Arkedo Studio

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

~ the eulogy ~

Arkedo was founded in 2006 by Camille Guermonprez and Aurélien Régard, and the founding goal they gave interviewers was unusual enough to be worth quoting: to be "as small as possible" while still making what they called "real" games, in boxes, with a manual. That is a statement about the year it was made in. By 2006 the box and the manual were already on their way out, and a small French studio saying it wanted both was taking a position rather than describing a business plan.

The first game was Nervous Brickdown for the Nintendo DS in 2007, a breakout variant that kept changing its own rules, and the second was Big Bang Mini on the same machine in 2009. Both were the kind of handheld game that reviewers liked more than shops did. Then came OMG: Our Manic Game on Windows Phone 7, which is a platform choice that tells you how willing this studio was to build for whatever hardware would take it.

The studio also kept its intellectual property, which almost nobody at that scale manages. As of January 2010 the founders still held the rights to everything they had made. That matters at the end, because a studio that still owns its catalog has something left to sell when the money runs out.

The big one was Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit, published by Sega in 2012, about a rabbit who is also the prince of hell and who is hunting down everyone who saw some embarrassing photographs of him. It shipped on consoles and PC, and it got an iOS version called Pocket Inferno that Arkedo did not build themselves. Then nothing came after it, because nothing was funded.

~ the dossier ~

~ the exclamation marks ~

Between the handheld games and the Sega deal there was the Arkedo Series, a run of small downloadable games with punctuation in their names. Jump! and Swap! were deliberately crude and sold on Xbox Live at the price of nothing much. They were the clearest expression of the "as small as possible" idea: one mechanic, and no ambition to be more than that.

Almost none of this reached me. Xbox Live Indie Games was a storefront I never had an account on, and in the Turkey of 2009 a console download service billed in dollars was something I read about and never bought from. The Arkedo games that could have crossed over were the DS ones, and the DS cartridges that circulated here were the famous licenses. So the studio's whole middle period exists for me as a catalog listing with prices attached in a currency I was not spending.

~ a year later, a court ~

The end was announced on 22 February 2013 and reported the same day. Régard was careful about the wording and the trade press noticed. He said the studio was not officially closing its doors, then added that "no one's employed anymore. No more games are produced either." The reason given was simple and is the most common reason there is. Hell Yeah! had shipped, no publisher had signed the next thing, and the two founders had both drifted toward their own smaller projects anyway. One account has Guermonprez moving to a publishing venture and Régard planning a new mini-studio.

The paperwork ran on for another three years and the French commercial register has all of it under RCS 490 440 674, filed at the Tribunal de Commerce de Paris against an address in the 14th. The court opened judicial liquidation on 18 February 2014, almost exactly a year after the announcement, and appointed SCP B.T.S.G in the person of Me Denis Gasnier of 3 rue Troyon in the 17th. The schedule of creditors was filed on 8 April 2015. The liquidation was closed for insufficiency of assets on 2 June 2016. So there are two dates to pick from, and they say different things: the studio died when the people stopped coming in, and the company died when a judge agreed there was nothing left to pay anyone with.

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