Eurocom

» see eurocom.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Eurocom shipped something like seventy games in twenty four years and put its own idea on the box maybe three times. Five people started it in Derby in October 1988, and the business it settled into was conversions and licensed work: you own a film or a fighting game or a cartoon mouse, you need it on a console you do not develop for, you call Derby. Bond, Mortal Kombat, Crash Bandicoot, Disney, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Athens 2004 Olympics, Dead Space: Extraction with Visceral, and in 2010 the GoldenEye 007 remake for Wii, which a lot of people think is the best Bond game since the original.

The studio's own things were Magician in 1991 and 40 Winks in 1999, and then Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy in 2003, which is the one that gets remembered. Sphinx started internally in 2001, ran on Eurocom's own EngineX, and went out through THQ into a market that had no idea what to do with an Egyptian action-adventure from a studio nobody could name. It sold poorly and has been quietly re-released and re-appreciated ever since.

007 Legends arrived in October 2012, a compilation of Bond film scenarios rebuilt in one engine, and reviewers took it apart. Activision did not come back with another contract. Eurocom cut about 150 jobs in November, said the remaining fifty would move to mobile, and on 6 December 2012 made those last forty-two redundant and stopped trading. Management put it down to falling console and PC sales since 2008 plus competition from smaller teams that cost less to hire.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ EngineX ~

EngineX was the reason the licensed work kept coming. Eurocom built one codebase that ran across GameCube, PS2, Xbox and later Wii, and it powered Sphinx, 007: Nightfire and the 2010 GoldenEye, which is a fourteen-year service life for a game engine written by a mid-size British studio. That kind of internal tech was what a work-for-hire developer sold: not creative vision, which the publisher supplied, but the ability to ship the same content on four incompatible machines to a date.

When the generation changed and engines became licensed products from Epic and Unity, that advantage stopped being an advantage. A studio whose value was its own cross-platform pipeline in 2003 was a studio with an expensive legacy codebase by 2011.

~ the last contract ~

There is a specific kind of exposure in the work-for-hire model that the accounts never show. Eurocom had 250 people whose employment depended on the next licensing deal existing, and licensing deals are decided by a publisher's marketing calendar rather than by the studio's quality of work. GoldenEye 2010 was well received and it did not protect anyone, because two years later the same client handed over a rushed compilation project with a release date tied to Skyfall and then read the review scores.

Twenty four years of never being the name on the front also meant twenty four years of never owning the customer. There was no audience waiting for the next Eurocom game, in the sense that no such category existed to wait for.

~ Eurocom House ~

The building stayed in use. Some of the remaining staff regrouped as Mobile Gaming Studios, also trading as EightPixelsSquare, and kept working out of Eurocom House in Derby making iOS and Android games, which is the same move the November announcement had described before the money ran out. In 2022 a large cache of Eurocom prototypes leaked online, including unfinished Dead Space: Extraction builds, and a studio that had spent its whole life invisible inside other companies' credits got looked at properly for the first time.

I have played games this studio made and could not have named it in a quiz. The reason has nothing to do with which country I was in, which is unusual for the graves on this site. It is the arrangement Eurocom agreed to in 1988 and honored until the end: the publisher's logo goes on the front of the box and the developer goes in the small text on the back, so when the last contract falls through, the name coming off the building is one that almost nobody outside it had learned.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »