Bethesda Softworks on Friday
said in an official blog post that its wholly-owned subsidiary Arkane Studios has released the source code for the well-received 2002 role-playing game
Arx Fatalis.
The source code, released under version 3 of the GNU General Public License allowing extensive re-use, can be downloaded from
Arkane Studios' official website - though the game's art and music assets still belong to Arkane and Bethesda.
The release of the source code comes after another Bethesda-owned studio, id Software,
released the source for two titles co-developed by id last August: Splash Damage's
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Gray Matter's
Return To Castle Wolfenstein.
Bethesda announced the acquisition of Arkane Studios in August 2010. Bethesda is working on a new unannounced project with Arkane, which most recently aided 2K Marin in the development of
BioShock 2. Arkane Studios was founded in 1999 in Lyon, France, establishing an Austin, TX-based studio in 2006.
Along with the
Arx Fatalis source code comes a new patch for the game to improve compatability with Windows 7, Vista and Nvidia GPUs, among other improvements. Arkane said the patch will be the "very last" update to the eight-year-old game.
