Spellbound Entertainment

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~ the eulogy ~

On 22 March 2012 Spellbound Entertainment filed for insolvency at the Amtsgericht Offenburg, after an investment round broke down in its final stages. Dr. Ulrich Nehrig was appointed preliminary insolvency trustee and ran a first audit of the books, which found enough advanced work in the building to cover the salaries of all sixty-five employees while the proceedings ran. Business was to continue as normal, and the trade press reported it that way.

Armin Gessert had started the studio in 1994 in Offenburg, a town in Baden sitting across the Rhine from Strasbourg. The first release was Perry Rhodan: Operation Eastside in 1995, out of a German pulp science fiction series almost nobody outside Germany has read. Airline Tycoon arrived in 1998 and Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive in 2001, and the second of those is what gave the company a reputation outside its own language.

The March filing did not kill the company outright. What finished it was the shape of the rescue: on 13 July 2012 the studio reopened under a new name, Black Forest Games, with forty of the original sixty-five staff and fresh funding behind it, and Spellbound stopped existing the same day. Andreas Speer, the new chief executive, told Eurogamer the plan was to build "an even greater company that is tuned to today's market opportunities" out of the core of the old one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Gessert was a known name in German games well before Spellbound. His first title was Street Gang for Rainbow Arts in 1984, and in 1987 he was one of the developers of The Great Giana Sisters on the Commodore 64, alongside Manfred Trenz and Chris Hülsbeck. That one is remembered for how closely it followed Super Mario Bros. and how fast it came off the shelves afterward. He worked at Rainbow Arts and Blue Byte before going out on his own in his early thirties.

Desperados is the one that traveled. Commandos had set the template for real-time tactics a few years earlier and that genre was everywhere in the Turkish PC world around 2000, so a cowboy version of the same idea arrived with its explanation already written. The studio stayed invisible behind it. Infogrames was the name on the box and Desperados was the name on the disc, while Offenburg was never a word anybody read off the back of a case.

~ the unraveling ~

Gessert died of a heart attack on 8 November 2009. He was forty-six, and the company he founded was fifteen years old and deep into the Gothic contract.

That contract was Arcania: Gothic 4, which JoWooD Entertainment handed to Spellbound after the Gothic series left Piranha Bytes. Taking over a loved German role-playing series is a hard job under any conditions and the 2010 reception was not kind. The expansion, Fall of Setarrif, shipped in 2011 under a different publisher, because JoWooD had gone into insolvency itself by then and Nordic Games had picked up what was left.

By 2011 Spellbound was a studio without a steady publisher, looking for money. It found an investor and lost it at the last moment, which is the line that recurs in the reporting of what happened the following March.

~ the inheritance ~

Twenty-five people did not make the move in July. The forty who did kept the offices and most of the management, and the name on the door was the only part that had to go. spellbound.de answers today with a hosting company's default page in German, reporting that no website is currently available for this domain.

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