Attic Entertainment Software

~ the goodbye ~

Das Schwarze Auge is Germany's national tabletop role playing system, and Attic's entire catalog stands on top of it. Turkey had nothing equivalent. There was no shelf of rulebooks in a shop and no group with dice around a table. My first role playing game was a private Ultima Online server years afterward, which is a completely different door into the same room.

The company was founded in September 1990 in Albstadt, a town in Baden-Württemberg with no software industry around it, by Hans-Jürgen Brändle and Jochen Hamma along with Guido Henkel. All three held equal shares, which matters later. The first releases were Lords of Doom that same year and Spirit of Adventure in 1991, both competent and both forgotten.

Then they got the license, and the license is the whole story. In 1992 Attic shipped Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge, the first computer game built on the German tabletop system, and it worked. Sir-Tech, the American publisher of Wizardry, picked it up and put it out in English in 1993 as Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny. A studio in a small Swabian town had a game on shelves in North America.

The company was still there in 1997 and it was gone by 2001, and nobody wrote the sentence that separates those two states. There was no insolvency filing. The releases just stop, the company goes inactive, and the record afterward is a blank.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the license ~

Building on Das Schwarze Auge gave Attic something no German studio could buy any other way: a rule system that hundreds of thousands of people already knew by heart, with a world already written. It is the reason the first game sold at all.

It is also a rent payment. The license belonged to Fantasy Productions and had to be paid for out of every unit, and it defined what the studio was allowed to make. Success under those terms means the money largely goes toward doing the same thing again. That tension surfaced in public later: in a 2002 interview with the German magazine PC Games, Henkel said he had grown tired of making the same kind of game repeatedly while the others still saw room in the brand.

~ the northlands trilogy ~

Blade of Destiny in 1992 and Star Trail in 1994, then Shadows over Riva to close it out in 1996 with the English version a year behind. The German name for the three together is the Nordlandtrilogie, and it is one of the most faithful tabletop conversions anybody attempted in that decade. The games track hunger and disease and make you buy boots for the walk, and they will let a character die on a road between two towns because you mismanaged supplies.

Writing in 2011, Die Zeit put the three games together at more than 2.4 million copies worldwide, which is not a niche number for a German-language product from a studio that never had more than a couple of dozen people in it. In between there was Druid: Daemons of the Mind in 1995, and a collaboration with a young Larian Studios called The Lady, the Mage and the Knight that was announced and never came out.

~ the quiet part ~

Henkel left in 1997 and moved to the United States, and the trilogy was finished. Nothing of consequence shipped after that. The company kept existing on paper for four more years while doing less and less, which is a more common ending than bankruptcy and a much harder one to date.

Hans-Jürgen Brändle died in Las Vegas in August 2005. The Dark Eye license moved on to other studios and other trilogies, and the Realms of Arkania games got a remake in 2013 that people mostly wish had not happened. Attic itself never announced anything. It is a studio that sold millions of copies and then closed the door without leaving a note on it.

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