Cryo Interactive

» see cryo-interactive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i cannot tell you whether i ever ran a Cryo game, and that is not modesty. It is what software distribution looked like in Turkey in the second half of the nineties. Discs arrived without boxes and often without a publisher screen, so you knew the game and never the company. Cryo is one of a category of European studios whose work almost certainly passed through my machine at some point wearing no name at all.

The company was registered in Paris on 28 January 1992, though the people in it had been working together since the late eighties inside ERE Informatique under a label called Exxos. Philippe Ulrich and Rémi Herbulot ran the creative side and Jean-Martial Lefranc came from Virgin Loisirs. Their opening statement was Dune in 1992, which took Frank Herbert's novel and made something that was part adventure and part resource management, with a soundtrack and a color palette that people still bring up thirty years later.

What Cryo did next is the part worth remembering. It stopped competing with American studios on action and started making historical reconstructions on CD-ROM, built with the institutions that hold the material. Versailles 1685 came out in 1997 co-produced with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and Canal+ Multimedia, with the museum at Versailles involved throughout. Egypt 1156 B.C. followed the same year with the Louvre. These were sold in bookshops as much as in game shops, and Versailles reached half a million copies in Europe by December 2000.

The money followed. Cryo listed on the nouveau marché in 1999 and the share price multiplied by twenty within months, closing 2000 with ten and a half million euros of net profit. Then the dot-com collapse took the stock from sixty euros to four, the 2001 accounts showed a sixteen and a half million euro loss, and Frank Herbert's Dune in 2001 failed to do what a Dune game was supposed to do. The company declared cessation of payments in July 2002 with forty million euros of debt and cut over eighty percent of its people. Roughly two hundred and thirty employees became about a dozen. The liquidation was filed in October.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the two dunes ~

Cryo's Dune should not exist. Virgin, which held the license and was publishing it, decided in 1990 that it did not like the look of the game or believe in a mix of adventure and strategy, and cancelled it. The license went to Westwood Studios instead, which turned it into Dune II and in the process invented the shape of every real time strategy game that followed.

Cryo kept working anyway. Around the same time Virgin's European operation changed hands and the cancellation never reached the people who needed to enforce it, so by the time anyone noticed there was a finished Dune game nobody had authorized. Virgin looked at it and shipped it. Two Dune games from one license came out in the same year, and the one that got cancelled is the one with the better music.

~ the cracks ~

The museum CD-ROMs worked because they were cheap to make relative to what they sold, and because in 1997 a disc was a plausible way to visit a place. Both of those stopped being true. Broadband arrived and turned a pre-rendered walkthrough of a palace into something a website could do for free, while 3D acceleration raised what a game was expected to look like.

Cryo answered by getting bigger rather than cheaper. There was an online subsidiary, Cryo Networks, set up in December 1997 to build persistent worlds, and a project called Dune Generations that never shipped. There was a listed share price to defend, which is a bad thing to have when your product cycle is two years long. The company was making the same kind of game in 2002 that it had made in 1997, at the cost base of a public company, into a market that had moved.

~ the long tail ~

DreamCatcher Interactive took most of the assets and the teams out of the liquidation and turned them into DreamCatcher Europe, so the adventure game business in France carried on with different letterhead. Microïds bought the Cryo brands and intellectual property on 20 October 2008 and has been reissuing pieces of the catalog since. The SCOL engine that Cryo Networks built was released as open source at the end of 2002 and is still out there.

The odd afterlife is the museum work. Versailles 1685 gets cited in academic writing about digital heritage far more often than it gets discussed as a game, which is roughly the opposite of how most game companies are remembered. A studio that failed at being a games business turned out to have been unusually good at something nobody was paying it for.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »