Dishonored Director Opens Black Pony Immersive Studio

Harvey Smith spent a year building a studio without telling anyone. On August 19, 2026, he stopped keeping the secret. Black Pony Immersive is 26 people, funded by an unnamed publisher, and making exactly the kind of game the name promises: single-player, first-person action RPGs where the systems tangle with each other and you get to decide what to do about it. If you have ever spent forty minutes in a Dishonored level figuring out how to reach a balcony, you already know the pitch.

• Black Pony Immersive was revealed on August 19, 2026 after roughly a year of quiet operation
• Harvey Smith co-founded the studio with executive producer Ben Horne, a collaborator of more than eight years
• Ricardo Bare, Smith's co-worker going back to the original Deus Ex, has rejoined the team
• The 26-person staff draws from Arkane, Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition, and funding is already secured

Who Is Behind Black Pony Immersive?

Smith is the throughline. He worked on the original Deus Ex, designed Thief: Deadly Shadows, and spent 2008 to 2024 at Arkane, where he directed Dishonored and Dishonored 2. That is roughly a quarter-century of one very specific design philosophy: build a space, fill it with rules that interact, and trust players to find the seams.

Ben Horne is co-founder and executive producer, and the two have worked together for more than eight years, most recently at Arkane Austin. Ricardo Bare's return is the detail that will make longtime fans sit up. He and Smith have been collaborating on and off since Deus Ex, which is over fifteen years of shared shorthand about how these games are supposed to feel.

Around them is a team assembled from Arkane, Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition. That is a lot of shipped games in one 26-person room, and it is a deliberately small room.

What Kind of Games Will the Studio Make?

The studio describes itself as built to design imaginative first-person action RPGs set in well-realized worlds, with emergent systems that let players approach challenges however they like. Translated out of press-release language: immersive sims. Single-player, exploration-forward, built around creative problem solving rather than a single intended solution.

Smith framed the decision plainly. "We're going to fall back on what we love, we're going to work with the people we love," he said. There is something clarifying about a veteran team explicitly choosing not to chase a trend, and instead making the thing they are unusually good at making.

Funding from a publisher partner, secured before the reveal, is the practical part of that. A studio can only afford to be picky about what it builds when the runway is already there.

Why an Immersive Sim Revival Feels Right in 2026

The genre never really left, it just got expensive. Immersive sims are costly to build precisely because their appeal is the number of solutions the designers did not anticipate, and that means more systems, more testing, more edge cases. A 26-person team is a bet that a focused scope can deliver that density without a 400-person budget.

The wider release calendar suggests there is appetite for it. We have watched atmospheric single-player work land well this year, from The Sinking City 2's strong horror reviews to bigger swings like Kingdom Hearts 4 arriving in late 2027. Players still show up for a world worth poking at.

No game, no title, no window yet, which is appropriate for a studio that has said nothing for a year. Consider this a name to keep in your notes. More studio and release news in our gaming coverage.

Sources: Video Games Chronicle — August 19, 2026; Game Informer — August 19, 2026; GamesBeat — August 19, 2026.