Synetic

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

~ the last words ~

Five people left Ascaron in 1996 and set up in Gütersloh under the name Synetic, with "The Funfactory" attached to the end of it. Have a N.I.C.E. Day! shipped in 1997 and its sequel a year later, sold in North America as Breakneck. Three more people joined after that and the studio stopped growing there. Eight employees was the whole operation from then on.

Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing arrived in 2000, then Mercedes-Benz World Racing in 2003 on Windows plus three consoles. World Racing 2 followed two years later on a shorter platform list. Both of those shipped under a car maker's license, which set the pattern for everything the company did afterwards.

From 2006 the work was a television license. Alarm für Cobra 11 is the RTL series about two highway police officers, and Synetic made six games out of it between 2006 and 2012. A mobile game, Sunny Hillride, came in 2013. On 31 March 2014 the studio stopped making games and said it was moving to industrial applications only. The two companies carrying the name were dissolved on 5 and 6 May, per the register entries at the Amtsgericht Gütersloh.

~ a release calendar for eight people ~

The arithmetic is the interesting part. Between 2006 and 2012 Synetic put out a licensed driving game at roughly annual intervals, on PC and on a console for most of them, with eight people on the payroll. The English Wikipedia article says the games were consistently among Germany's best sellers, and attaches no sales figure to the claim; none of the usual sources carry one either.

The license is also where the distance sits. Cobra 11 has been running on RTL since 1996 and the games were built for people who already knew the two leads, so the only thing a buyer outside Germany was paying for was the driving. The later titles went out internationally with the series name taken off the box, under the name Crash Time.

~ the publisher ~

The Cobra 11 games went out first through Playtainment and later through dtp entertainment, the Hamburg publisher that filed for insolvency on 27 April 2012. The sixth and last of them shipped that same year. Nobody has published a sequence of cause for what happened next, and there is not much of a sequence to publish: after 2012 the list carries one small mobile title and then stops.

~ what moved to vitrios ~

The projects and the patents went to Vitrios GmbH in Düsseldorf, a separate company with its own register number. The German article says Vitrios has not existed since June 2023, citing that register.

Thirteen games in eighteen years, never more than eight people on the payroll. The exit was voluntary, which is rare in this file, and the register entry it produced looks exactly like everybody else's.

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