Black Isle Interview

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Part One of an interview with Black Isle Studios President, Feargus Urquhart has been posted at RPGVault. He talks about the the beginnings of the RPG division at Interplay and answeres questions about several of the games, including the ones below.

Jonric: When Baldur's Gate was released in late 1998, it became a breakout title for the entire genre. When did you first realize it would be a monster hit, and what would you list as the main factors that led to it becoming one?

Feargus Urquhart: Well, the day we went to duplication on CD 1 was the day of Interplay's annual Christmas party. Pretty much all Chris Parker (the producer on Baldur's Gate) and I were thinking about was getting really drunk. And even through the first couple weeks of January, we had no idea that it was doing so well. We knew that we had sold in around 125K units in the US - and we just hoped that we could sell through all of those. We knew the game was good, but that is never enough to make a game a hit. As it turned out, all of those units pretty much sold through in the first six weeks, and it was doing even better in Europe.

As for why it did so well - there are probably about three hundred reasons. However, the key ones were that it was the first exceptional D&D game in a long time, BioWare did an outstanding job in making the game and talking about it online, it had a multi-player component, and the player could pause and issue orders while the game was paused. In other words, BioWare and Interplay were able to excite everybody about the game because of the license, and then the game delivered on all of those promises.

Jonric: Black Isle followed up about a year later with Planescape: Torment, which won tremendous critical acclaim but sold a relatively modest number of copies. To what do you attribute this?

Feargus Urquhart: I felt that the modest sales of Torment were a reflection on the way the game was marketed, the decision to make it single-player only, and the very poor preview version that we released to the gaming press. Of those, I think that the single-player nature of the game could have been easily overcome if we could have done a better job of representing the product to the public and to the press.

A big part of that was the preview that we released. The biggest thing that the gaming press said about the final version was that they were totally surprised by the game that it had become - a GIGANTIC mistake on our part. It meant that the preview version of the game was a very different experience for them, and they were surprised by the final version. I think that while being called "This Year's Surprise Hit!" or "The Sleeper Hit of the Summer" can be turned to your favor when it is said about a movie - I think that in games something like this is a real sign that things weren't done right.

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