Developer LookingGlass Technologies Publisher Origin Systems Format PC Release 1994 FIRETEAM Developer Multitude, Inc Publisher Cryo Interactive Format PC Release 1998 DEUS EX Developer Ion Storm Publisher Eidos Interactive Format PC, PS2 Release 2000
Harvey Smith grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast among chemical plants and shrimpers – an industrial milieu analogous to Dishonored’s setting of Dunwall, with its lightning-oil companies and whaling trawlers. “By my standards today, it’s not a place I would live,” he says. “And I knew that when I was 20 years old.” After graduating high school, he and his partner “got the fuck out of Dodge”. Smith joined the United States Air Force, working as an electronics technician and in satellite communications, which enabled him to travel across the country and to Germany, where he lived for three years. “If you’re a kid from a chemical plant town, it’s transformative to move away,” he says. “Just because of the people you talk to and work with, the kind of restaurants you go to.”
Once Smith’s enlistment was up, the Air Force asked him a functional but existential question: “They say, ‘What address do you want us to put on this form?’ They’re about to ship your shit in a month. And you have to go, ‘Where am I going to live? They’ve been telling me where to live for six years’.” Smith wasn’t about to go home, and so followed school friend Steve Powers to Austin, and into the orbit of Origin Systems. “Steve, with his Art Institute degree, had gotten a job at Origin. And he was like, ‘Dude, you would be perfect here’,” Smith says. “And so I started trying. I went skydiving with Lord British because he took a group of 30 people jumping out of planes. We played Shadowrun with them. And I just couldn’t get a job as a writer or designer.”
Ultimately, Smith landed a role in QA. “And it turned out to be the best thing ever for me, because for about a year I worked with everyone – from legal and translations and marketing to the engineers and the level designers,” he says. “It was like an overview of how the process works. I needed that more than I needed to get my ego stroked by getting a writer or game designer job.”
As well as remaining a fixture of Smith’s D&D campaigns ever since, Powers has been a quiet partner inand now the vampire
