StormRegion

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

~ the eulogy ~

Viharsarok is the Hungarian name for the south-eastern corner of the country, the part around Békés county, and it translates roughly as storm corner. A software company registered in Budapest in December 1996 under the name Media Star took that word, carried it loosely into English, and became Stormregion in 2001. The studio's own site later dated the founding to 1997, which is the year the English Wikipedia still uses. Everything it is remembered for came out after the rename.

S.W.I.N.E. was first, in 2001: a tactical game in which rabbits and pigs fight each other with real artillery, which is a harder premise to sell than it sounds and found its people anyway. Codename: Panzers followed in 2004, a World War II real-time strategy game running on an engine the studio had written itself and called Gepard. A second Panzers came in 2005 and Rush for Berlin in 2006.

In June 2007 the German holding company 10tacle Studios AG bought Stormregion outright. 10tacle had spent four years assembling developers across Europe on money that came substantially from German media funds, and by that summer it owned seven studios in six countries. Ten months later it could not meet payroll.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gepard years ~

Gepard was the point. Most studios of that size licensed somebody else's engine and shipped on top of it, and writing your own with the tools to go with it is why the Panzers games looked more expensive than they were. It also made the source code worth taking. The accusation reached the Hungarian press in December 2005, and in 2006 Stormregion went to court against Mithis Entertainment, another Hungarian developer, alleging that staff who had left for Mithis took the engine's code with them.

Codename: Panzers was a shelf name to me, and a magazine name. World War II strategy was one of the categories that always reached Turkish retail, so I knew the title long before I knew a Budapest studio had made it. A publisher's logo gets the cover and the developer gets small type on the reverse, which is the arrangement that lets a company like this vanish with nobody outside the trade registering it.

~ april 2008 ~

There was no announcement. 10tacle stopped paying salaries in April 2008, and the Budapest staff left. The office closed behind them because there was nobody in it, and the parent's own insolvency followed that year, taking the remainder of the group down with it.

Two games carrying the Stormregion name shipped after the studio had ceased to exist. Codename: Panzers Cold War arrived in 2009, and Mytran Wars for the PSP the same year, both still credited to Stormregion. The official site and the official forum went dark. stormregion.com is a for-sale listing on a domain broker today, priced for whoever wants a word that means storm corner.

~ budapest after 2008 ~

The name went to a broker and the people were easier to place. In 2015 two of the developers who had built S.W.I.N.E., Péter Bajusz and Attila Bánki-Horváth, registered a new studio in Budapest and called it Kite Games.

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