ERE Informatique

~ the eulogy ~

French Wikipedia dates the founding to 28 April 1983 and credits it to Emmanuel Viau, citing a Pix'n Love history of the industry. Philippe Ulrich joined the year after as directeur de collection, which is a publishing job title rather than a games one, and the company behaved like a publishing house: it commissioned authors. Rémi Herbulot, a self-taught programmer who had been working at Valeo and living in Caen, wrote Macadam Bumper for them in 1985, a pinball game where you built the table yourself.

The catalog from there reads like the first wave of French home computing in one list: Crafton et Xunk in 1986, which the English-speaking world got as Get Dexter, Sram in the same year, Bubble Ghost in 1987, and Teenage Queen in 1988, a strip poker game that is still the first thing some people say when the label comes up. Ulrich also ran a budget line called Gasoline Software from 1986, a detail the English article leaves out entirely.

Nothing in this grave is memory. The company finished in 1989, when I was five, and its games mostly traveled under other people's labels anyway. The name sat on the box for about two years before it stopped being printed at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ exxos, the god of programmers ~

Infogrames entered the share capital at the end of 1986 by buying out Marc André Rampon, the man who had taken shares off Viau and built the first distribution network. Complete control followed in June 1987. What came next was the strangest thing the company did: on 12 June 1988 the new owners threw a press ceremony at ERE Studio 102 on the Champs-Élysées to announce a development label called Exxos, framed in the French article as the god of programmers, a deity invented for marketing purposes.

Three games went out under it. L'Arche du Captain Blood and Purple Saturn Day in 1988, then KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers in 1989. Captain Blood is the one that got out of France, an alien-hunting game with a conversation system made of pictograms, and it is still the title cited to explain what French games looked like while nobody else was making anything of the kind.

~ the siren in the infobox is a shop ~

French Wikipedia's infobox gives this company a registration number, SIREN 398 122 317, a head office in Vallauris on the Côte d'Azur, a registration date of 19 August 1994 and a dissolution on 21 August 1996. The national business register knows that number. It belongs to an entity created on 10 August 1994 in Vallauris, filed under activity code 52.4Z, which is retail trade, and closed on 30 June 1996.

A games publisher founded in April 1983, holding its press ceremonies on the Champs-Élysées, cannot have been registered in 1994 on the Riviera under a retail code. Search the register for the name and five dead companies called ERE INFORMATIQUE come back, in Vallauris, Josselin, Villeurbanne, Beaune and Baie-Mahault, and not one of them is this one. Companies dissolved long enough ago simply fall out of the online register, so the publisher has no entry left at all, and somebody filled the gap with the nearest matching name. The 1996 date circulating for ERE Informatique is a shop on the coast closing after twenty two months.

~ what walked out ~

The two language versions disagree about why the staff left in 1989, and the disagreement is informative. English Wikipedia says financial problems, chiefly unpaid royalties. French Wikipedia says disagreements between Ulrich and the Infogrames management. Both end the same way: the creative core left the group and kept working together, and what they formed was incorporated as Cryo Interactive Entertainment in Paris on 28 January 1992.

So the company has two endings and no paperwork for either. The brand was swallowed in June 1987 and the people were gone by 1989, and whatever legal shell was left behind went quietly enough that the register no longer carries it.

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