Akella

» see akella.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Sea Dogs came out in 2000 and it was the good one. A first-person age-of-sail game where you commanded a ship around a Caribbean that got you sunk by weather as often as by cannon. Bethesda published it in the West, back when Bethesda still put out other people's work. It sold well enough that Akella started a sequel.

The sequel became the Pirates of the Caribbean game. Disney's film was coming, Bethesda held the license, and Sea Dogs II was rebuilt around Jack Sparrow's world with the release date moved to match the movie. It shipped in 2003 visibly unfinished and the modding community spent the following decade finishing it, which is the shape a lot of Russian PC games from that era ended up in.

Akella itself started in 1995 in Moscow, founded by people who had met two years before that. The name comes from Akela, the wolf who leads the pack in Kipling's Jungle Book, and the logo was a wolf. At its largest it ran five development teams on top of a localization and distribution business, which is what a publisher in Russia had to be in that decade. Nobody else was going to translate anything.

None of this was visible from Turkey. Russian games arrived here the way most games arrived, as a disc with an English build on it, from a company with no local presence and no name recognition. Akella was one of the largest game businesses in a country a short flight away and I could not have told you it existed.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Through the 2000s Akella was the default route into Russia. If you had a Western game and wanted it on shelves in Moscow, you licensed it to them and they handled the translation and the discs. That business paid for the development teams, and the development teams kept making pirate games. Age of Pirates followed in 2006 and a sequel after it.

In 2007 they sold the Sea Dogs development division to 1C, their largest domestic rival. That is the decision the whole story turns on. The pirate games were the only thing Akella had that anybody outside Russia recognized, and they sold the team that made them while keeping a publishing business that depended entirely on other people's output.

~ what it became ~

Postal III came out in 2011. Akella funded it and a small Moscow studio called Trashmasters built it, after Running With Scissors handed their series to people who had never made anything like it. The result was received as one of the worst games of that year, and Running With Scissors later disowned it in public, which rights holders almost never do about a sequel they authorized.

The lawsuits were already running by then. Around two hundred million rubles, roughly six million dollars, against a company that had sold its best developers four years earlier and burned its credibility with the Postal audience in a single release. Akella has not operated since 2012. It was never formally liquidated, so it technically still exists, which is the quietest way for a company that size to end.

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