Motion Twin (Flash era)

» see motion-twin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Motion Twin was a small french studio in Bordeaux that made flash and browser games from 2001 onwards. They were never huge in the english-speaking world, but in france and in some neighboring countries their games were the things teenagers played in the school computer lab during break.

The most famous one was probably Hammerfest. It was a turn-based winter game where you played a kind of sledding character and threw snowballs at other characters. Mush was a multiplayer game about being on a doomed spaceship where the players had to figure out which ones of them had been infected by an alien parasite. Dinoparc was a dinosaur breeding game for younger kids.

Honestly, i never played these. I am turkish, born in 1984, so i was already mostly past the school flash games age by the time these were popular in france. But i remember the names from forum discussions, from french friends in the early 2010s, and from articles about the flash era that mentioned the studio.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what made them different ~

Most flash games of the 2000s were small individual things. Single developers making single games for newgrounds or miniclip. Motion Twin was different. They were a collective, organized as a french workers cooperative. Every member had equal pay, equal voting rights, equal everything. There were maybe eight to twelve people at most.

They made games together. They picked which game to make next together. They split the profit equally. This was an unusual way to run a game studio in 2005. It is still unusual now. Most studios are top-down. Motion Twin was structured the way an old printing press cooperative would have been.

The games themselves were also different from the typical flash era output. They were free to play but had paid currency for cosmetics or shortcuts. This was earlier than most western mobile games figured out the same model. Motion Twin was making mtx-funded multiplayer browser games years before that became the norm everywhere.

~ how the flash era died ~

Adobe announced in 2017 that flash would be killed off by the end of 2020. The browsers all stopped supporting it in stages over the next few years. Most flash games on the open web stopped being playable. Motion Twin's catalog was no exception.

By that point Motion Twin had already pivoted. The studio had been working on a non-flash project that became Dead Cells, which launched into early access in 2017 and was a critical and commercial hit. Dead Cells is a side-scrolling roguelike. It does not look like a flash game. It looks like a real indie game. The same eight or so people made it. The cooperative structure stayed.

So strictly speaking, Motion Twin the company is alive. The studio is still operating. The Dead Cells team is them. But the flash-era Motion Twin, the one that made hammerfest and dinoparc, is over. Those games are not coming back. The browser-game studio is dead.

~ the cooperative survived ~

The most interesting thing about Motion Twin is that the cooperative structure survived the pivot. Most studios that make a hit game grow rapidly, take outside investment, and stop being whatever they were before. Motion Twin made Dead Cells, made enough money to keep going, and stayed small. They actually spun off a sister cooperative called Evil Empire, which now handles updates to Dead Cells while the main Motion Twin team works on a new project.

This is rare. The success that killed most other studios as recognizable entities did not change Motion Twin's shape. They are still a workers cooperative in Bordeaux, with equal pay and equal voting rights. It is the kind of structural survival you almost never see in commercial gaming.

~ what we lost ~

The french flash game ecosystem. There was a whole world of these games in 2003 to 2010 that was essentially invisible outside france. Motion Twin was just the most successful of a category that included dozens of small studios making browser games for kids and teens. Most of those games are unplayable now. Most of those studios are gone. Motion Twin is one of the few that survived its own genre dying.

The original hammerfest is also lost. There was an html5 remake at some point, but the experience of opening a flash game in your school lab during break, on a slow computer with a CRT monitor, is not something a remake can recapture.