Eutechnyx

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

~ the goodbye ~

Company 02172322 was incorporated on 30 September 1987 under the name Zeppelin Games Limited. Brian Jobling was seventeen. He had been writing and selling games for the Atari 8-bit and the ZX Spectrum from home since he was fourteen, somewhere in the north east of England, and he put what he made into a company.

Zeppelin sold cassettes cheap. Zybex and Draconus in 1988, Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge in 1989, Edd the Duck in 1990, a soccer manager with Kenny Dalglish's name on the box. It also imported Atari 8-bit games from the Polish studio LK Avalon and put them on British shelves, an odd line to find in a budget catalog from 1991.

The American publisher Merit Studios bought the company in 1994 and renamed it Merit Studios Europe. The directors bought it back in 1996 with help from Infogrames, renamed it Eutechnyx, and signed a three-year exclusive on PlayStation and PC. From that point the company only made cars go around tracks. James Bond, Max Power, Cartoon Network, The Fast and the Furious, NASCAR: the brand on the box changed every eighteen months and the engine underneath did not.

By 2009 there were offices in Gateshead, Hong Kong, Chengdu and the United States. In 2012 a sister company called ZeroLight was spun up in the same Gateshead building to sell the realtime car rendering to actual car manufacturers. ZeroLight moved across the river to the Newcastle quayside in September 2016 and is still trading today, which makes it the part of the building that had a future in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the two-pound shelf ~

The budget cassette market that made Zeppelin was a British thing, and specifically a British newsagent thing. Games at 1.99 next to the magazines, no box, a photocopied inlay card. It had no equivalent in Turkey, where the same years were copied floppies sold off market stalls, with no price tier at all because nothing on them was licensed in the first place. I was three years old when Zeppelin incorporated, and the whole Spectrum generation passed over this country at a height.

The later end of the catalog did reach me. The licensed racing games Eutechnyx built in the 2000s turned up in Turkish shops under whatever brand had been bolted onto them, and nobody I knew ever read the developer line on the back of the case.

~ ride to hell ~

In June 2013 Eutechnyx released Ride to Hell: Retribution, a biker game that had been in development for years and arrived broken in every direction at once. It scored in the teens. It became a running joke on YouTube within a week, which is the only time in thirty-seven years that the studio's name traveled further than its clients' names did.

The London office closed that same month. Nineteen more people went in July 2014 after Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance did nothing. In January 2015 the NASCAR license moved to Dusenberry Martin Racing, with Eutechnyx finishing NASCAR '15 as a contractor on a license it no longer held, and in July eight more staff left when the online racing game ACR failed commercially.

~ ten quiet years ~

NASCAR '15 was the last one. After that the company filed accounts and did nothing else that anybody recorded. Eutechnyx Holdings Limited, company 03230457, was dissolved on 29 April 2024. The operating company filed its last accounts to 31 March 2024 and was dissolved on 20 May 2025.

Nothing was announced. By then there was no website left to announce it on, and eutechnyx.com does not answer today on either scheme. A studio that spent its whole working life putting other companies' logos on the box went out under a name nobody had reason to look for.

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