No Cliché

~ the goodbye ~

Everything No Cliché ever finished was exclusive to hardware Sega announced it was abandoning in January 2001. Two games on a console its own maker publicly gave up on is a narrow target, and from Turkey it was not a target at all. The Dreamcast was never a machine I had in front of me. Toy Commander's reputation reached me years later and entirely secondhand, from people who had owned one.

The team predates the name. Frédérick Raynal had left Infogrames after Alone in the Dark and set up Adeline Software International in Lyon in February 1993, as an offshoot of Delphine Software International, with 21 people and four co-directors alongside him. Adeline made Little Big Adventure in 1994 and Time Commando two years after that. Little Big Adventure 2 followed in 1997. After the second Little Big Adventure the company went under, and Sega bought the team rather than the catalog. Delphine kept the rights to everything Adeline had already made.

Raynal set the new company up under Sega in 1999 as Sega Software, and it was renamed No Cliché shortly afterwards. The brief was Dreamcast development, so this was a studio built for a single piece of hardware that its own parent owned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ toy commander ~

Toy Commander came out in 1999 and is the thing the studio is remembered for. The premise was a child's bedroom at war, flown from inside radio-controlled toys, and it arrived inside the Dreamcast's European launch window when there was very little else of its kind on the machine.

Toy Racer followed in 2000, a smaller spin-off built on the same toys. The studio also did coding work on the European release of the Dreamcast port of Quake III Arena, helping Raster Productions with the localization side. Two games and a port assist is the complete output. Two years does not buy much more than that.

~ agartha ~

The project that mattered was Agartha, a survival horror. Raynal's Alone in the Dark had established many of survival horror's conventions back in 1992, so a horror game from him on new hardware was the studio's real bid for a second act.

In 2001 Sega Europe stopped development on most of its European Dreamcast titles. Agartha was among them, abandoned unfinished, and the cancellation is the event the French record treats as the moment No Cliché ceased to operate. The company lingered a short while afterwards and put its remaining people on a PC version of Toy Commander, which also did not ship. It was dissolved in 2002.

The detail that stands out here is who did the killing. This was not a publisher dropping an external studio it had no stake in. Sega owned No Cliché outright and had bought the team specifically to make Dreamcast games. Then it withdrew from the hardware those games existed to sell.

~ moto racer advance ~

In 2002, with the company dissolved, a Game Boy Advance game called Moto Racer Advance shipped with Adeline Software International on it. That name belonged to a company that went under in 1997, and to a team Sega had since bought and closed. A studio credit can outlive two separate deaths if the paperwork is convenient enough.

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