‘The last time I liked everything about a game was probably Baldur’s Gate 3’: Raphael Colantonio, co-founder of Arkane Studios, talks us through the games installed on his PC

Raphaël Colantonio became a PC gamer for a very specific reason—he was a huge Ultima fan and wanted to play Ultima 7. “Number six did not come out on Apple. It was so painful to me, the idea I could not play Ultima, that I bought a PC,” says the co-founder of Arkane Studios. “It ended up being exactly what I wanted, because it [had] way more possibilities than any of the Ultimas until then.”

After working at companies like EA and Infogrames, in 1999 Colantonio co-founded Arkane Studios. The studio’s debut game was Arx Fatalis, a first-person RPG inspired by Looking Glass’ genre-redefining Ultima Underworld. Over the next two decades, Arkane established itself as the modern successor to Looking Glass, developing some of the PC’s best games, such as 2012’s Dishonored and 2017’s Prey.

Following Prey’s release, Colantonio left Arkane to establish WolfEye studios, which published its first game—Weird West—in 2022. WolfEye is currently working on an unnamed first-person RPG—though it may actually have a name now, at least internally. “I think we have it,” Colantonio says.

Colantonio took a break from WolfEye’s next project for a rooftop reconnaissance of his Steam library. We discussed tactical cats, dystopian decision-making, and ripping off the tech behind the world’s greatest stealth game.

What game are you currently playing?

The one that I’m playing right now is Mewgenics.

I played Mewgenics because I was a big fan of The Binding of Isaac, and I just bought it with eyes closed, not knowing what I was getting into, and initially I was disappointed because it felt like a very different game than what I was expecting. I thought it would be action, and instead it was more like a turn-based combat game.

They have this metagame that I don’t think works super well. I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing with my cats, like, how can I actually benefit from their legacies to create better cats? To me, so far, this part is very blurry. I’m just waiting day-by-day [for] the new cats [to] come in and then some of them die.

But then it kind of grew on me over time, and I think some of it was, [it] kept me in by the rage in some ways, and by the fun in some other ways, because it had to be fun enough that I wanted to see more, and [it has] some really cool combo[s] because it is a little bit in the style of The Binding of Isaac … it’s almost like it relies on not being tuned. So you can have an absolutely shitty run, or you can have this incredibly OP run, which feels super satisfying until you die or make a mistake.

I was thinking, what other [tactics] games did I play that I put a lot of hours in? Into the Breach was one of them, which is definitely on the tactics side. I would say XCOM also was a big one for me. Those are not games that I would be good at designing, but I enjoy playing them.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

I played Cyberpunk for the first time. And I finished it.

I probably sound like an asshole all the time when I speak about games, because I sound very extreme. There are things that I absolutely love, that is the best thing in the world, and then I can be picky and complain about the things people don’t notice.

I wouldn’t say Cyberpunk grabbed me. I saw the strings. There were so many strings to me in the game that bothered me. But it grabbed me for its production … it’s a pretty smooth ride. It’s good direction, looks incredible, very good cinematics. Story was interesting. But my choices—it took me a while to realise that actually there were choices. After maybe four or five hours, I was convinced that this game only had fake choices and no consequences whatsoever, because they do so much of the thing where ‘Are you going to this or are you going to do that?’ And no matter what you do, it’s more to give you a little bit of attention rather than anything that happens after that.

At the same time, what they do, they do so well. Like the size of the city, the driving, the feeling of a living city. It’s a big game, and then there are choices that open [up] at some point. Some of the powers and some of the synergy between the[m]—you can definitely see some of the Deus Ex love that is behind it. But I think it’s such a big game that they had to sacrifice some of what made Deus Ex so cool.

No doubt, it’s a great experience. It’s just that because I’m such an old gamer and so picky, that it’s very hard for me to like everything about a game. I would say the last time I liked everything about a game was probably Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s just nothing I can say here. Like, just nothing.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

I played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. The question is why did I play it? Could have been for research purposes. No, I think I played it because, first of all, I’m a fan of Lovecraft. But the game I don’t think was super well received.

I remember Todd Vaugn, a guy at Bethesda, had worked on it … he told me I should play it, because there’s some things I would probably like about it. And it’s true, there was something about the atmosphere that they managed to do very well. And then the game was probably too brutal at times, so it eventually became frustrating.

Making a game is so hard, because some games have fantastic qualities, but then still fail to connect at the end, which is unfair of course because it’s brutal. People ship the game and either it works or it doesn’t. But the amount of work is the same. I think that’s one of those that could have been really cool.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

According to Steam, it would be Wasteland 2. It says 649 hours, which is funny because it’s more than I spent apparently on Weird West.

But anyway, yeah, it grabbed me. It was a really cool game. For good reasons, it’s very Fallout-ish. And also … I think I was [playing Wasteland 2] during Prey at the time. I was working on Prey, so it was probably somewhere around, yeah, that’s right, it says 2015. So I was developing Prey back then.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

It depends what the question is. If it’s like ‘What is a game that will always stay in my heart?’ There are a few of those. Never uninstalled? I think Steam gives me the comfort and confidence that I can uninstall something and then reinstall it later. So in that sense I could uninstall anything.

I definitely love Thief, Fallout, Deus Ex. When Thief came out, I was a developer already. I hadn’t [started] Arx Fatalis yet. I was a big fan of Underworld. Underworld was Looking Glass, and I knew there was this new game coming out from the Looking Glass guys.

So I was extremely excited about it, and it came out and everybody else was playing Metal Gear Solid, and I was playing [Thief] instead. This one was super analogue in the way the stealth worked, and the feedback was more immersive. They were very different things, and [Thief] was not very pretty, but incredibly atmospheric, and it grabbed me because you could feel some of the design philosophy from that Looking Glass thing that I could not yet really well analyse. I could sense there was something there that was feeling like home.

The first time I saw the rope arrow was ‘Oh wow, I can dynamically create vertical paths anywhere.’ And even though I did not necessarily have those words or this analysis in my head as I was playing it, I realised there was something analogue about it as opposed to, say, Zelda, where they would say “Here is the hook, and you have a grappling hook, now you can grapple the grappling hook.” Whereas here it was like “Anywhere there was wood.”

There were moments in the game where I was playing with the four-speaker system. I can’t remember the name of their audio protocol back then, I think it was EAX or whatever. And wow, the quality of the sound made up for [the graphics] and the spatialisation and the fact that the sounds were travelling through portals.

So Dishonored was very much our own expression of a Thief game, right? … We entirely ripped off their portals and propagation system for Dishonored. They had made a paper about it, and so they were begging to be ripped off, frankly, and we shamelessly took it and used it, which worked really well, and it’s a very brilliant idea. The idea being, you place portals, and the sound travels through those portals, so that really helps you locate where sound comes from.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

I am using DaVinci Resolve whenever I want to do mockups of something either for the game, or for my band. So I do a little bit of video editing. And there is one [other] thing I have to tell you. It is called DiskState. It’s something that shows you in a visual form where your hard drive [space] is. It’s funny because this one, it’s been with me since maybe the ’90s, and every time I have a new PC, the first thing I do is I install DiskState.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

It’s not bad. Frankly, I’m pretty proud. I’m trying to recall now because I’m not in front of my PC, but it’s pretty clean. I’ve seen some super messy desktops. I’ve seen some with nothing [on them], which I don’t understand either. But maybe I have four or five folders, and then five, six icons, and that’s it.