Loriciel

~ the last words ~

Marc Bayle, an Arts et Métiers engineer, met Laurent Weill, who had a master's in computer science, while the two of them were doing French military service. They wrote about ten pieces of software during it and registered a company off the back of that. The French company register puts the creation date at 1 July 1983, SIREN 328186705, with the first establishment at 17 rue Lamandé in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris. Philippe Seban joined shortly after launch, bought half the capital and took over as managing director.

Loriciels wrote for whatever was selling in France, which meant a longer hardware list than most publishers carried: the Oric 1, the ZX81 and the Spectrum, every Amstrad CPC, the Thomson MO5 and TO7/70, the Matra Alice, the Amstrad PCW, MSX, the Commodore 64, then the Atari ST and the Amiga and MS-DOS. Around a hundred and fifty games came out of it in ten years. The Ministry of Industry gave the company joint first place in its Grand Prix de la Performance Commerciale.

Trouble arrived in 1992. The company was placed in receivership, and during the observation period, while it was supposed to be trading its way out, its American distributor left a large invoice unpaid. The sell-off order, the plan de cession, was handed down on 4 May 1994. English Wikipedia records attempts to revive the name afterward, first as Loriciel again and then as Virtual Studio, and has the last product as Tommy Moe's Winter Extreme: Skiing & Snowboarding for the Super Nintendo.

~ the record ~

~ logiciel plus oric ~

Take logiciel, French for software, and bolt on Oric, the British machine the company wrote its first code for. The result pins a date and a market into two syllables, and it also left the company carrying a dead machine's name for another eleven years. In 1989 the plural was quietly dropped and Loriciels became Loriciel.

~ l'aigle d'or ~

L'Aigle d'or is the title that counted. It won the first ever Tilt d'or in 1985, in the best adventure game category, awarded by the French magazine Tilt, and the French article dates the company's rise as a major developer from that release. After it came Sapiens, Mach 3, the Skweek games, Tennis Cup, Panza Kick Boxing, Bumpy, Jim Power.

I have no claim on any of it. The catalog is in French, part of it was written for machines sold mainly inside France, and at least one of the licensed titles was built on a French television format: Des chiffres et des lettres is a game show that means nothing outside the country. Loriciel's audience was an eleven-year-old in Lyon with a CPC 464, not somebody whose internet started in Turkey in 1998 and worked backwards from there.

~ the cession, and a siren that never closed ~

English Wikipedia says the company was "active from 1983 to the early 1990s" and cannot date the end at all. The French article dates it properly and the state register confirms it: all four of Loriciel's establishments carry a date_fermeture of 4 May 1994, including the original Paris address and the Gennevilliers head office that had only opened in July 1992. Four establishments, zero open.

The paperwork then kept going without the company. The French article records a further redressement judiciaire on 27 October 2000, flagging it as unverified, and a closing judgment after transfer on 10 May 2001, seven years after the business itself had stopped.

The entity's own administrative status in the register today is still "A" for active, with no closure date at the company level, which is a thing INSEE records do when nobody ever files the last form. Read the establishment rows instead of the summary field and the date stops being ambiguous.

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