Lankhor

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

~ the obit ~

Lankhor was formed in 1987 out of a merger between two very small French concerns, one of them literally named after its proprietors, Béatrice and Jean-Luc Langlois, the other called Kyilkhor Création. Bruno Gourier was the third name on the founding list. The groupement was registered on 6 January 1988 and a limited company followed on 9 June 1992, which is the paperwork trail of a family business that grew slowly rather than a startup that launched.

What it made first was adventure games. Le Manoir de Mortevielle came out in 1987 and Maupiti Island in 1990, and three of the company's games took a Tilt d'Or from Canal Plus, those two and the racing game that followed. In 1998 Génération 4 gave it the award for best French company, eleven years in, which is the sort of recognition that arrives when a studio has become part of the furniture.

The racing game was Vroom, released in 1991, and it is the title that gave Lankhor a life outside France. A data disk came in 1992 and a multiplayer version in 1993. Domark published Lankhor's F1 the same year, and Kawasaki Superbike Challenge followed in 1995 through Domark and Time Warner Interactive. Later the Formula One work went to Eidos, with Official Formula 1 Racing in 1999 and F1 World Grand Prix in 2000.

The last two releases came through Microïds: Warm Up! in 2000 and Ski Park Manager in 2002, the second of which reached shops after the company behind it had stopped operating. So the catalog and the company have different end dates, and the catalog's is the later one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ le manoir de mortevielle ~

Mortevielle is the game Lankhor is actually remembered for, and the credit for it runs back further than the company does. The English Wikipedia says Gourier and Bernard Grélaud published a version of it in 1986 on the Sinclair QL, a year before Lankhor existed, and that the Lankhor release was a commercial success.

The format is a manor house with a death in it and a closed set of suspects. You move between rooms and you read. The French press praised it to the point of a Tilt d'Or, and both encyclopedia entries still lead with it rather than with anything the company shipped afterwards.

The company never had another one like it. Maupiti Island in 1990 is the nearest thing and it did well, but after that the money and the staff went into cars and bikes, which were easier to sell abroad and did not have to be translated.

~ the video system contract ~

I came to Mortevielle as a thing written about rather than a thing played, which is the normal relationship with a parser adventure in a language you do not read. The game is nothing but reading. Vroom, by contrast, needed no French at all, and Vroom is the one that got a Domark deal and an English-market name. A studio whose best work is locked inside its own language will be remembered abroad for its second-best work.

The ending was not a slow decline. The French article says that after financial difficulties, and after the cancellation early in 2001 of an important contract with the Japanese publisher Video System, Lankhor had to close its doors late in that same year. Headcount had been twenty-three at its height and was eight at the finish. The limited company was struck off the register on 3 October 2002, a date the English article's own infobox contradicts by a day while its text agrees with it. What is left online is a tribute site at lankhor.net run by people who are not the company, plus a former employee's site documenting the final months. lankhor.com itself is now a premium-domain listing with a sales phone number on it.

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