Brian Fargo

Life

Frank Brian Fargo was born in Long Beach, California, the only child of Frank Byron Fargo and Marie Curtis Fargo, and grew up in Whittier and Newport Beach. He attended Corona del Mar High School, where he ran track and field, and decided to make games after his parents bought him an Apple II. While still in high school he wrote his first game, Labyrinth of Martagon, with his friend Michael Cranford. In 1981 he self-published and marketed, guerrilla-style, the graphical text adventure The Demon's Forge, and he wrote educational games for the World Book Encyclopedia. He was an eager student of the craft: in 1982 Softline magazine printed his letter asking how On-Line Systems stored the graphics in The Wizard and the Princess.

Work

In 1983 Fargo founded Interplay Productions; Rebecca Heineman, Jay Patel and Troy Worrell were among its founders. Its first contract was the Activision adventure Mindshadow. Next, for the young publisher Electronic Arts, Fargo brought in Cranford to create a role-playing game. The Bard's Tale (1985), designed and programmed by Cranford with additional design by Fargo, sold about 407,000 copies, the most of any 1980s computer RPG, and spawned two sequels. Fargo then directed Wasteland (1988), a post-apocalyptic RPG with a reactive world and consequences that persisted, which later inspired Fallout. He and Cranford fell out over contract terms after the first Bard's Tale, a dispute all parties have since put behind them.

Working as a developer for other publishers let Interplay break even at best, so in 1988 Fargo turned it into a publisher, starting with its own Battle Chess. His gift was spotting small teams. He gave an early contract, RPM Racing, to Silicon & Synapse, the company of his old friend Allen Adham and Adham's partner Michael Morhaime, who went on to rename it Blizzard Entertainment. He backed Parallax Software, whose demo became Descent. He hired a small Canadian studio, BioWare, to make Shattered Steel, and then published its Baldur's Gate (1998) through Interplay's RPG division, Black Isle Studios, whose own games included Planescape: Torment (1999) and Icewind Dale (2000). Interplay grew to more than 600 employees at its mid-1990s peak, and in 1996 Computer Gaming World named Fargo the third most influential "industry player" of all time.

Expansion brought debt. Universal/MCA bought a 45 percent stake in 1994, Interplay went public in 1998, and the French publisher Titus Software invested and then took majority control. After disagreements with Titus over management, Fargo resigned in 2000. In 2002 he founded inXile Entertainment in Newport Beach, whose first titles included a comic Bard's Tale (2004), and which found success with downloadable hits such as Line Rider.

In 2012, inspired by Double Fine's crowdfunding success, Fargo took Wasteland 2 to Kickstarter. It reached its $900,000 goal in two days and closed with $2,933,252, plus more than $100,000 via PayPal. The following year Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment set in Monte Cook's Numenera setting, hit $1 million faster than any Kickstarter project before it. A 2015 campaign for The Bard's Tale IV raised more than $1.5 million, and Cranford joined as an adviser. In 2018 Microsoft acquired inXile as part of what is now Xbox Game Studios; Fargo, who had talked of retiring after Wasteland 3 (2020), stayed on to lead the studio. He also founded Robot Cache, a digital PC games store.

Legacy

Fargo's career traces the arc of the Western Western Computer RPGs (CRPG). The Bard's Tale carried the First-Person Dungeon Crawlers ('Blobbers') to a mass audience on the Commodore 64; Wasteland pointed toward open, consequential worlds; Interplay and Black Isle made the late-1990s CRPG renaissance possible by publishing Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment and Fallout; and his Kickstarter campaigns helped prove, in the early 2010s, that players would directly fund the kind of deep, old-school RPGs large publishers had abandoned. The designers who passed through his companies, including Heineman, Chris Avellone, Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer, spread that tradition through the industry. In 2009 IGN named him one of the top 100 game creators of all time. When Heineman died in 2025, Fargo was among the Interplay veterans who paid tribute to her.