[3] The team's first widely distributed game was the graphical text adventure The Demon's Forge, which Brian self-published and guerilla marketed in 1981 (and was later re-released by Boone Corporation).

[citation needed] In 1983, Fargo founded Interplay Productions prior to landing his first contract in 1983 with Activision for Mindshadow,[6] a graphical text adventure game for the Apple II and Commodore 64.

After the release of Mindshadow, Fargo hired an old high school friend and started work to create a role-playing game Bard's Tale for the Apple II and C64 for a then-new publisher Electronic Arts.

In 1988, Fargo decided to make the transition from a development house to a developer/publisher, adding the additional costs of production and marketing, with both the risk and possible reward of publishing successful games.

This was Adham and Morhaime's first contract to produce a game as Silicon & Synapse and was one of the first of such finds for Fargo, who had an eye for recognizing talent in small development teams.

[10] Adham and Morhaime eventually changed the name of their company to Blizzard Entertainment, future developer of the Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises.

Interplay continued to expand in the mid-1990s, adding licensed titles to its own intellectual properties such as Stonekeep, by acquiring rights to the original Star Trek and creating a series of its adaptations.

The next game they developed for Interplay, through the Black Isle division, was Baldur's Gate, which proved to be a big hit, followed by others, such as Icewind Dale and the critically acclaimed Planescape: Torment.

That same year, Computer Gaming World ranked Fargo as the third most influential "industry player" of all time, as he "has shown both brilliant product vision and great business talents.

"[12] In 1998, Interplay filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock to fund future development and retire debt the company held.

At the time, the market for IPOs had started to slow from the boom years of the early and mid-1990s, yet the need for capital drove Fargo to file the offering.

[14] In 2012, inspired by the success of Double Fine Adventure's fan funded model, Fargo announced that he was going to attempt to fan-fund Wasteland 2 using the webservice Kickstarter.