Sproing Interactive

» see sproing.at as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Harald Riegler and Gerhard Seiler founded Sproing Interactive Media in Vienna in 2001 and owned it until the day it closed, which in this industry is close to unheard of. Austria is not a country with a games industry so much as a country with a few studios, and for most of the 2000s Sproing was the largest of them. At its height it employed around a hundred people.

The business model was work for hire, in German, for German-speaking publishers. Sproing made Moorhuhn games, built on the chicken-shooting mascot that saturated office PCs in Germany and Austria around 2000, and it made Meine Tierarztpraxis, a veterinary clinic series for children that sold abroad as Paws & Claws. The catalog runs past fifty titles and takes in a Wii horror game for Deep Silver called Cursed Mountain as well as the beta of Ubisoft's Silent Hunter Online.

The one that earned a prize was Panzer Tactics DS, a turn-based wargame on the Nintendo DS published in 2008 by 10tacle Studios, which won the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis for best German console game. 10tacle itself filed for insolvency that same summer, an occupational hazard when your revenue arrives entirely through other companies' licensing budgets.

~ the record ~

~ fifty titles and a quiz show ~

Schlag den Raab was a German television format in which members of the public competed against the host Stefan Raab across a long evening of unrelated games. Sproing shipped the second game in the series in 2011 and the third in 2012, and by the time the third was announced the earlier two had sold more than 250,000 copies between them across platforms. That is the studio's commercial high point and a clean illustration of what it was: a competent team of a hundred people making a good version of somebody else's television show for a market of ninety million German speakers.

Nothing on that catalog reached Turkey in any form. These games were built for an audience that shared a language and a Saturday night schedule, which is a kind of distance that has nothing to do with how far away Vienna is. The licensed-German-product layer of European gaming was large and stayed profitable for a decade, and almost nobody outside it could see that it existed.

~ the sanierung ~

Sproing filed for insolvency in November 2016 with liabilities of roughly 2.8 million euros. The specific filing was a Sanierungsverfahren, the Austrian restructuring procedure, which is designed to keep a company trading while it pays creditors down rather than liquidating it on the spot. Riegler was careful about the wording at the time and told the press this was a formal restructuring process rather than a collapse, and that a smaller Sproing could continue.

Two of the five internal teams were let go immediately. The trigger, which the trade press reported without ever naming it, was the cancellation of one large project the studio had been building under license. "This step is very sad, and we're terribly sorry for those affected, but it doesn't jeopardise the studio per se," Riegler said, and added that Sproing was now focusing on the future as a smaller team. Three smaller games still shipped in 2017 under the Sproing name. The company was finished before 2018 regardless, the usual outcome for a restructuring that begins by removing most of the people who do the work.

~ purple lamp ~

In 2018 Harald Riegler started Purple Lamp Studios in Vienna, staffed substantially from the wreck. Its first release was SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated in 2020, a remake of a 2003 licensed platformer, which sold well enough that the studio got another SpongeBob game three years later. The pattern held exactly: an Austrian team working a foreign license, with somebody else's character on the box.

Sproing's domain outlived the company and was taken over by a gambling affiliate, which now serves casino copy under a brand built from the studio's name. Sixteen years of credits are on MobyGames and nowhere else.

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