US Gamer looks back at the glory and the last days of Black Isle Studios:

The Last Days of Black Isle Studios

The crucible that defined some of the best RPG designers ever.

Feargus Urquhart remembers the moment that he knew that it was time to leave Black Isle Studios—the team he had founded a little more than five years before it was under Interplay.

Interplay had been struggling with debt and other issues for years before Urquhart finally decided to leave the studio he named for a region of Scotland, his ancestral homeland. But he had nevertheless held on all the way through 2003, if only out of the vain hope that they could finally finish Fallout 3.

Interplay lost $20 million in 2003, but Urquhart knew that it was over well before that.

"For me, I was very aware of what was going on at Interplay in general, and I tried to share that as much as I could with everyone in Black Isle," Urquhart remembers. "The point where I felt that Black Isle was not going to get the support it needed from Interplay anymore was when Interplay lost the [Dungeons & Dragons] license. Interplay could have figured out how to keep it, but it was a lower priority. This meant a game that people had been working on for two years had to be scrapped. After that happened, it felt to me like the writing was on the wall and both Black Isle and Interplay itself were probably not going to be around much longer.

That summer, Urquhart wound up departing the division he had helped to create after a seven year stint. And then the clock started ticking.

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