Ascaron

~ the obit ~

Holger Flöttmann registered Ascon Publishing on 8 August 1991 in Gütersloh, a town in north west Germany with no particular reason to have a games company in it. The name changed to Ascaron in 1996 because a Swiss firm called Ascom objected. That is the least interesting thing that ever happened here and it is also the only reason anyone can spell the company.

What it made for its first decade was specifically German. Die Patrizier put you in a Hanseatic League port buying grain and selling cloth, and Port Royale did the same thing in the Caribbean with more cannon. A football management series called On the Ball ran alongside them for years. These sold in serious numbers at home and were treated as a curiosity everywhere else.

Sacred in 2004 was the break. It was an action role playing game built in the shape Diablo had set, large and strange in places, and it went well past the German market. The sequel was supposed to be the thing that turned a regional publisher into an international one, and in the narrow sense it worked. In every other sense it is what finished the company.

Sacred came out in the middle of the years when the interesting computer was not the one at home. Between roughly 2002 and 2005 in Turkey the machine that mattered was the one in the internet cafe, rented by the hour, and what that economy supports is Counter-Strike. A round ends in a few minutes and the money keeps making sense the whole time you are sitting there. A sixty hour single player role playing game does not survive contact with a meter. i had a machine at home and a slow line into it, so something like Sacred was technically within reach and socially nowhere at all. Nobody was going to talk to you about a save file.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the first death ~

Ascaron filed for insolvency on 31 August 2001, in the month it turned ten. It was restructured in early 2002 as Ascaron Entertainment GmbH with new money behind it and carried on as though nothing had happened, which is a thing German insolvency law makes possible when the underlying business is worth keeping.

Then it grew. The Aachen studio opened in 2002 and a Potsdam operation followed in 2005. There was an office in Birmingham. For seven years after almost dying, the company was larger every year, which is the part that makes the second filing land differently. Nobody was watching for it.

~ twenty million euros ~

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel shipped in late 2008 having cost something like twenty million euros and having taken far longer than anyone had budgeted for. It sold 750,000 copies. That is a genuine commercial result for a German studio and it was nowhere near enough, because the overrun had been financed and the financing had to be serviced against a release date that kept moving.

The application to open insolvency proceedings went in at the Amtsgericht Bielefeld on 14 April 2009. Frank Welsch was appointed provisional administrator on the 17th. Six months between shipping the biggest thing the company ever made and handing the keys to a court.

~ the inheritance ~

Kalypso Media signed for most of the brands on 3 June 2009 and walked off with Patrician, Port Royale, Darkstar One and On the Ball. Deep Silver bought Sacred separately and picked up the support obligations for Sacred 2, so the game kept getting patched by a company that had not made it.

Kalypso then hired fifteen of the developers into a new studio called Gaming Minds, which has been making Port Royale and Patrician games ever since. So the products lived and most of the team lived. Only the company died. The legal end is recorded as July 2009 in the English sources and 1 September 2009 in the German ones, and nobody has bothered to reconcile that, which tells you how much attention the last step got.

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