Fishtank Interactive

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

~ the obit ~

Ravensburger has been in business since 1883 and its trademark is a blue triangle that has been on German jigsaw puzzles for over a century. In April 2000 its software arm, Ravensburger Interactive Media, started a separate label so it could publish games that sat about as far from a jigsaw puzzle as software gets. The label was called Fishtank Interactive and its logo was a cartoon fish with bulging eyes. Everything underneath it was shooting, strategy or both.

The catalog is short and it is better than its reputation. It held AquaNox, the underwater shooter from Massive Development, plus Etherlords and Evil Islands out of Nival in Moscow, alongside S.W.I.N.E., Car Tycoon, Beam Breakers, Archangel, 1914: The Great War and RIM: Battle Planets. English Wikipedia is rude about them, saying they were known for low production values and missing features like multiplayer, which is half fair and half the standard verdict on anything European and mid-budget from 2001.

AquaNox is the reason anyone outside Germany knows the fish existed. It launched in late 2001 as one of the demonstration titles of the GeForce era, the kind of game that shipped on CDs in the box with new hardware and got screenshotted in the specialist press because of what the water did. In Turkey that is mostly how it existed, a benchmark number quoted in hardware articles and on the forums where people argued about which card to buy. The cafes around here were bought and filled for Counter-Strike. Nobody was spending an hour in one to look at reflections.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the label was actually for ~

Publishers invent sub-labels for one of two reasons: to reach a market the parent brand cannot, or to protect the parent brand from the market it is reaching. Fishtank was the second kind. Ravensburger sold games to families and preschoolers, and a company in that position cannot put its own name on a box with a rifle on it without someone writing a letter.

It lasted two years, a single product cycle. By January 2002 the parent had already handed the international publishing rights to a publisher with better reach, an admission that it could not sell these games outside Germany on its own.

~ the day it changed owners ~

That somebody was JoWooD Productions, the Austrian publisher behind Gothic. In January 2002 Ravensburger Interactive passed JoWooD the international publishing rights to the Fishtank titles, including AquaNox and Etherlords. Four months later JoWooD took the rest. The takeover of Ravensburger Interactive Media was announced in the week of 16 May 2002 and the trade press carried it on the 20th, with nine games in development changing hands for release across 2002 and 2003.

The games kept coming out, under the buyer's name on the front. Nothing was ever published as Fishtank again, and the fish is now one of those logos you find on a disc in a bargain bin and cannot place. fishtankinteractive.com has not resolved in years.

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