Pendulo Studios

» see pendulostudios.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Pendulo Studios was founded in Madrid in September 1993 and incorporated as a company the following March. Four people started it, and two of them, Felipe Gómez Pinilla and Ramón Hernáez, were still the registered administrators when a judge dissolved it thirty-two years later. In between they shipped eleven games, nearly all of them point-and-click adventures, in a genre the rest of the industry kept declaring dead.

The first one, Igor: Objetivo Uikokahonia, arrived in 1994 as a comedy adventure in Spanish for a Spanish audience. The one that mattered was Hollywood Monsters in December 1997, published by Dinamic Multimedia, which had sold around 250,000 copies in Spain alone by the time MarcaPlayer counted them up in 2011. Then came Runaway: A Road Adventure in 2001, which did the thing Spanish games were not supposed to do. It sold abroad. MCV put it at about 400,000 full-price units in Europe by January 2004, and ABC reported the trilogy at roughly 1.5 million worldwide by 2010.

The publishing history tells its own story. Dinamic Multimedia handled the early ones and then went under, so Runaway's European life passed to a German publisher, dtp entertainment, and a French one, Focus Home Interactive. From Yesterday Origins in 2016 onward everything went through Microids. A studio of that size does not really choose its publishers. It outlives them.

In the Counter-Strike years I was in Ankara internet cafes, and a boxed Spanish adventure game whose European distribution ran through German and French retail had no route into that room. Runaway came to me much later, as a name European PC magazines kept citing, and that remains the extent of my first-hand acquaintance with it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the register says ~

The legal ending is unusually well documented for a studio that never made an announcement. Procedimiento concursal 514/2025 reached a decision on 20 May 2026, when the Sección de lo Mercantil of the Tribunal de Instancia de Madrid declared Pendulo Studios SL in concurso de acreedores, voluntary, with the company keeping its own powers under the supervision of court-appointed administrators. BORME published it on 29 June 2026 as entry 307025.

Two months later the same judge, Andrés Sánchez Magro, signed the auto of 15 July 2026 that opened the liquidation phase. The wording published on 14 August is flat: the company is dissolved and its administrators cease, replaced by the concurso administration. Gómez Pinilla and Hernáez are named in that line. That is how you find out two of the founders were still there at the end.

~ the last point and click ~

The collapse is easier to date than the closure. In March 2024 the studio opened an ERE covering 33 people, about 43 percent of the staff, and the games workers' union blamed the publisher Microids directly, citing impossible deadlines and almost no communication. The game behind it was Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh, which had shipped the previous November to poor sales.

After that it went quiet rather than closing. A former employee told MeriStation that as far as they knew nobody had been in the office since March, a line the trade press picked up in October 2025 and again in January 2026. No farewell post, no final blog entry. For a studio whose entire craft was writing dialogue, the exit was carried out without any.

~ thirty-two years ~

What Pendulo had become by the end was one of the last Spanish studios still standing from the 1990s, most of that generation having gone down with Dinamic. Igor in 1994 and Tintin in 2023 sit twenty-nine years apart, with the same two or three people writing comedy adventures through the death of boxed retail and then through the death of the genre.

The late games aged into a particular kind of cult. Blacksad: Under the Skin in 2019 and Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo in 2021 both have the shape a studio's work takes when it needs the contract more than the idea, and both reviewed around the middle. Runaway is still the one people name.

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