Obsidian is an unusual case of a new company created after management issues at the old one being formed by the old crappy management themselves. The actual RPG talent at Interplay went to Troika and the parasites on that talent went to Obsidian, with the exception of MCA who was neutralized by the parasites anyway. Obsidian was founded by Dunning Kruger poster child Chris Parker, and Feargus Urquheart, a jumped up QA tester who coincidentally found himself in a management position, and who only has two real talents: Bullshitting and parasitism. And it is with these two skills of Feargus that Obsidian managed to stumble on for fifteen years. First of all, Feargus bullshitted and guilt tripped MCA into being his slave under the false pretense of being a co-owner, almost as if MCA was Dak'kon and Feargus was TNO. What Feargus thus achieved was to leech off of MCA's talent and reputation, just like his entire career has been built on leeching off of the Interplay talent. And he also got MCA to cover for every hare-brained executive decision even though MCA was never a real owner so much as a glorified employee getting treated like shit and paid way below his market value.
Obsidian's good reputation was always completely undeserved, and the fact that they ever had such a reputation again shows us Feargus' bullshitting and parasitism skills. This was not a studio founded by 'the guys that made Fallout and Torment'; it was founded and led by the man chiefly responsible for chasing Tim Cain out of Interplay. The only great game made to this day by any of the founding members of Obsidian is Planescape: Torment, and any repeat of that effort was prevented by MCA himself being admittedly burned out of being creative lead, and above all by Feargus and Parker's constant dimwitted meddling.
Obsidian was known for making RPGs using other people's engines and games with varying success. This is what Black Isle always did as well. It's not that they were prevented by publishers and circumstances from any great creation of their own: it's that they never had the capacity as a company, even with plenty of great individual talents on the payroll. Feargus and the gang's MO from the BIS days was always to take a great holistic creative effort by someone else, be that Cainarsky or Bioware, and rearrange the parts and throw it all in the blender, producing a result that was sometimes better, usually worse, depending on the quality of the original. (How many parasites have been nourished by Cain/Boyarsky/Anderson's original titanic 1997 creation, starting with BIS itself!)
And after they had released their cargo cult imitations of truly creative works, they would slyly pretend like they had anything to do with the originals - thus fostering a reputation based almost entirely on stolen valor. This found its apogee in Pillars of Eternity, AKA Nostalgia Parasitism: The RPG. "A spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate" - except nobody on the team ever worked on Baldur's Gate. The Project Lead worked on Icewind Dale, a Black Isle project using Bioware's engine, Bioware's graphics, Bioware's design work, Bioware's reputation, to produce something utterly inferior in every way. Sound familiar? They did have the creators of Fallout and Torment on the team, but their skills were criminally underused because of apparent mismanagement. The only creative success by Obsidian to this day is Tyranny, which seemingly slipped through the cracks because the bumbling Feargus-Parker-Sawyer-Fenstermaker clique was busy crapping out PoE leaving the far more talented "B-team" largely alone. Obsidian's talentlessness as a company finally caught up with them with the Dumpsterfire disaster, which showed that Feargus' signature appeals to pity and fake nostalgia are no longer enough to make RPG fans buy all these mediocre games. (Compare the Dumpsterfire implosion to the D:OS explosion, a series that while it may not be to everyone's taste, was clearly made with talent, flair, heart and soul.)
And thus we come to Feargus' latest, greatest piece of bullshit artistry. Even though Feargus was the individual most responsible for making Cain quit Interplay, he somehow managed to get back both Cain and Boyarsky - I don't know what kind of promises he made - and with those two back in the same room the sparks started flying, weird things started happening, and nine months later Indiana was born. And so we are back to where it all began, with Feargus in a unique position to profit off of the exploitation of Cain/Boyarsky's creative energy. And it does seem like this is what let Feargus finally realize his life goal of becoming a sellout. Was it Indiana that made Spencer pull the trigger? Quite possibly. And Feargus must have correctly calculated that Cainarsky would be too invested in their project to complain about everything being sold from under their feet, just like he calculated that MCA would be too guilt-tripped to rebel until he had got what he wanted from him. On top of that is the factor that Spencer is a huge Baldur's Gate fan from the 90s, which of course Feargus has no connection with but makes every effort to present himself as if he did, so it's likely that Feargus' special talent for nostalgia parasitism led him to this happy ending. And it's even possible, if less likely, that this time even the players will have a happy ending, depending on what happens now with Indiana. It may turn out that, if Indiana was fated to be the midwife of Feargus' dream coming true, that Obsidian's mission in life, through all the years of its confused and seemingly pointless existence, was, likewise, to bring Indiana into the world. Fingers crossed.
In any case, hats off to Feargus Urquheart, the fat little QA tester that could. The rags to riches story of a true bullshit king of the RPG industry.
