inXile Entertainment was founded in 2002 in Newport Beach, California by Brian Fargo, the same designer who had started Interplay Productions in 1983 and shepherded Wasteland, Fallout and the Baldur's Gate era of computer role-playing games before leaving the company he built. The new studio opened with a deliberate callback to that history: The Bard's Tale (2004), a tongue-in-cheek action RPG that revived one of Interplay's oldest names with a sarcastic narrator and a bard more interested in coin than heroism. The years that followed were a working developer's mix of licensed and contract projects, including the console versions of Line Rider, the co-op fantasy shooter Hunted: The Demon's Forge for Bethesda in 2011 and a remake of the Apple II classic in Choplifter HD, while the studio waited for a way to make the deep, party-based RPGs its founder was known for. That way arrived in March 2012, when the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter raised close to $3 million from fans and made inXile one of the first studios to prove that crowdfunding could finance a full-scale computer RPG. A year later, Torment: Tides of Numenera set a new record for a crowdfunded game at over $4 million, a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment led by original Planescape designer Colin McComb and set in Monte Cook's Numenera tabletop world, a billion years into Earth's future.
Those campaigns defined the studio's modern catalog. Wasteland 2 shipped in September 2014 and returned as a free Director's Cut a year later, bringing the post-nuclear Desert Rangers back to a genre that had largely abandoned squad-based, consequence-heavy tactics. Torment: Tides of Numenera followed in February 2017, an RPG that let players talk, bargain and reason through almost every encounter, with Techland Publishing handling the boxed release in several territories. The Mage's Tale carried the Bard's Tale world into virtual reality in 2017, The Bard's Tale IV: Barrows Deep revived the dungeon-crawling original series in 2018 alongside a remastered Bard's Tale Trilogy, and in November 2018 Microsoft announced it was acquiring inXile as part of Xbox Game Studios, with Fargo staying on as studio head. The first fruit of that backing was Wasteland 3 in August 2020, a colder, larger and far better funded sequel set in a frozen Colorado, extended by The Battle of Steeltown and Cult of the Holy Detonation expansions, with Wasteland Remastered bringing the 1988 original to modern systems the same year. The studio's next project, the steampunk first-person RPG Clockwork Revolution, was unveiled in 2023. For players, inXile's catalog is where the tradition of reactive, writing-first, choice-driven role-playing has been kept alive from the Interplay days through to the present, and the games below are the ones we stock from it.
