Delphine Software International

~ the last words ~

Delphine Software International was founded in 1988 in Paris as part of the Delphine Group, with Paul de Senneville at the top and Paul Cuisset directing what actually got built. The group's other business was music, and the music was a much larger business than the games ever became.

The first years were point-and-click adventures under Cuisset. Future Wars in 1989 and Cruise for a Corpse in 1991 both ran on an engine he wrote, and both did well enough across Europe to keep the studio funded without anyone having to explain it to a publisher.

Then two games in eighteen months changed what the name meant, and nothing after them came close. The studio went commercial in a plainer way once the moment passed. Shaq Fu in 1994 and Fade to Black in 1995 were followed by the Moto Racer series, which Electronic Arts published from 1997 and which paid the bills into the next decade.

There was a Richard Clayderman cassette in a lot of Turkish homes in the eighties, and Ballade pour Adeline was the piece everybody could hum whether or not they could name it. Paul de Senneville wrote it in 1976 for his newborn daughter Adeline and put it out on Delphine, the label he had already named after his older daughter. Twelve years later the same money started a game studio, and in 1993 that studio opened a subsidiary called Adeline Software. So the nearest I get to this company is not a game at all. It is a piano melody I heard in other people's living rooms years before I had a computer of my own.

~ the record ~

~ where the money came from ~

Delphine Records was set up in 1974 by de Senneville with Olivier Toussaint. Its business was instrumental piano records, and Richard Clayderman was the artist who made it enormous. Ballade pour Adeline sold on a scale that pop records rarely reach and kept selling for decades, in markets that had nothing else in common with each other.

That is where a French game studio in 1988 got its funding. It is an odd origin and it explains a couple of things about the early catalog. There was no publisher standing over the studio asking what the audience was, so a project like Another World, which is one person building a game with no obvious buyer, could get made.

~ the two games ~

Another World shipped in 1991. Éric Chahi built essentially all of it alone across about two years, with Jean-François Freitas on the sound. It had no interface and no on-screen text. The polygon animation was rotoscoped from footage Chahi shot himself, and the game killed you constantly on the assumption that you would learn something each time. It sold around a million copies through the nineties. Chahi left afterward and took the rights with him.

Flashback followed in 1992, directed by Cuisset, with the same rotoscoped look pushed further over a much more conventional game. It went further commercially than Another World did, far enough that Guinness World Records later logged it as the best-selling French game. Neither one produced a sequel anybody thinks about.

~ the long tail ~

In December 2002 the studio was taken out of the Delphine Group, and in February 2003 it was sold to Doki Denki, another French developer. Doki Denki went bankrupt and was liquidated in July 2004, which is where Delphine's operations actually stop. There is no closing announcement, because by then the name belonged to somebody else's insolvency.

The games outlived the company by a wide margin. Chahi has re-released Another World himself on every platform generation since, personally, as the rights holder. Cuisset went back to Flashback twice, directing the 2013 remake published by Ubisoft and Flashback 2 for Microïds in 2023, and neither landed. Adeline Software, the subsidiary named after the song, made Little Big Adventure in 1994 and was sold to Sega three years later.

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