Titus Interactive

» see titus-interactive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This name arrived backwards for me, the way it did for most people outside France. First came the joke, some worst games ever list on the english speaking internet in the mid 2000s with a screenshot of Superman flying through a ring in green fog. The company that made it was a footnote in the joke. Only later does it turn out that the footnote had been publishing games for twenty years and at one point owned Fallout.

Eric and Hervé Caen founded it in 1985 as Titus France SA, out at Lagny-sur-Marne east of Paris. The catalog through the late eighties and early nineties was solid European home computer work. Crazy Cars came first, then The Blues Brothers and Prehistorik in 1991, and the company got itself a mascot in the form of a fox in a red shirt with a platformer of his own. None of it was fashionable and most of it sold. By 2002 the group was turning over seventy three million euros.

The trouble started when Titus decided to become an owner instead of a publisher. It began buying into Interplay in late 1999 and had 72.5 percent of it by August 2001. On the way through it bought Interplay's holding in Virgin Interactive on 16 April 2001, which made Virgin a wholly owned French subsidiary. Virgin was renamed Avalon Interactive on 1 July 2003, which is how one of the best known names in British publishing ended up quietly retired by a company in Seine-et-Marne.

Interplay was not a healthy thing to own. Its accounts came across into the parent, which had bought them with money it did not have. By June 2004 Titus was in redressement judiciaire, the French version of protected receivership, with until 7 February 2005 to fix itself.

~ the record ~

~ the superman problem ~

Superman: The New Superman Adventures came out on the Nintendo 64 in 1999 and has been on every list of the worst games ever made since. The player flies a low polygon Superman through floating rings against a wall of green fog, on a timer, over a Metropolis rendered as flat blocks. The fog was there because the machine could not draw the city.

The failure was not only technical. Warner's licensing terms are widely reported to have restricted what Superman could do in the game, which meant a Superman with no one to fight, and the ring flying was what remained after the character had been stripped of the reasons anyone likes him. Titus shipped it anyway, into a market where a licensed superhero game sold on the box. It is the only Titus product most people can name, which is a hard way to be remembered after twenty years of shipping games.

~ the day it died ~

The court did not wait for February. The tribunal de commerce de Meaux ended the grace period early and pronounced judicial liquidation in the first days of January 2005, with the trade press confirming it on the fifth. English sources often print 9 January, which does not match reporting that was already published four days earlier. GameSpot carried a debt figure of thirty three million euros for Titus itself, while French coverage put the group's total liabilities above a hundred million.

Around thirty remaining employees were laid off. The French subsidiaries went down with the parent and Avalon France closed at once. The British side of Avalon kept trading for most of 2005 before it was dissolved too. Because the filing was in the court where the head office sat, the American subsidiary was untouched, so Interplay outlived the company that had bought it and eventually took ownership of what Titus left behind. The Virgin Interactive back catalog sits there now, under a company that was itself nearly dead, having been acquired by a French publisher best known for a Superman game.

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