Haiku Studios

~ the eulogy ~

Haiku Studios shut in 1997, which puts it a year on the wrong side of my first dial-up connection. There is no part of this I was present for. What is left is a register entry and a short list of games, one of which actually shipped.

The French national register has it as SIREN 390 008 126, registered in Paris on 18 January 1993 under the software activity code. That day-precision founding date is better than anything the encyclopedia carries, and it matches: Wikipedia says 1993 and says the name Haiku Studios was coined that year to cover Computer's Dream plus several other developers who joined them.

Computer's Dream is the part that explains why anyone bothered. Olivier Cordoleani and Hervé Lange had worked together through the 1980s on Iron and Flame for Atari, then on B.A.T. in 1990 and B.A.T. II: The Koshan Conspiracy in 1992, both for Ubisoft. B.A.T. is a real piece of French adventure-game history, a cyberpunk thing with an interface that tried to do far too much at once and is still argued about. These were not beginners.

~ the dossier ~

~ down in the dumps ~

The one game that shipped came out in 1996. Down in the Dumps was a cartoon point-and-click, published by Philips Media for MS-DOS and Windows, with a Macintosh version following in 1997. Console versions were announced for 1996, including one for Philips's own CD-i, and not a single one of them was released. That tells you where the money went before it ran out.

The studio's own website survives in the archive as a capture from 25 December 1996, about ten months before the end.

~ three games that never shipped ~

When it went down there were three projects in development, and that list tells you more than the rest of the article put together. One was a 3D racing game called Demon Driver. Another, Moreau, is believed to have been a tie-in to the 1996 film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the one with Brando in the ice bucket. The third, Elric the Necromancer, would have been an action role-playing game off Michael Moorcock's albino emperor.

A movie license and two original projects, all running at the same time, inside a company Wikipedia estimates at somewhere between eleven and fifty people, on the back of a single released title. The infobox gives the fate as bankrupt and the year as 1997, and no trade source anywhere describes the circumstances. What the article does link is a French-language interview with Cordoleani and an entry on the cancelled-games site Unseen64 for Demon Driver, which is roughly the whole paper trail.

~ still active, says the register ~

The thing is not in the BODACC court bulletin at all, because the open data there begins long after 1997. What the national register does say is that SIREN 390 008 126 is in administrative state A, active, with no closure date on it, twenty nine years after the last person walked out. There is a separate HAIKU STUDIO registered in the 10th arrondissement in 2017 and closed in 2019, a different entity with a different number.

A French company that dies before the register goes digital simply stays open forever in the database. The paperwork outlasts the payroll.

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