Shiny Entertainment

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

~ the eulogy ~

David Perry was a Northern Irish programmer who had spent the early nineties at Virgin Games making licensed platformers, including the Mega Drive version of Aladdin, which is still the one people mean when they say Aladdin. In October 1993 he left and set up Shiny Entertainment in Laguna Beach with a team small enough to fit around one table.

The first thing they made was Earthworm Jim, which came out in 1994 and looked like nothing else on the Mega Drive. Doug TenNapel's animation ran at a frame rate cartridges were not supposed to manage and the design was built around a physical joke rather than a genre. A sequel followed in 1995, and then Interplay bought the studio and Shiny stopped being independent after twenty-four months of existence.

What came next was a decade of good games that did not sell and one bad game that sold enormously. MDK in 1997 invented the sniper zoom in a third-person shooter and is still cited for it. Messiah and Sacrifice both came out in 2000, and Sacrifice in particular is one of those titles that reviewers loved and shops could not move. Then the Matrix contract arrived and rewrote what the studio was for.

~ the dossier ~

~ the worm ~

Earthworm Jim reached Turkey, and Shiny did not. The Mega Drive had a real presence here through the nineties alongside the Famicom clones, and Jim was one of the cartridges that circulated, mostly without anyone knowing or caring who had built it. MDK arrived a few years later the way most PC games arrived, on a disc from a shop that sold discs, and studio credits were the part of a game you skipped to get to the install.

The worm itself had a second life that had nothing to do with games. There was an animated series in 1995 and 1996, and Jim turned into one of those mid-nineties characters who ended up on merchandise in countries that had never sold the cartridge. Interplay kept the rights after the studio changed hands, which is why there were later Earthworm Jim games that Shiny had nothing to do with.

~ the matrix money ~

Infogrames, trading as Atari, bought Shiny from Interplay in April 2002 for forty-seven million dollars. Interplay was in serious financial trouble by then and the sale was less a strategic move than a way to keep the lights on. What Atari was really buying was the contract Shiny had signed to make the official Matrix game.

Enter the Matrix shipped in May 2003, the same month as The Matrix Reloaded, with an hour of film footage the Wachowskis shot specifically for it. It sold a million copies in eighteen days and finished at roughly five million. It was also, by consensus at the time and since, not good. Reviewers described a game that was visibly built to a film release date rather than to a finish, and the bugs were the kind you notice in the first ten minutes. Atari's quarterly results that year were carried by it anyway.

The Matrix: Path of Neo followed in 2005 and did not repeat the trick. By then the films had stopped being an event and the studio had spent four years on somebody else's property.

~ the last owner ~

Perry had already left Atari by the time Foundation 9 Entertainment bought Shiny in October 2006. Terms were not disclosed, which given the forty-seven million Atari had paid four years earlier tells you enough. Foundation 9 was a roll-up, assembling development studios the way a holding company assembles anything, and it already owned The Collective in Newport Beach, about twenty minutes up the road.

On 9 October 2007 it announced the two were merging. The combined studio operated without a public name for five months and was introduced as Double Helix Games in March 2008. Double Helix made Silent Hill: Homecoming and a Front Mission game, was bought by Amazon in 2014, and became part of Amazon Game Studios. The Earthworm Jim rights went a different direction entirely, staying with Interplay and eventually reaching auction. The studio that drew him has been gone since a Tuesday in October 2007.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »