SnapDragon Games

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

~ the obit ~

Five employees in 2009. That is the whole company, and it is the number the German tabloid BILD used when it ran a short profile of the studio in September that year, which is also the only piece of consumer press SnapDragon Games ever seems to have attracted outside the trades.

Christian von Duisburg founded it in Hamburg on 13 October 2005 and was its chief executive for the whole four years. Two titles carry the studio's name: Karate Phants: Gloves of Glory in 2009, and The Kore Gang in 2010. Both are console games made by a small team for a publisher who carried the money and therefore carried the decisions, which was the standard arrangement for a German developer this size in that decade.

I cannot put myself anywhere near this one. A five-person studio in Hamburg making a Wii platformer was a story that ran in the German trade press and more or less stopped there, and that was never something I read.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the kore gang ~

The Kore Gang is the game that outlived the arrangement that built it. It was announced in May 2008 as a Wii jump-and-run, with Sweden's Zoink Games involved alongside SnapDragon, and CDV Software attached as publisher.

Then CDV's results went bad and it dropped the title, along with Psychotoxic, leaving the studios behind both to look for somebody else. The Kore Gang eventually came out on 9 August 2010 through a publisher called Pixonauts. The studio it was meant to keep in business had run out before it shipped.

~ what happened upstream ~

The dates on the other side of this are precise, which makes the gap on SnapDragon's side more obvious. A Frankfurt court put CDV Software Entertainment under preliminary administration on 7 April 2010 and opened full proceedings on 1 June for insolvency and over-indebtedness together. By 19 July, when Eurogamer's German edition ran a Kore Gang preview, SnapDragon's own insolvency filing was already in it. The game shipped three weeks after that.

Wikipedia gives the fate in a single word, insolvency, with a year and no month. No German trade source dates the filing more precisely and the Hamburg commercial register entry is not reachable from here, so the studio ends up with a founding date down to the day and an ending that is a year wide.

~ the domain ~

snapdragongames.com now answers with a HugeDomains for-sale page, the standard lander with a price on it. Not a squatter running an unrelated site, not a frozen last version of the studio's own pages. Just a listing, which is what a small developer's domain becomes once nobody renews it and a broker picks it up.

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