Coktel Vision

~ the last words ~

Coktel Vision was founded in Paris in 1984 by Roland Oskian, an engineer who had come out of Matra Espace, which is a spacecraft company. That is the kind of origin the French software industry had in the eighties, when the people starting game companies mostly came from somewhere serious and were doing this on the side of a career that had already begun.

Muriel Tramis joined in 1986 and became the reason the catalog is remembered. She wrote and designed most of what the studio is known for and worked with the artist Pierre Gilhodes on the Gobliiins games, which are puzzle adventures built around three characters with one ability each and a house style that looks like nothing else from that decade. People in France called her the Roberta Williams of the country, which undersells it slightly.

The other half of the company was Adi, later Adibou, an educational line aimed at children roughly four to seven years old. It sold. By 1997 it had gone past a million and a half copies, which for a French language product on CD-ROM in the nineties is enormous, and it made Coktel a household name in a way none of the adventure games ever did.

Sierra On-Line bought the studio and finalized the deal on 29 October 1993. That put a Paris design house inside an American publisher at the exact moment American publishers were being bought by companies that did not make software at all, and everything after that is somebody else's corporate calendar.

Adibou was French at the layer that cannot be shipped. A shooter crosses a border with a patch and a photocopied manual, and half the time in the nineties it crossed with neither. Software whose entire job is to speak to a five year old in that child's own language does not travel that way, because moving it to another country means building the product again. There was never a Turkish version. i was fourteen when the first machine and the first phone line arrived here in 1998, roughly eight years past the age this thing was written for anyway, so it sits out of reach twice over.

~ the record ~

~ the other half of the company ~

The adventure side was strange and specific. Gobliiins arrived in 1991 and took two sequels. Inca in 1992 leaned hard into the full motion video moment, and Urban Runner in 1996 put real actors in front of filmed sets. Tramis also made Mewilo and Freedom, both set in the Caribbean and both dealing with slavery, which is not a subject any other game publisher of that era went anywhere near.

All of it ran on a house engine that fan preservation later reverse engineered. The Gob engine is supported in ScummVM today, so the adventure catalog is one of the few parts of this company that still starts up on a modern machine without an emulator underneath it.

~ the owner list ~

Sierra in October 1993. Then CUC International bought Sierra in 1996 and Coktel moved into a division called CUC Software, owned by a company whose actual business was selling discount club memberships. In 1998 the software operation went to Havas in France, and Havas ended up inside Vivendi. Four owners in twelve years, none of whom had bought the studio for what the studio was good at.

Muriel Tramis left in 2003 after the new management started subcontracting the main titles out, which is usually the last event in a studio's life even when the paperwork takes another two years to catch up. In October 2005 Vivendi sold what remained to Mindscape, eleven employees included. Mindscape kept using the Coktel name for a while and then closed in 2011.

~ the legacy ~

Adibou is still a live memory in France in a way that almost no software from that era is anywhere, because the people who used it were small enough at the time that it went in as a childhood object rather than as a program. There are adults now who can hum the sounds it made.

Muriel Tramis was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'honneur on 14 July 2018, only the second game designer in France to get it. She had been out of the industry for fifteen years by then and the company she did the work for had been gone for thirteen.

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