PCGamesN talked to Brian Fargo about how he survived in the industry to eventually revive the RPG.
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Game development teams are often thrown together hurriedly around a new contract, but inXile started slowly. Fargo picked staffers he knew and trusted. Findley was one. Another was Maxx Kauffman, who he had seen do great work on Redneck Rampage.
"I brought them together," Fargo says. "But then it became, ‘OK, what are we going to do here?'. And this struggle to find a business model took nearly a decade."
That jokey card title was proving prophetic. In 2002, the ground was shifting beneath the feet of RPG developers. There was very little publisher interest in PC games. With Steam still years off, the digital sales business did not exist. And those contracts that did exist were mostly reserved for studios that were already well-established.
Fargo kept the lights on by "hustling around." He attempted, without success, to win the Baldur's Gate 3 license from Infogrames. He sold the Wizardry franchise off to Japan, where it continues to this day. For a short while, Fargo and a friend co-owned half the rights to GTA for Game Boy.
"We both did very well by selling it back to Take-Two," he says.
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