Crawfish Interactive

» see crawfish.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

My 2002 ran on a cafe PC with Counter-Strike installed. Nintendo handhelds were a separate economy here, brought in by importers at prices that made a cartridge a gift rather than a purchase, and most of the Game Boy Advance library only reached me later as files with nobody's publisher logo attached to them. Crawfish Interactive is a name I picked up from the credits of games I had already seen.

The studio opened in March 1997 in Croydon, south London, founded by Cameron Sheppard, who had built the Game Boy conversion of Mortal Kombat II before that. It never set out to own a franchise. It took properties that already existed on a big machine and got them onto a small one, which in 1997 meant the Game Boy Color and from 2001 meant the Game Boy Advance.

It is harder work than it sounds and a good deal less glamorous than a credits roll suggests. A handheld conversion arrives with the original as a fixed reference that everybody has already played, and with a licensing window for a deadline. Crawfish built a reputation for working under those terms and still shipping something that felt like the game on the box.

~ the case file ~

~ a fighting game on a handheld ~

Street Fighter Alpha 3: Upper came out on Game Boy Advance in 2002 and is still the title people cite when they argue the GBA was underrated. The arcade original ran on hardware with an order of magnitude more to spend. The conversion kept the roster and enough of the animation timing that it was treated as a real fighting game rather than a souvenir of one.

~ the cartridges that never came out ~

The cancelled half of the catalog is the interesting half. Crawfish had a Game Boy Advance version of Grand Theft Auto III in development, which would have meant folding the 3D game down onto a 2D handheld, and it never shipped. There was also a GBA port of the Bitmap Brothers' Gods and a Game Boy Color South Park, both dropped. The last two titles the studio started, a Superman game and an Ed, Edd n Eddy game, were finished elsewhere after it closed.

~ november 2002 ~

The closure was never a verdict on the work. Publishers stopped ordering Game Boy Advance conversions at the rate a specialist house needed to stay funded, and the money stopped arriving. The studio shut. Its developers moved across to Climax as a group and became that company's handheld team, so the skills outlived the company by a good few years. Croydon's one studio of any note ran for five years and eight months, and the craft it had refined stopped paying before it stopped being possible.

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