Radon Labs

~ the last words ~

Das Schwarze Auge is the German pen-and-paper role-playing system, published since 1984, and in its home market it occupies roughly the place Dungeons and Dragons occupies everywhere else. Outside German-speaking Europe almost nobody has heard of it.

The team came out of TerraTools in Potsdam, where three of them had spent 1995 to 1998 building Urban Assault for Microsoft. When that shipped they left and set up on their own, and the company was registered as a GmbH in 2000 with a seat in Berlin. The founding year is not settled. The German Wikipedia has the team forming in 1995 and incorporating in 2000, while the Berlin commercial register's first entry is dated August 2004. Those are probably two different events in one continuous history, and Bigpoint's press release in 2010 simply said 1995 and left it there.

What it did for most of its life was contract work, and the list is strange reading now. Educational titles in the Genius series, quiz discs, a Langenscheidt vocabulary trainer, a Moorhuhn game, a tie-in for the television soap Verliebt in Berlin. A near-death after Project Nomads in 2001, when publisher CDV ran into trouble, had pushed the studio off one large game every three years and onto several small ones a year. That is a survival strategy and it worked for most of a decade.

Then on 1 August 2008 it shipped Das Schwarze Auge: Drakensang, a full-size party-based role-playing game of a kind nobody in Germany had made at that scale. It sold over 100,000 copies in Germany, a figure its publisher dtp put out in March 2009, and it won the first Deutscher Computerspielpreis that same month. A sequel, Drakensang: Am Fluss der Zeit, followed on 19 February 2010. By then the studio had over ninety people between Berlin and a second office in Halle, and Bigpoint would shortly describe it as one of the top three development studios in the country.

~ the record ~

~ the license problem ~

Drakensang 3 never got funded. dtp entertainment's chief operating officer Markus Windelen confirmed in May 2010 that the talks had failed, and gave two reasons that are hard to argue with: the game sat in a niche of the role-playing market, and the Dark Eye license was barely known outside Germany, which made international sales difficult. A hundred thousand copies was a strong result inside Germany and a thin base for a budget running into the millions.

Radon Labs had no balance sheet to bridge the gap and no second large customer. The Amtsgericht Charlottenburg ordered insolvency on 12 May 2010, case 36r IN 2091/10. Proceedings opened on 25 May and liquidation was registered on 15 June. The case itself was not formally closed until 1 November 2023, thirteen years after the filing.

~ what Bigpoint actually bought ~

On 1 June 2010 Bigpoint announced it had taken the studio on. More than thirty-five people moved across, both managing directors stayed to run the office, and the Berlin location was folded into an existing Bigpoint subsidiary that had already been renamed Bigpoint Berlin at the end of May. So the people continued and the company did not. The Radon Labs name was never used again.

Bigpoint took the Drakensang name rights without the Dark Eye license underneath them. So Drakensang Online, which opened beta on 8 August 2011 and signed up more than 850,000 accounts in its first month, is set in a world invented to avoid the rules the original game existed to adapt. A browser action game wearing the name of a boxed role-playing game, with the German tabletop system that justified the name left behind in the estate.

~ the engine outlived the studio ~

Radon Labs wrote its own renderer, the Nebula Device, which the studio dated back to 1998. Nebula2 went up on SourceForge under an MIT license. In August 2007 heise reported that Nebula3 would be released as open source under BSD terms, and Drakensang was the first game built on it.

That code is still being committed to. The repository lives at gscept on GitHub, maintained by the game development and computer graphics program at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, and the license file still opens by saying that Nebula is based on Nebula3 by Radon Labs GmbH, Berlin, with a copyright line running 1999 to 2010 followed by the Swedish maintainers from 2011. It targets Vulkan now and builds as modern C++. The studio has been gone for sixteen years and the header on its engine has never been taken off.

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