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Baldur's Gate 3 was originally cancelled nearly 20 years ago because of an "accounting error," according to an insider

An accounting error, which Chris Avellone calles "very suspicious" ending up robbing the world of Baldur's Gate 3 back in 2003.

Baldur's Gate 3 Karlach — Image credit: Larian Studios

News by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Fri May 15 2026

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Baldur’s Gate 3 remains a hugely popular game even years after it was first released, but there was a time when it wasn’t Larian Studios who had the keys to the most famous city in the Forgotten Realms. Originally, Interplay-owned Black Isle Studios was hard at work on the follow-up to 2000’s Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. However, according to one developer at the studio, the first attempt at Baldur’s Gate 3 was cancelled because of a very suspicious accounting error.

Chris Avellone is a well-established figure in the CRPG industry. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve probably played a game he worked on. With titles such as Fallout, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale in his resume, he knows something about the genre. Back in 2003, he was working on Baldur’s Gate 3, but suddenly found that the project had been cancelled. During a recent interview, Avellone claims the issue wasn’t quality but because of a “very suspicious” accounting error at Interplay.

“I’m pretty sure a payment wasn’t made to the right party,” he claimed. When the money dried up, the team was moved to another project, which was the ill-fated Fallout 3 game that never got made either. Avellone seems to still be frustrated by that, as he added he knew Black Isle’s Fallout 3 – often referred to by its codename of Van Buren – wouldn’t be made “because regardless of the team’s intentions, regardless of how much we’d love to get it done, how many hours we put in, it wouldn’t matter because executive row would likely do something, which they eventually did.”

Without that accounting error, of course, we might not have gotten the huge success that Baldur’s Gate 3 eventually became, of course.

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