben Horne Launch Black Pony Immersive

Harvey Smith is running a studio again. The former Arkane Austin studio director, whose credits run from Deus Ex through Dishonored and Prey, has co-founded Black Pony Immersive, a 26-person independent studio, with former Arkane production director Ben Horne. The pair revealed the venture in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz published on August 19, 2026, ending a two-year quiet period that followed Microsoft’s closure of Arkane Austin in May 2024.

That closure put 96 developers out of work. Smith, who Bethesda credited as Co-Creative/Studio Director on Redfall, was among them. Black Pony Immersive opened its doors in August 2025 and has been hiring quietly since, reuniting a core of the old Austin team around a single project.

“Ben and I chose the worst time in history [to start a game studio],” Smith told GamesIndustry.biz. “Because, you know, what else are you going to do?”

A Studio Built From a Closure

Microsoft’s May 2024 decision to shut Arkane Austin, alongside Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games, was part of a wider retrenchment across its Bethesda studios. Gaming.net covered the cuts as part of a pattern that continued into Xbox’s broader studio reset. For Smith, the closure was the catalyst for a move he says he had long wanted to make: running his own company.

“When things are going pretty well, your impetus to do something crazy is very low,” he said. “It’s only when things explode that [you become willing to take the leap].”

Horne’s path to the new studio ran through another closure. After Arkane Austin shut, he joined Meta-owned Twisted Pixel, where he worked on Marvel’s Deadpool VR. He left in August 2025, a few months before Meta closed that studio too (per GamesIndustry.biz, which links to its own report on Meta closing three VR studios after a 10% Reality Labs cut).

Fundraising in a Cold Market

Horne was direct about the difficulty of raising money for a new independent studio in the current environment. “Harvey and I spent a lot of time, in a really horrible environment for fundraising, talking to many different groups about how to raise money,” he said. “We turned down some deals that just didn’t feel right. You know, ‘hey, if you guys are willing to maybe think about this NFT blockchain situation…’ As much [as we wanted] to get this off the ground, let’s try to do it the right way.”

The studio has not disclosed its funding arrangements. Smith described a structure built around minimal outside interference: “We don’t have to seek much approval from anyone else, and that makes us very nimble.”

The Immersive-Sim Formula

The project Black Pony is making remains unannounced, but its genre is not in doubt. The studio’s name is the tell, and its own description of itself commits to “narrative-rich games set in well-realized worlds, where players create their own memorable experiences with expressive, emergent game systems.”

Smith was specific about the design lane the team is staying in. “You’re slightly underpowered, but you have some creative tools. You have an exploration-based landscape, player-driven pace. Single-player, narrative-rich… Whether you call that an action RPG or FPS-RPG hybrid or an immersive sim, whatever.”

He framed that discipline as a lesson drawn from Arkane’s own record. “When we’ve stayed in that lane, the results have been much better, and we get much closer to something that we truly love.”

The staff reflects that history. Alongside Smith and Horne, the studio includes Ricardo Bare, Smith’s creative partner since their Deus Ex days, and Monte Martinez, formerly of Ion Storm, 2K Marin, and WolfEye. Smith called Martinez “the secret weapon of the immersive-sim world.” Not everyone is an Arkane veteran; Smith noted the team also pulled in people from the indie scene.

What Black Pony Is Betting On

The through-line of Smith’s pitch is that keeping an experienced team together has value that a closure ignores. “I don’t think the people closing the studios understand yet what they’ve lost,” he said. It is a pointed argument from a founder who watched Microsoft dissolve a studio with a two-decade pedigree in first-person immersive design, and it doubles as the commercial case for Black Pony: that the assembled team, not any single title, is the asset.

For now the studio is 26 people, fully remote across the United States, working on one unannounced single-player game. Smith said the pitch existed before the company did. “We had the pitch before we had the company.”