Nucleosys

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~ the last words ~

The point-and-click adventure was already a dead genre by the time Nucleosys committed to it. In 2003, when Agustín Cordes and Alejandro Graziani started the studio in Buenos Aires, the publishers who had built that business were gone or had moved to shooters, and the remaining audience was being served by a handful of European houses and almost nobody in the Americas. Starting an adventure studio in Argentina that year was a decision made against the entire weight of the market.

Scratches came out in North America on 8 March 2006. It is a first-person horror adventure set almost entirely inside one English house, which a writer has bought and moved into, and the plot is him working out what happened there before he arrived. There is no combat in it and nothing to shoot. The game's whole technique is to leave you alone in rooms long enough that your own attention turns into the threat, and the title refers to a noise you keep hearing and cannot place.

It did not sell the way a game that well-liked should have. The studio renamed itself Nucleosys Digital Studio a couple of weeks after release, put out a Director's Cut in 2007 with new material in it, and shipped one more title in 2008, Risk Profile: Federal Cases, which almost nobody noticed. That is the whole catalog. Two games and an expanded reissue, over six years.

In 2006 an Argentine first-person horror title was, from where I was sitting, a name mentioned on a forum rather than a box on a shelf. The shops in Turkey carried whatever the local distributors had agreed to carry, and a small adventure game licensed separately into North America was not on that list. People found Scratches through the English-language adventure community instead, which ran its own forums and kept a private idea of what counted as a success.

~ the record ~

~ scratches ~

The thing worth preserving about Scratches is how cheaply it got its effects. It is a pre-rendered game, built the old way, with fixed viewpoints and a mouse pointer that changes shape over things you can touch. By 2006 that was an obsolete way to make a game, and the obsolescence is exactly what made it work, because a fixed camera decides what you cannot see, and horror lives entirely in what you cannot see. The budget for a free-roaming 3D version was never there, and the shortfall is what protected the design.

~ the unreleased one ~

The last project was described on the company's site and then never again. It would have been a first-person horror adventure taking place in one location over the course of a single night, with several characters to talk to. That is all the information that exists. It was never given a title, and no screenshot or frame of footage has turned up in the seventeen years since.

It is a sharper description than most finished games manage. One building over one night, which is a design and a budget at the same time: a studio that knew exactly how much game it could afford to make, describing it in a single sentence. Whatever went wrong went wrong early enough that nobody outside the studio saw a frame of it.

~ what replaced it ~

Word that Nucleosys was disbanding reached the games press in July 2009, and on 3 August the studio posted on its own site that it would be closing its doors soon. No reason was given then and none has been given since. The domain is now a parking page.

Agustín Cordes started another studio, Senscape, and went on building in the same genre, which is the only real continuity here, since the company itself left nothing behind to inherit. Argentine game development has become a genuine industry in the years since, and Nucleosys predates almost all of it. Choosing a dying format in a country with no games business, then shipping something good enough to outlive both, was never a plan. It was a preference, and the studio paid for it at the going rate.

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