Black Isle Studios

Black Isle Studios is a development division of developer and publisher Interplay. Originally formed in 1996, it started using the name in 1998 and it was based in California, USA. The division's name refers to Black Isle in Scotland, the native country of founder Feargus Urquhart.

The studio was a continuation of Interplay's DragonPlay, not a real division with a dedicated group of people, but rather a name used to introduce RPGs. Black Isle Studios continued this by solely focusing on RPGs. The company established and worked on 2 major franchises: Fallout and Icewind Dale. Other games are Planescape: Torment and Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (although mainly the work of Reflexive Entertainment Inc). Next to in-house projects, Black Isle also aided in the development of BioWare's Baldur's Gate series. There was one game in the series they developed by themselves, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004 - Xbox/PS2)

The division was closed on 8th December 2003, when they were working on Fallout 3 (codenamed Van Buren, unrelated to the Fallout 3 that would release in 2008). Three more titles had been cancelled earlier: Stonekeep II (2001), Black Isle's Torn (2001) and Baldur's Gate 3: The Black Hound (2003). Many of the employees moved on to Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment.

On 22 August 2012, the studio's website was relaunched, along with the brand. However, the revived brand had nothing to do with the former Black Isle, except for Mark O'Green and Chris Taylor, two former members of the Black Isle.

Black Isle was shut down once again in early 2014, probably because of insufficient funds, with all of the employees having left the company to find employment elsewhere, thus leading to the cancellation of Project V13, the only project that the new team was working on, which was a successor to Fallout Online, a scrapped MMO set in Fallout universe.

The company was launched for a third time by 2021, when Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II ports for PC and newer consoles were to be released.