Neko Entertainment

» see e-neko.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Crazy Frog reached Turkey. In 2005 you could not get away from that ringtone, and the animated thing attached to it was on the music channels for a year. What did not reach Turkey, or anywhere much outside the French and British bargain racks, was Crazy Frog Racer, the budget kart game built around it by a small studio in Montreuil on the eastern edge of Paris. That studio was Neko Entertainment, and the frog was the most famous thing it ever touched.

It was set up in 1999 and named for the Japanese word for cat, with a cartoon cat for a logo. Its actual business was volume. Neko wrote its own cross-platform toolchain, the Neko Game Development Kit, specifically so that one team could ship a title onto several machines at once and move an existing game to a new console quickly. Over eighteen years that put its name on Nintendo and Sony hardware across four console generations, from the Game Boy Advance to the PlayStation 4.

The catalog is mostly licensed properties and family titles, the sort of thing that sells at a lower price in a supermarket rather than at full price in a games shop. Cocoto, a small horned imp, carried a whole series of karting and mini-game releases. Kung Fu Rabbit arrived late, in the download era, and is the title still easiest to find on a store today.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the register says ~

France publishes its corporate deaths, which means the ending here is documented in a way almost no games studio's is. Neko Entertainment sat on the commercial register under number 424 505 790, and the Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales carries sixteen notices against it: years of routine account filings, then the part that matters.

~ the ten year plan ~

On 22 May 2013 a court opened a redressement judiciaire, the French procedure that keeps a company trading under supervision while it works out how to pay what it owes. A year later, on 28 May 2014, the court approved the plan itself and set its duration at ten years, naming Me Bernard Houplain as the commissioner responsible for seeing it through. Ten years is a long leash, and it only gets granted if the court thinks there is a business underneath the debt.

The belief did not survive one annual cycle. On 13 May 2015 the same court issued a judgment resolving the recovery plan and ordering liquidation instead, and on 15 July it approved a plan de cession, a court-supervised sale of the business as a going concern. Neko Entertainment's own file stayed open until 10 March 2017, when it was closed for want of assets.

~ koneko ~

A company called Koneko, which is Japanese for kitten, appears on the register in April 2015, three months ahead of that sale. It filed accounts in November 2016 and it went into liquidation on 24 May 2017, with the court fixing the date payments had stopped at 14 November 2016. Its own file was closed for want of assets on 10 January 2023, almost six years later.

24 May 2017 is also the day the Agence française pour le jeu vidéo published the farewell, under the headline "Fin de partie pour Neko Entertainment / Koneko". The note thanks everyone who passed through and explains nothing: eighteen years of a fine human adventure full of twists, the east Paris studio closing its doors for good at the end of May. The English Wikipedia records 2017 as the death and does not say that the date it cites is a court judgment, handed down on the same day the note went up.

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