Reflexive Entertainment

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

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard the name reflexive was while reading an indie games festival recap in 2005. wik and the fable of souls had taken the seumas mcnally grand prize and the press writeups all linked back to a small studio in lake forest california that nobody in europe had heard of. i clicked through. it turned out reflexive had been around since 1997 and had a whole catalog of bright colorful casual downloads i had never paid attention to. big kahuna reef and ricochet were the brand-name ones, plus a curious turn-based star trek thing called away team. the kind of titles you saw on a friend's parents' windows xp in 2004 with a popcap shortcut next to them.

reflexive was founded in 1997 by four engineers out of virgin interactive entertainment: lars brubaker, ernie ramirez, james c. smith, and ion hardie. the early arc was work-for-hire ports and middleware. in 2001 they shipped star trek away team for activision, a turn-based squad tactics game that flopped commercially but got them a name in the trade press. either way, by 2003 the studio had pivoted entirely to the downloadable casual category, building both the games and the storefront that sold them, called reflexive arcade.

the run from 2003 to 2008 was the casual download era's whole arc. big kahuna reef came out in 2003, an underwater match-three that sold by the hundred thousand on real arcade and shockwave and msn games and the early big fish portal. ricochet lost worlds came out in 2004 with a breakout-clone formula nobody else was still iterating on. wik came out the same year, an art-driven puzzle platformer about a frog-tongue character that won three awards at the 2005 igf. for a few years the brand sat alongside popcap and big fish on every yahoo games promo banner.

~ the dossier ~

~ what amazon actually bought ~

on october 20 2008 amazon acquired reflexive. the press release was vague but the read across the industry was that amazon wanted the reflexive arcade storefront tech, not the games. amazon was about to launch a digital downloads section for pc casual games and reflexive had already shipped the dependency tracking plus the license server and patcher that a casual download portal needed. for about eighteen months amazon ran the reflexive games catalog and the reflexive-branded arcade in parallel with the new amazon digital games store.

the games team mostly worked on amazon casual game ports through that window. anyway, in may 2010 amazon dissolved the games division. the staff who stayed were folded into amazon corporate. some left to start tiny indie studios that mostly did not survive. the reflexive arcade went into a slow wind-down through 2011. the last new release on the storefront was airport mania first to fly in 2008, and by 2010 the catalog was visibly a stale shelf nobody was curating.

~ what it left ~

amazon game studios was founded two years later in 2012 with new world and the lord of the rings online as flagship ambitions. honestly, almost none of the reflexive dna made it across. the casual download portal category amazon had paid for died in the same window as steam took over pc distribution and the iphone app store took over casual. by 2013 the reflexive.com domain was redirecting to amazon and the storefront had quietly stopped processing transactions. the wik installer still works if you have the cd in a drawer somewhere, the dependency on the reflexive arcade license server died with the company.

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