Davilex Games

» see davilex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The A2 is a motorway. It runs from Amsterdam down through Utrecht to Maastricht, it is the road most of the Netherlands drives on to get anywhere, and in 1996 a company in Houten shipped a racing game set on it and called the game A2 Racer. That is the whole pitch. Here is the road you already know, now drive down it too fast.

The company behind it was not a games company. Davilex was founded in 1986 by David Brons and Lex van Oorspronk, whose first names welded together give you the name, and it sold administrative software to Dutch businesses and households. DaviDos, file management under MS-DOS. Later Davi-Cash for home finances, written in Visual Basic 3 for Windows 3.1 and among the first Dutch Windows applications of any kind. In 1993 it merged with Torpedo Software out of Groningen and moved the whole operation to Houten under the Davilex name.

Games arrived sideways. The first one was Inspecteur Banaan en de ontvoering van MaBella in the early nineties, and in 1994 Davilex bought Redcat Software and got an educational series with it. Then football, including a 1996 title fronted by the broadcaster Jack van Gelder for playing along with the European Championship. Then the motorway, and everything changed scale.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the a2 ~

A2 Racer only came out in the Netherlands, and it worked so well there that Davilex simply did the same thing in each neighboring market with the local road swapped in. Germany got Autobahn Raser, which sold 103,000 copies between January and September 1998 and finished as the sixth best-selling computer game in the region over that period, then took a VUD Gold award in February 1999 for passing a hundred thousand units across the German-speaking market. Britain got M25 Racer and then London Racer, while France got Paris-Marseille Racing. A version reached the United States as US Racer.

The critical reception was consistently poor and it never once mattered. These were shelf products at a price nobody had to think about, sold in supermarkets and electronics chains rather than games shops, bought by people who wanted a car game and recognized the road on the box. London Racer and its sequel are credited with over 600,000 copies in the UK.

~ how it scaled ~

By 2001 Davilex was signing pan-European distribution with Infogrames for Europe Racer and had a North American deal by November of that year. In May 2002 it bought a Universal license and made two Knight Rider games, which is the point where the formula stops being about roads and starts being about whatever brand was cheap. Amsterdam Monster Madness went out in Britain under the title AmsterDoom. There was a Beach King and there was an Amsterdam Taxi Madness. The catalog in those last years reads like a company trying every door in the corridor.

In January 2003 Davilex announced it would restructure into a publisher only and close its internal development studio. Dutch sources put the actual end of in-house development at 2004 and the end of publishing at 2006. English Wikipedia dates the whole thing to 2005, which is one of those disagreements that comes from a company dying in stages rather than on a day.

~ the parent that survived ~

Nothing about this sold into Turkey. The Dutch budget shelf was a distribution arrangement inside one retail market, and a shop in Ankara in 1998 was not stocking a racing game about a motorway near Utrecht. I came to A2 Racer the way you come to another country's advertising jingle, much later and secondhand, from Dutch people my age who find it funny that anyone outside would ask.

Davilex the accounting company outlived Davilex Games by more than a decade. It was bought by the Norwegian software group Visma in 2017 and davilex.com answers today with a working business, which makes this one of the cleaner examples of a dead brand whose domain still resolves for an entirely legitimate reason. davilexgames.com does not resolve at all.

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