Étranges Libellules

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

~ the obituary ~

The commercial court in Lyon converted Étranges Libellules from receivership into liquidation on 28 June 2012, and Gameblog got the court on the phone the next day to confirm it. The studio was eighteen years old. Two years before that it had 120 people on the payroll in Villeurbanne, and somebody close to the case told the site the headcount had since been divided by three or four.

What the company made was other people's properties. Kirikou arrived in 2001 off the back of the animated film, and The Pink Panther: Pinkadelic Pursuit followed in 2002. Then came Asterix & Obelix XXL in 2003 and its sequel Mission Las Vegum in 2005, which are the two games the studio is actually remembered for. Arthur and the Invisibles and Asterix at the Olympic Games both shipped in 2007, and The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon in 2008 was the one time it was handed an existing game series rather than a film.

2010 was the biggest year and also the last one. Alice in Wonderland went out alongside Tim Burton's film and How to Train Your Dragon alongside DreamWorks', two licensed releases in twelve months from a studio at its largest size. Nothing shipped after that. On 9 February 2012 the company opened a safeguard procedure, which is the French mechanism for a business that can still pay its bills and can see that it soon will not.

~ the case file ~

~ the licensed years ~

A licensed game is a contract with somebody else's marketing calendar attached. The film opens in March, so the game ships in March, finished or otherwise. Étranges Libellules did this for a decade and got genuinely good at it. The XXL games still have a following, and the Nintendo DS version of Alice in Wonderland was singled out at the time as the best thing in that particular package.

The studio's name was never the thing on the shelf, though. You bought Asterix. I was playing PC games through exactly these years, out of an internet cafe in the 2002 to 2005 window and then on my own machine at university, without the words Étranges Libellules ever once reaching me, and the packaging had no particular interest in changing that. Work for hire buys payroll and it does not buy a name, and that bill comes due later.

~ nine months in court ~

The French insolvency register is unusually specific about how this ended. The safeguard opened on 9 February 2012, with Olivier Buisine appointed to supervise management and Bruno Walczak as creditors' representative. On 12 April the court converted the safeguard into a receivership and dated the cessation of payments to that same day. On 28 June it converted the receivership into a liquidation and made Walczak the liquidator, which ended Buisine's mission.

The file then stayed open for another fifteen months. The statement of claims was lodged with the registry on 11 September 2012, and on 18 September 2013 the court closed the liquidation for insufficiency of assets, which is the formula for a company whose remaining assets will not cover what it owes. English Wikipedia gives 29 June 2012 for the liquidation and the French article gives 26 June. The published judgment says 28 June.

~ what lyon lost ~

Lyon had been a real games city and the two years around this took most of it. Phoenix Interactive and Widescreen Games had both gone under the year before, which Gameblog pointed out in the same piece. Arkane Studios survived, split between Lyon and Austin, and was bought by ZeniMax the following year. The Kinect prototype Étranges Libellules had on the bench when the court ruled was never finished.

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