Silver Style Entertainment

» see silverstyle.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 26 June 2014 the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg blocked enforcement against a small Berlin game studio so that whatever assets were left would still be there when the insolvency proceedings opened. The studio was Silver Style Studios. The lawyer appointed to sit on the remains was Christian Otto. Gamesmarkt ran the notice a week later, on 3 July, under a headline that needed no elaboration: Silver Style Studios meldet Insolvenz an.

The name was twenty-one years old by then. Carsten Strehse started Silver Style Entertainment in Berlin in 1993, back when the German PC market was large enough and particular enough to support studios that sold almost entirely at home. They made role-playing games and adventure games for people who read German games magazines and bought boxes in German shops, and for a long stretch that was a workable business.

What is unusual about the ending is that there are two of them. The company that died in 2014 was not the company Strehse founded. It was a second company, formed in 2010 out of the wreck of the first one's parent, carrying the same name forward with a different word at the end.

~ the case file ~

~ what berlin was making ~

The catalog is a tour of a specific European taste. Soldiers of Anarchy in 2002, a squad tactics game set after a plague. Gorasul: The Legacy of the Dragon before that. The Fall: Last Days of Gaia in 2004, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that got further out of Germany than anything else they made. Later there was Simon the Sorcerer 4: Chaos Happens, a sequel to a series that had started at a different studio in a different country.

None of this reached me. The German PC scene of the early 2000s ran on its own magazines and its own retail chains, and in Turkey you met it only if you went looking, usually through a pirated copy with no manual. The Dark Eye, the pen-and-paper system that Silver Style eventually built games for, has been a household name in Germany since 1984 and means nothing here at all.

~ the name without the founder ~

The Games Company bought the studio in 2006 and turned it into an in-house developer, which is the arrangement that looks like security until the parent is the thing that fails. The Games Company went insolvent in 2010, the valuable rights were sold to Kalypso Media, and the development team reconstituted itself as Silver Style Studios. Strehse was not part of it. Gamesmarkt described the result plainly as a new foundation with a familiar name.

~ the work for hire years ~

The second company spent four years doing what small studios do when they no longer own anything: retail and digital work for whoever was paying. One of those jobs was a set of game adaptations of Die wilden Kerle, a German children's football franchise. The Fall had shipped under the same name less than a decade before.

The other direction was browser games. Das Schwarze Auge: Herokon Online put The Dark Eye in a browser window and aimed it at a free-to-play audience, which was where a lot of German studios were looking at the time. The insolvency filing came in June 2014.

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