Black Isle is a name that brings a tear to the eyes of any old school RPG gamer. Their PC titles, from Fallout to Baldur’s Gate, helped define how storytelling is done in RPGs today. BioWare, which was the driving force behind the Baldur’s Gate games, pretty much took Black Isle’s style and ran with it, even after the Interplay-owned studio was long since defunct. Many of its key members reformed under the name Obsidian, which you may have heard of in the same breath as such games as Fallout: New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
And, now, Black Isle is back, courtesy of Interplay, and gamers around the globe are left to breathe a resounding sigh of, well, exasperation. What’s in a name, after all? It’s been proven time and again, with Rare and with Infinity Ward among others, that it isn’t the studio’s name that makes the game, but the individuals who’ve worked on it that define it. Further, having lost even the license to make a Fallout MMO, what is Interplay planning to do with the Black Isle name?