Editor’s note: This is a slightly updated version of an article I posted on Examiner.com when, many years ago, I was an RPG and Gaming writer for the site. This was the third of five articles in total, which I’ll slowly be adding to the Codex to give them a permanent home.

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You wouldn’t think that a man whose main claims to fame are cyberpunk-themed shooter/RPG-hybrids would be living his dream making quirky games about Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Rabbit, but such is the case with Warren Spector.

Spector worked on numerous Origin Systems titles, and was also the producer for several Origin-published games developed by Looking Glass Studios. After working, for a brief time, on Thief: The Dark Project (which was released in 1998, the last title published by Looking Glass), Spector was invited to found the Austin-based expansion studio of Jon Romero’s Ion Storm.

At Ion Storm Austin, Spector oversaw the development of a string of hits, including Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Thief: Deadly Shadows (after Eidos acquired the Thief IP in the wake of Looking Glass’ closure). Eidos closed Ion Storm Austin in 2005, but Spector had quit the company the year before to pursue personal interests, and announced the formation of Junction Point Studios shortly after news of the closure broke.

Disney Interactive acquired Junction Point only a few months after its founding, giving Spector the chance to pursue something that he described, in various interviews at the time, as his lifelong passion: producing games based on Disney IPs. This passion ultimately culminated in the release of Epic Mickey and its sequel, Epic Mickey 2, on a range of platforms (though they are both arguably best experienced on the Nintendo Wii).

Sadly, Disney closed Junction Point in early 2013, not long after Epic Mickey 2 shipped. Spector stepped away from full-time development and into academia, founding and directing the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas at Austin — a short-lived detour that ended when Paul Neurath’s OtherSide Entertainment offered him a chance he could not refuse: a larger hand in the development of Underworld Ascendant and, especially, another turn in the System Shock universe. By mid-2016 he was OtherSide’s studio director, building an Austin team around System Shock 3 while the studio also pursued its spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld.

That System Shock sequel never reached players under Spector’s watch. After a few years of progress with a small team, would-be publisher Starbreeze suffered a financial collapse that killed most of its external projects; a later Tencent investment kept OtherSide afloat but, as Spector has said since, left any future System Shock 3 release in other hands. OtherSide’s next major release was the co-op immersive heist sim, Thick as Thieves, which met a rough commercial runway — studio layoffs followed, and planned post-launch content was abandoned within months. In August of 2026, Spector announced his retirement from game development after nearly forty-four years, allowing that he has been here before and might change his mind, but sounding, this time, as though he means it.

The closure of Looking Glass Studios in 2000 also led, it can be argued, to the creation of another powerhouse development studio: Irrational Games. Irrational, known for a short time as 2K Boston, was founded by Ken Levine, Jonathan Chey, and Robert Fermier, all formerly of Looking Glass. They went on to produce a string of games including the critically acclaimed System Shock 2 and its spiritual successors, BioShock and BioShock Infinite. Arkane Studios also ended up acquiring some additional ex-Looking Glass talent in the form of Austin Grossman and Harvey Smith. Grossman also worked alongside Warren Spector at Ion Storm Austin, and both he and Smith signed on with Arkane’s fledgling Austin-based studio to helm the Dishonored series.

By the time BioShock Infinite arrived, the three founders’ paths had already diverged. Ken Levine finished the Burial at Sea DLC, then in 2014 wound down Irrational Games as a large studio, keeping a lean Take-Two-derived team that rebranded in 2017 as Ghost Story Games; their long-gestating narrative shooter Judas remains in development as of this writing, with no firm ship date.

Jonathan Chey, who had left Irrational years earlier to go indie in Australia, kept Blue Manchu busy with the tabletop-hybrid Card Hunter and later the comic-book-styled shooters Void Bastards and Wild Bastards. Robert Fermier, who had departed after System Shock 2 for Ensemble Studios and the Age of Empires series of games, stayed in that RTS/action orbit — working on titles such as Orcs Must Die! and, more recently, appearing in programming credits for Age of Mythology: Retold and Nightdive’s System Shock remake.

Harvey Smith stayed with Arkane through all of Dishonored’s sequels and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, directed Prey (released in 2017), and later led the troubled live-service shooter Redfall — the title whose failure preceded (and likely prompted) Microsoft’s 2024 shuttering of Arkane Austin. In August of 2026, Smith and fellow Arkane alum Ben Horne had quietly founded Black Pony Immersive, a new studio aimed squarely at single-player, first-person immersive-sim action RPGs. Since this was but a month ago, the studio has not yet announced any in-progress titles.

Austin Grossman, meanwhile, kept one foot in games — writing for Dishonored and Dishonored 2, with a later stretch as Director of Game Design and Interactive Story at Magic Leap — while building a parallel career as a novelist (Soon I Will Be Invincible, YOU, Crooked, and Fight Me being some of notable works) and, more recently, teaching writing and narrative design at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

It would also be remiss to not mention Floodgate Entertainment, a studio founded by Paul Neurath in 2000. Floodgate’s first title was Shadows of Undrentide, a well-received expansion pack for BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights, and they collaborated with Arkane Studios on Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. For a while thereafter, their focus shifted to mobile and casual gaming, in some respects mirroring Richard Garriott’s changing interests at the time. Neurath was mentioned above in association with OtherSide Entertainment, the studio he founded after Floodgate closed in 2011.

Step back from the individual résumés and the pattern is hard to miss. Origin Systems wasn’t just a publisher of hits; it was a school, a meeting ground, and — for a remarkable stretch of years — a place where the next generation of designers, producers, and programmers learned to build worlds that rewarded curiosity as much as combat. From its own offices, and from the Looking Glass partnership Origin maintained, came the people who would later define Deus Ex, System Shock 2, BioShock, Dishonored, Prey, and a long line of studios chasing that emergent gameplay ideal.

Companies close. Labels change hands. Mickey Mouse and SHODAN make strange neighbors on a single CV, but what endures is the apprenticeship in its truest form: an industry still staffed, directed, and moved forward by people who first learned their craft at Origin or in its shadow.