THE MAKING OF ARCANUM OF STEAMWORKS AND MAGICK OBSCURA

There have been several watershed moments in the history of videogame RPGs. There was 1981, when the Ultima and Wizardry series first landed. Then we had Ultima Underworld in 1992, before Fallout (1997) and Baldur’s Gate (1998) set the genre on the critical path to the modern day. Arcanum is an elegant and ambitious game that arrived towards the end of that computer RPG wave, though in some ways it sat at its very crest.

As lead developers behind the original Fallout, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky were two of the top figures behind the rise of computer RPGs in the late Nineties. The pioneering duo were in line to continue building their legacy, and worked on Fallout 2 for much of its development, but their visions for the game didn’t align with Interplay’s. The publisher saw Fallout as a franchise and wanted to make it more pop-culture savvy and selfreferential, which clashed with Tim and Leonard’s more systemic, more hardcore RPG sensibilities.

Tim and Leonard walked away from Fallout 2 during development to establish Troika Games along with fellow Fallout developer Jason Anderson in 1998. Driven