Pyro Studios

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

~ the eulogy ~

Commandos was on Turkish PCs from 1998 onward and I had no idea it was made in Madrid. That was normal. A PC game in this country arrived as a disc with a box that had been through two distributors, and the studio credit was the last thing anybody read. For most of a decade I would have guessed the game was German.

Pyro Studios was set up in Madrid in 1996 by two brothers, Ignacio and Javier Perez Dolset, inside a family holding company that later traded as Zed Group. Spain in 1996 had no PC games industry to speak of. The 8-bit boom of the 1980s had come and gone, the studios that drove it were dead, and nothing had replaced them. Pyro was built to sell outside Spain from the first day because there was no inside Spain to sell to.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines came out in 1998 and it did not play like anything else on the shelf. The camera was fixed and isometric, and every enemy's field of view was drawn on the ground in front of him as a visible cone. Nobody had a health bar worth arguing about. If a soldier saw you, the mission was over, so the game was a puzzle wearing a war film's uniform. The series went past five million copies worldwide.

The thing that made it travel is the thing that makes it a Turkish memory too. Almost no reading. The briefing was skippable and the actual game was a top-down diagram you could learn by failing at it, which mattered enormously in a market where the English on screen was a second obstacle after the puzzle itself.

~ the dossier ~

~ the trick ~

Each commando did one job and could not do any other. The Green Beret moved bodies and dug holes. The Sniper had three bullets and no way to solve a problem that needed four. You did not build a squad, you were handed one, and the design problem was working out the single order those six men had to move in.

That is a much harder thing to write than it looks, and it is why Commandos 2: Men of Courage in 2001 is the one people still install. It added building interiors and a camera you could rotate, which sounds incremental and was not: a level became a structure you could see through rather than a floor plan. Praetorians in 2003 took the same vision cone logic into Roman battles and worked. Imperial Glory in 2005 tried it at the scale of Napoleonic Europe and did not.

~ the drift ~

Commandos 3 in 2003 was smaller than the game before it. Then in 2006 the studio made Commandos: Strike Force, a first person shooter, which is the exact opposite of the idea the name was famous for. It reviewed badly and it deserved to. A series built on never being seen had been converted into one about aiming down sights.

After that Pyro drifted toward licensed work and contract jobs. A console project called Cops was canceled in late 2008 and took about thirty jobs with it. Planet 51 in 2009 was a movie tie-in for an animated film the same holding company had produced, which tells you where the studio's center of gravity had moved. In 2012 what remained merged with Play Wireless and became Pyro Mobile.

~ the actual end ~

Pyro Mobile went quiet through 2016 and 2017. The Facebook page stopped in January 2017 and the last tweet is from that May, which is how the death of a studio looks when nobody bothers to announce it. It had taken close to a million euros in Spanish public grants to develop a next generation Commandos due by December 2016. The game never shipped.

In the summer of 2017 both founders were arrested in a police operation investigating a large alleged fraud against public aid and subsidies. The company stopped operating in the second half of that year. In July 2018 Kalypso Media bought the rights to the whole catalog, Commandos and Praetorians among them, and started reissuing games that a Madrid studio had made twenty years earlier for a country with no games industry to make them for.

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