In Utero

~ the last words ~

In Utero began in 1994 on the work nobody credits. Graphic assets for other people's games first, on Alone in the Dark 2 and on V-Rally, then level design on Virus. A service business can run for years that way without ever owning a product of its own.

Its first title arrived in June 2000: Odyssée, an educational adventure game about the voyage of Ulysses, commissioned by Cryo Interactive, which had made a specialty of exactly that sort of job. The reception was mixed, and by then the studio had committed to something much larger. Two games were in development on a single engine the team had written itself. Jekyll and Hyde came first on the schedule, Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles behind it, and both were adventure games with platforming in them and a deliberately unpleasant atmosphere.

Evil Twin is the one with a following. Ubi Soft published it in 2001 on the PlayStation 2 and on Windows, and it concerns an orphan called Cyprien who condemns his own imaginary world to oblivion on his birthday and then has to go there and repair it. It had been announced for late 1999 and arrived two years behind that, into a different market. At its peak the studio employed about fifty people.

~ the record ~

~ two games, one engine ~

Writing your own renderer and putting two titles on it reads well on paper, and it concentrates all of the risk in one place. The two titles shared the engine and the tools, along with much of the design thinking, so when the pair of them underperformed there was no third product standing on different foundations. The engine had been the studio's real asset and its largest expense at the same time.

None of it crossed my path. In 2001 my home connection was a modem, and what I did with it had to fit down a phone line, which rules out a French platformer on a PlayStation 2. Evil Twin is a game I have read about carefully and never touched.

~ liquidation on a monday ~

The studio went into liquidation on Monday 25 February 2002 and stopped existing from that date. Gamekult carried the news on the Thursday afternoon, in a few sentences, under the headline "In Utero, c'est fini".

Two things had done it. Cryo had ordered a sequel to L'Ombre de Zorro, one of the studio's weaker jobs, and then canceled the order; and the revenue from Evil Twin, which had actually shipped, was arriving too slowly to cover the hole. A developer living on commissions and royalties dies when one is withdrawn while the other is late.

~ the cohort of 2002 ~

The Gamekult piece put In Utero in a sentence with two other names. No Cliché had been closed by Sega the year before, and Lankhor was going the same way after fifteen years. French development studios with plenty of ideas and no money left, was how the sentence ran, and it was a fair description of all three. All three are graves here now.

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