Obsidian Entertainment

History

By 2003 Interplay Productions was sinking, and with it Black Isle Studios, the division that had made Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Fallout 2. On June 12, 2003, five of its leaders, Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Chris Parker, Darren Monahan and Chris Jones, founded Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine, California. Black Isle was closed that December.

Without an intellectual property of its own, Obsidian became the industry's sequel specialist. It made Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords (2004) and Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006), both following games by BioWare; Fallout: New Vegas (2010) for Bethesda Softworks; Dungeon Siege III (2011); and South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014). The work paid the bills but was often rushed, and by 2012 a cancelled console project had forced layoffs and left the studio in trouble.

Its rescue came from its fans. In September 2012 Obsidian launched a Kickstarter for "Project Eternity," an isometric RPG in the style of Baldur's Gate, and raised nearly $4 million. Led by Josh Sawyer, it shipped as Pillars of Eternity in 2015, followed by Tyranny (2016) and Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire (2018). Avellone left in June 2015.

Microsoft announced its purchase of Obsidian in November 2018. Under Xbox it released The Outer Worlds (2019), the survival game Grounded, Sawyer's illuminated-manuscript mystery Pentiment (2022), and in 2025 the first-person fantasy RPG Avowed (February), Grounded 2 (early access, July) and The Outer Worlds 2 (October). In July 2026 news outlets reported that as much as a quarter of the staff had been laid off, a possible Avowed sequel cancelled, and the studio refocused on a game in the Fallout universe with Bethesda Game Studios; in September Microsoft moved Obsidian from Xbox Game Studios to ZeniMax Media.

Notable work

Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights 2 showed Obsidian's hallmark early: companions who argue with the player's philosophy and plots that question the genre's assumptions. Fallout: New Vegas is its most celebrated game, a Mojave full of rival factions where almost every quest can be solved several ways.

Pillars of Eternity is its most important fantasy work. Set in the world of Eora, it revived the Real-time with pause combat, The party and dense prose of the Infinity Engine games, adding a setting built around souls and reincarnation. Avowed later returned to Eora in first person, bringing Obsidian's fantasy into the Open-World RPGs space defined by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Legacy

Obsidian is the keeper of a tradition: the Western Computer RPGs (CRPG) as a thing of words and choices, descended from AD&D tables by way of Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. Its Kickstarter helped launch the isometric revival of the 2010s, which ran through Larian's Divinity: Original Sin II to Baldur's Gate 3.

Many of its designers, including Avellone and Sawyer, became influential voices on writing and systems design, and the studio's reputation for reactive writing made it a byword for games where your choices are remembered. Its return to Fallout in 2026 closed a loop that began at Black Isle.