Brian Fargo is the Founder & Studio Head of inXile entertainment, an Xbox Game Studios developer.
Brian’s career in the entertainment business began at age 18 when he taught himself to program and used that skill to create games for the Apple II. It was the classic story of hand-duplicating disks, putting them into baggies, and shipping them across America. After a short stint at self-publishing, he sold the company to Boone Corporation at age 19 and became their Vice President of Development.

Following the corporate experience gained at Boone, he went out on his own at age 20 to found Interplay Entertainment Corp. Interplay was a game developer and publisher that eventually went on to become one of the Top 5 game publishers in the world. They produced and published hits like Fallout, Battle Chess, and Baldur’s Gate, as well as titles that licensed globally recognized entertainment brands like Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings. Interplay’s worldwide sales would eventually exceed over $100M annually. Brian’s influence in the game industry in the early 90’s would also help to fund, publish, and support those who would go on to form Blizzard Entertainment, Treyarch, and Bioware.

As the industry matured, larger entertainment companies like movie and television studios began to take notice of video games and wanted to get in on their success. Brian partnered with Universal Studios for a 45% stake in Interplay to become the game arm of Universal and bring their movie and TV licenses into video games. Later, Interplay went public with an IPO in 1998, and then did a cross-stock swap with Titus publishing in France. To boost its direct distribution, Interplay acquired a 49.9% interest in Virgin Interactive Europe, giving it offices in Germany, France, and the UK.

Brian then decided to set out on his own again, founding inXile entertainment in 2002. He first partnered up with Vivendi Games to finance inXile’s first project, and eventually pivoted over to crowdfunding to finance the business. Brian raised over $13M directly from his audience using the Kickstarter and Fig platforms. inXile raised equity investment from Tencent and Gumi, Chinese and Japanese game publishers, respectively.

In late 2018, following the success of Wasteland 2 and The Bard’s Tale IV, inXile entertainment was purchased by Microsoft, adding their catalog to the growing Xbox Game Studios family, and securing their ability to develop PC and Xbox titles well into the future.

Additionally, Brian raised money for and sits on the board of a digital game resale platform named Robot Cache.