Black Isle Studios - Definition and Overview

Black Isle Studios is a division of the electronic entertainment company Interplay Entertainment and specializes in the creation of computer role-playing games. It is based in Los Angeles, California, USA. Black Isle was founded in 1998. The company is most famous for working on the Fallout and Baldur's Gate series of CRPGs.

On December 8, 2003, Interplay laid off Black Isle's PC games staff (the studio had been working on a console game too). As of 2004, Interplay has neither explained the move nor clarified what the future holds for Black Isle. Many former Black Isle employees now work at Obsidian Entertainment, a video game development company.

Products

• Fallout 2 (1998)
• Planescape: Torment (1999)
• Icewind Dale (2000)
• Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter (2001)
• Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter - Trials of the Luremaster (2001)
• Icewind Dale II (2002)

In addition to game developed in-house they have also aided in the development of several CRPGs published by Interplay; the most notable being the Baldur's Gate series for Windows and Mac OS, and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance for PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube. Because Black Isle is a role-playing game developer and helped publish the Baldur's Gate series, many people mistakenly believed that Black Isle developed the Baldur's Gate series. This is false, and the Baldur's Gate series was developed by BioWare, a company that is sometimes erroneously credited with developing the Icewind Dale series.

External link

• Black Isle Studios homepage (http://www.blackisle.com)
• GameSpot: "Interplay shuts down Black Isle Studios" (8 Dec 2003) (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/fallout3/news_6085243.html)
• Obsidian Entertainment homepage (http://www.obsidianent.com)