Helixe

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

~ the obituary ~

Helixe opened in 2000 in Burlington, Massachusetts, and never did anything except portable games. That was the whole proposition. Underneath the PlayStation 2 budgets ran a parallel economy of studios whose entire job was to deliver the Game Boy Advance version of whatever the publisher held the rights to, at a fraction of the console cost.

Star Wars: The New Droid Army for the Game Boy Advance in 2002 is the early credit. The work that defined it came later and came from Pixar: Nintendo DS versions of Ratatouille and Wall-E, inside a licensed catalog THQ had built around the studio animation business. The last thing it shipped was the DS version of de Blob, a Wii game squeezed onto a handheld.

THQ owned it well before the end. By February 2003 helixe.com was billing the place as "Helixe Games: A Division of THQ Inc.", with the tagline "Gameboy Advance game development at its best!" under it. Kurt Bickenbach, who became a director at the studio that followed, is described in the trade press as one of Helixe's original co-founders. So it started as somebody's company and finished as a line on a parent's studio roster. That is the normal trajectory for a work-for-hire shop that is good at exactly one platform.

On 4 November 2008, Gamasutra reported that the layoffs had been instituted that day. Sega Retro dates the formal closure to 3 November. The two dates bracket the same week, and nothing in either account involves anyone in Burlington.

~ the case file ~

~ pixar on a cartridge ~

A handheld movie tie-in is a product with no online component whatsoever. You bought a cartridge in a shop and put it in a Game Boy Advance or a DS. That was the entire transaction, and nothing in it phoned home, so there was no server anyone could later switch off. Helixe's games are among the small set of dead-studio products that still work perfectly, because nothing they depended on can be taken away.

They also assumed a retail chain Turkey did not have. A DS tie-in for a Pixar film needs a child with a handheld console and a parent standing in a shop that stocks first-party Nintendo cartridges. In Turkey in 2007 the handheld in the room was more likely to be a phone, and the Pixar film arrived on a disc from a stall. I was twenty-three that year. The intended buyer was about fifteen years younger and lived somewhere with a GameStop.

~ 4 november 2008 ~

Helixe did not die alone. Paradigm Entertainment in Dallas and Mass Media near Los Angeles went in the same round, as did Locomotive Games in Santa Clara and Sandblast Games in Seattle. Juice Games in the UK was cut by roughly a third, and Rainbow Studios in Phoenix was trimmed by an unspecified amount. THQ's quarterly report was due that Wednesday.

What a THQ representative told Gamasutra while five studios were being closed was: "Right now that's a rumor. We have no comment on that." The internal email confirming two of the closures was already circulating. A publisher will deny a studio's death to the trade press on the same day it tells the studio, because the shareholders get the version with a number attached to it and nobody else is owed one.

~ what doubletap took ~

Three months later, on 3 February 2009, Gamasutra reported that Bickenbach and Richard Corredera, Helixe's technical director, had started DoubleTap Games in Boston, Bickenbach as production director and Corredera as business director. The domain helixe.com has not lapsed. What loads from it is a two-line script, and the only thing the script does is forward the visitor to a parking lander.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »