OUAT Entertainment

» see ouat-entertainment.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Angouleme is a small city in the Charente with an outsized claim on French visual culture. It hosts the comics festival and it has a national animation school, and a cluster of image-industry companies grew up around the pair. OUAT Entertainment was one of them, registered on 1 April 1999 and spelled, in the official record, OUAT ENTERTAINEMENT, with an extra e that nobody ever corrected across twenty years of filings.

The business was licensed casual games. OUAT built titles on characters that French children already knew from television and cinema, for publishers including Ubisoft, Atari, Universal and Hasbro, across a span of platforms that reads like a history of the period, from Game Boy Color and PlayStation 2 through to Facebook and the iPad. From 2009 it also published its own work, and from 2016 it concentrated on mobile, with Identity Pursuit and Word Heroes as the last things it shipped.

The French company register records the closure on 22 May 2019, with the establishment marked etat C. The English Wikipedia article disagrees on both ends, giving 25 March 1999 and 30 May 2019, and it carries a primary-sources warning. Where the two conflict, the register is the document that was actually filed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four playstation symbols ~

The logo deserves its own paragraph. OUAT is an acronym for Once Upon A Time, and the studio rendered it using the four face buttons of a PlayStation controller: the circle for O, the square for U, the triangle for A and the cross for T. It only works if you squint, and it works better in French than in English.

It is also a small piece of evidence about who they thought they were. A studio that identifies itself with controller glyphs is telling you it comes from games rather than from the animation houses next door, which in Angouleme was a distinction worth drawing.

~ borrowed characters ~

The catalog is almost entirely other people's intellectual property. Kirikou on Game Boy Color in 2001, from Michel Ocelot's film. Azur & Asmar on PC in 2007, from the same director. Totally Spies! 3: Agents secrets on DS and Totally Spies!: Totally Party on PC, PS2 and Wii in the same year, then a fourth Totally Spies game the year after. Martin Mystere on DS in 2008. Later there were games on Les Incollables and on Plus Belle La Vie, the soap opera that ran on France 3 for eighteen years.

That list is a precise map of a particular business. These are not games anyone was going to buy on their own merits; they are games a parent buys because the child recognizes the face on the box, sold through French retail into a French-speaking market, timed against a broadcast schedule. It is a real trade and a hard one, because the licensor takes a cut and the window is short, which leaves the budget as whatever survives both.

Totally Spies! traveled much further than the studio behind the tie-ins ever did. The series was a French production with a wide international broadcast life, and plenty of people who watched it in dubbed form had no idea there was a French company in Angouleme making the DS games. The series was dubbed widely and sold worldwide. OUAT's games for it were made in French, for French retail.

~ siren 422345264 ~

Studios this size rarely get an obituary, because nobody writes one. There was no closure post and no coverage in the trades. The Wikipedia article is still written in the present tense and still says the company "creates and publishes" video games, seven years after it stopped.

What exists instead is a line in a government database: SIREN 422345264, created 1999-04-01, date de fermeture 2019-05-22. The domain went to an insurance broker; ouat-e.com sells health cover now. For a studio that spent twenty years lending its work to characters other people owned, ending as an entry in a register under a misspelled company name is at least consistent.

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