Replay Studios

~ the eulogy ~

Marc Moehring and Sascha Jungnickel founded Replay Studios in Hamburg in 2002, one of a cluster of German studios in that decade that were good enough to get signed and never big enough to survive a bad year. Their first game was Crashday, a driving game with stunt and destruction modes, announced in August 2005 and published by Atari in 2006. It did not sell in numbers that mattered to a publisher of Atari's size, and it is the Replay game people still speak well of.

In July 2006 the studio announced its real project: Sabotage, a stealth game set in the Second World War with a female lead, signed with the German publisher dtp Entertainment. The publishing rights moved to Gamecock Media Group in August 2007. In March 2008 the game was renamed Velvet Assassin. In October 2008 Gamecock itself was bought by SouthPeak Games, which inherited the release. Three publishers across one development cycle, and the one that finally shipped it was two removes from the one that signed it.

Velvet Assassin shipped in April 2009 for Windows and Xbox 360, loosely inspired by the story of a real wartime British agent, and the reviews came back mixed, which for a studio with one project in flight is the same as bad. The following month the studio put out Tunnel Rats: 1968, a tie-in to a Uwe Boll Vietnam film, published by Boll's own company, and that one found no defenders.

~ the dossier ~

~ survivor ~

In October 2004 Replay announced a game called Survivor, and the pitch is the part of this studio worth keeping. It was a disaster-survival game, and the disasters were real ones: the sinking of the Titanic, Hurricane Andrew, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the September 11 attacks.

The last of those was three years old at the time of the announcement. The press reaction in 2004 was roughly what you would expect, and the game was never released. The idea has not come back, and nobody appears to want it to. A studio that wanted to make the most uncomfortable game of the decade ended up making a stealth game about a British spy instead.

~ insolvenz ~

On 3 August 2009 the German games press reported that Replay Studios had filed for insolvency. The next day the studio's lead programmer, Claus Praefcke, confirmed that the company was closing. Barely three months separated its last release from the filing.

The arithmetic is unforgiving and completely ordinary. A studio of that size had one project in flight at a time, and Velvet Assassin had been in flight for three years while the contract holding it changed hands twice. When it underperformed there was no back catalog earning anything and no publisher with a reason to fund the next one. Hamburg lost a studio in a week.

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