Kheops Studio

» see kheops-studio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Cryo Interactive went bankrupt in 2002 and its brand and intellectual property were bought up by Microids as insolvency assets. The people went elsewhere. A lot of them landed at DreamCatcher's new European branch, founded that January, to finish the Egypt series they had been working on. In the summer of 2003 that publisher laid off the developers it had inherited from Cryo, and in September those developers incorporated themselves in Paris as Kheops Studio.

Benoît Hozjan took the creative director's chair and Stéphane Petit the technical one. Their first move was to go back to DreamCatcher and ask for a contract to finish Egypt III independently, which they got, and which became the studio's first release in 2004. For the next seven years they shipped at a pace that looks impossible now, three games in 2004 and three more in 2006.

Fifteen titles in total, almost all of them PC adventure games, almost all of them published by Microids. The catalog reads like a reading list: Jules Verne more than once, Leonardo da Vinci, Nostradamus, Cleopatra, Dracula, a cave-painting mystery set in the Paleolithic.

~ the chronicle ~

~ cultural entertainment ~

Hozjan had a term for what the studio made, and he used it in interviews: cultural entertainment. Games drawn out of history or literature, mixing the documented part with an invented part, built for people who wanted the research to be real underneath the puzzle. Return to Mysterious Island put you on Verne's island with an inventory and a crafting system years before crafting systems were a thing anybody named.

These games sold in boxes, through European retail, to an audience that had already been declared dead once. Nothing in that supply chain ever came near me in Ankara, and by the mid 2000s the only adventure games I would have run into were the ones that came up in forum threads about what was worth installing. A French studio making a Nostradamus mystery for the German and French retail market did not come up.

~ the arithmetic ~

A fifteen-game catalog in eight years is a studio living contract to contract. Each one had to pay for the next, at mid-budget PC prices, in a genre where the publisher's print run kept getting smaller. The Fall Trilogy, three episodes between 2009 and 2011, was the last thing they finished, and by then the market they had been built for was running on casual portals and downloadable hidden-object games rather than boxed adventures.

~ receivership ~

Kheops filed for bankruptcy and was placed in receivership by a French court. The studio closed in January 2012, eight years and four months after it opened. The games had carried the publisher's name on the front all along, so the catalog kept on selling after the people who built it stopped existing as a company. The studio's own site is readable now only as an Internet Archive capture from 2009, games page intact, two unfinished episodes still in the future.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »