Arkane Studios

Walk into Arkane's offices in Lyon and you'll find a studio that has spent a quarter century building the same kind of game from different angles. Raphaël Colantonio founded the company on October 1, 1999, after years working in the French games industry. The first release, Arx Fatalis in 2002, was a first-person dungeon crawler with a rune-based spellcasting system you drew by hand with the mouse. That idea, that a game should hand you tools and let you figure out what to do with them, has never really left.

A second office opened in Austin, Texas, in July 2006, and for eighteen years the two studios traded projects and staff. The Austin branch closed in May 2024 after Redfall landed badly, a casualty of ZeniMax-wide cuts that followed Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of the parent company in March 2021. Lyon kept going, and it is Lyon that still carries the name today.

Inside the studio, the design language is specific. Levels are built as overlapping routes rather than corridors. Powers like Blink in Dishonored or the Gloo Cannon in Prey exist to break the intended path, not to decorate it. Playtesters are encouraged to find the route the designer didn't plan. The team talks about this in developer commentary and level-design breakdowns far more than in trailers, which is part of why the audience skews toward people who read patch notes for fun. [edit]