United States · Founded 1983 · 8-bit / 16-bit / 32-bit
Brian Fargo's "By Gamers. For Gamers." publisher created Fallout, published Baldur's Gate and Descent, and housed Black Isle Studios before financial collapse forced it to sell off its crown jewels.
Interplay was founded in 1983 as Interplay Productions by Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, Troy Worrell, and Rebecca Heineman — the latter being the winner of the 1980 National Space Invaders Championship — along with investor Chris Wells, most of them veterans of the California developer Boone Corporation. The company's early work was unglamorous, consisting of software conversions and even some military contract work, but its first major hit arrived in 1985 with The Bard's Tale, a role-playing game published by Electronic Arts that established Interplay's reputation in the genre that would define it. Over the following decade Interplay built one of the strongest catalogues in PC gaming, operating as both developer and publisher and adopting the slogan "By Gamers. For Gamers." Its greatest creation was Fallout (1997), a post-apocalyptic role-playing game of enormous ambition and blackly comic tone that became one of the most beloved series in the medium. Its in-house studio Black Isle followed with Fallout 2 in 1998 and went on to produce Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale games. As a publisher, Interplay's judgement was equally sharp. It published BioWare's Baldur's Gate in 1998 — a game widely credited with reviving the computer RPG — along with its expansion, sequel, and spin-offs, and it published the Descent series among many others. For a period in the late 1990s, Interplay's output represented something close to the state of the art in Western role-playing games. The collapse was swift and painful. Financial troubles turned dire in 1998, and to avert bankruptcy the company went public on NASDAQ as Interplay Entertainment. A failed push into console gaming and bitter conflicts with the French publisher Titus Interactive followed, and Brian Fargo resigned as CEO on 24 January 2002. Black Isle was shuttered, and in April 2007, to pay creditors, Interplay sold the Fallout intellectual property outright to Bethesda Softworks — surrendering the franchise that had been its greatest achievement. The company survives today as a shell of what it was, but its late-1990s catalogue remains among the finest any publisher has ever assembled.