Silmarils

~ the obit ~

Silmarils localized its games into a long list of languages and went as far as commissioning custom character sets for Polish and Korean. Turkish was never on that list, and neither was I. The distance here is not taste, it is distribution. These were boxed games sold into European retail by European publishers, and that channel did not run to Ankara.

The company was founded in October 1987 by two French brothers, Louis-Marie and André Rocques, who had already been writing and selling games independently since 1983 on machines like the TRS-80 and the Oric. The office was in Lognes, out in Marne-la-Vallée east of Paris, with a second development team up in Nancy. The name came off Tolkien, which tells you roughly what the catalog was going to be about.

Their run through the early nineties is the part that lasted. Crystals of Arborea in 1990 put a real-time 3D landscape in front of a role playing party earlier than most people were trying it. Ishar: Legend of the Fortress followed in 1992. Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom came the next year and Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity the year after that. Alongside those came Transarctica, a strategy game about running a train across a frozen world, and Robinson's Requiem, a survival simulation cruel enough that you could die of an untreated infection in a leg you had amputated yourself.

Amiga and Atari ST were the home machines for all of this, and that is the wall. My first machine came with a dial-up modem attached to it and the 16-bit European boxed-game era was already over by then. Silmarils spent its best years serving a market I arrived too late and too far east to be inside.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what they were good at ~

Ishar's reputation rests on one design decision that almost nobody copied. Your party members had opinions about each other. Recruiting someone put it to a vote, and a character could refuse outright to travel with a person they disliked. A member could also steal from the party and walk off with the money. Most role playing games of that decade treated a party as a spreadsheet with four rows. This one treated it as a group of people who might not want the job.

The other thing was the look. Silmarils art on the Amiga is dense and hand-painted, and it holds up in screenshots in a way that a lot of contemporaneous 3D does not. The games were hard and they were unfriendly, and the French press of the era loved them for exactly that.

~ the long slide ~

After 1994 the shape changes. Deus in 1996 tried to carry the survival idea into a bigger production, and Time Warriors went at 3D fighting. Asghan: The Dragon Slayer in 1998 was an action adventure aimed at the PC accelerator generation. None of it landed the way Ishar had, and the studio was now competing against publishers with budgets that had grown by an order of magnitude while its own had not.

The last thing to come out under the name was Inspector Gadget: Mad Robots Invasion in 2003, a licensed children's game. That is a long way from a party of adventurers arguing over whether to let a thief join. Studios that end this way usually took the license because it was the contract available, not because it was the plan.

~ how it ended ~

The company went into liquidation in 2003. No single public disaster is attached to it, no failed blockbuster and no lawsuit, which is how most sixteen-year-old studios actually die. The revenue got thinner every cycle until the year it did not cover the year.

In February 2004 the two brothers registered a new company called Eversim with a former colleague and went into political strategy simulations, which is a genre with a small and loyal audience and none of the production costs that had been squeezing them. The Ishar games have been resold on digital storefronts since, credited to a company that no longer exists.

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