Digital Jesters

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

~ the obituary ~

TrackMania reached me. Digital Jesters did not. The game was a Nadeo product out of France that spread across Europe on free versions and shared tracks, and the box with the Digital Jesters logo on the spine was a retail arrangement for one country. That was the whole company: something that lived in the gap between a developer and a shelf, in Britain, for under three years.

Former CDV staff set it up in 2003, after CDV shut the UK office they had been running. They started with UK-only distribution for Nadeo, TrackMania and Virtual Skipper 3, and that went well enough to widen the catalog to TrackMania Sunrise and Freedom Force vs the Third Reich across the UK and Scandinavia, plus the Pro Rugby Manager series at home.

For a publisher that size the list was not small. The money behind it was another matter. By autumn 2005 the trade press was carrying insolvency rumors while a company director publicly denied them, and developers were going on the record about payments that had never arrived.

~ the case file ~

~ the autumn ~

In November 2005 the French studio Kylotonn ended its publishing deal over Bet On Soldier and said in plain words that Digital Jesters appeared unable to pay several developers. That same month a group reorganized the business as The DJ Group, which is the move you make when the name on the letterhead has become the liability. The last game to actually ship was a racer built around the Crazy Frog, the ringtone character, in November 2005.

~ 22 december 2005 ~

The order was made in the Birmingham District Registry of the High Court on the petition of Kaoscontrol Limited, a creditor. The website went dark not long after. The formal notice appointing a liquidator appeared in the London Gazette on 26 September 2006, which is the ordinary nine-month lag between a company stopping and the record saying so.

~ what the spine said ~

TrackMania is still being made, by Nadeo, inside Ubisoft. Digital Jesters survives as a line in that game's UK release history and as a page number in the Gazette. What is worth keeping here is the arrangement itself, which has largely stopped happening: a separate company whose entire job was getting a French game into British shops with its own logo printed on the spine, back when that was still how a game crossed a border.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »