Harvey Smith Interview

Arkane Studios’ director Harvey Smith, a veteran designer who over the years worked on a number of outstanding titles including System Shock, Deus Ex, and Dishonored, recently had a chat with Vandal – a Spanish entertainment website.

The interview was understandably in Spanish, but thanks to Google’s translating magic, we can get the general gist of what was said there and learn that Smith is currently working on some unannounced project supposedly in the vein of Dishonored and Prey.

Beyond that, the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including cloud gaming, Arkane’s past and current projects, the importance of QA, and more. Here’s a couple of sample questions:

You worked at Dishonored at Arkane Lyon and now you’re at Arkane Austin, so you’re not working at Deathloop .

No, Dinga Bakaba [game director] and Sébastien Mitton [art director] are with him, but I worked with them on Dishonored 1 from Austin. We collaborated between Lyon and Austin for the first Dishonored and then for Dishonored 2 I moved to Lyon and was there for four years. Raph stayed in Austin and worked at Prey with Ricardo Bare and Susan Kath and the people I’m working with now. At the end of Dishonored 2 I went back to Austin. I’m not in Deathloop , I’m in something else, working with the guys who made Dishonored and Prey

[…]

I suppose that after so many years working together you miss Colantonio, do you have some envy for him about going indie?

Yeah though, well, he lives in Austin. Before the pandemic, we had coffee once a week and had dinner once a month. [Sighs] He is also a great cook, I cook southern dishes and Mexican cuisine and we both like to eat on the grill. He is very good at Italian and French cuisine. Anyway, he is one of the few people I have continued to see during the pandemic. He comes to the patio, the two of us with masks, and we have a cappuccino coffee, we sit on the patio, because outdoors it is safer. We are about six feet [almost two meters] away, with the mask.

I envy him in some things, because a team of 20 or 30 people is much less heavy, you can make decisions faster, experiment more, the budget is smaller, so you can try more crazy things. But I think he also envies my situation because sometimes he tells me that he misses having a team of 200 people and a huge budget and being able to create something of the highest quality but everything has its pros and cons. And games can be interesting in one way or another.