Trecision

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~ the last words ~

GamesIndustry.biz published the death notice on 9 July 2003 at 1:58 in the afternoon. Rob Fahey's first line calls Trecision Italy's oldest development studio and says it has gone into liquidation after twelve years in business. Underneath that phrasing, the money had stopped arriving. The company had been working out of Rapallo, on the coast east of Genoa, since 1991, when Pietro Montelatici set it up with Fabrizio Lagorio and Edoardo Gervino.

What it made for most of that time was adventure games. Profezia came out in 1991 for the Amiga and DOS, and the rest of the nineties went the same way: Alien Virus in 1995, then Ark of Time in 1997, then Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy in 1998. Nightlong is the one anybody remembers, a cyberpunk point-and-click that had started life as an Alien Virus sequel before Trecision rebuilt it around a different story. That rewrite caused a fight with ICE, the English publisher of the first two games, who believed they already owned the thing being made. Trecision took Nightlong to Team17 instead.

An Italian developer was not visible from Turkey in 1998. Games arrived on a disc with a publisher's logo across the front of the box, and the people who actually built them were small type on the back, if they were anywhere. Nightlong went out across Europe under the Team17 name, so even the Trecision game you were most likely to have played carried someone else's badge.

~ the record ~

~ the year it got big ~

In March 2000 Trecision bought two of its domestic rivals, Pixelstorm in Naples and MotherBrain in Milan, and became the largest game developer in the country. Italy's industry was small enough that this took two acquisitions. Pixelstorm had already been making football games under the Trecision label, Puma Street Soccer in 1999 and Chris Kamara's Street Soccer for the PlayStation in 2000, and that is the direction the whole company drifted in.

The adventure games thinned out. The Watchmaker shipped for PC in 2001 and did not do what Nightlong had done. By 2003 the catalog looks like a studio taking any work going: a mobile title called Elf Tales, a licensed game of the Italian Big Brother.

~ the french problem ~

Trecision had two games in development for Cryo Interactive when Cryo declared bankruptcy in Paris in 2002. A mid-sized developer in one country was carrying its production costs against contracts signed in another, and when the publisher stopped existing the contracts did too.

Montelatici was blunt about what happened next. Cryo's closure hit them heavily, he told GamesIndustry.biz, and then the shareholders decided not to sustain Trecision anymore, so there was no choice but to close. He thanked the staff in the same paragraph. It is the shortest possible description of how a studio dies: somebody upstream fails, and the people with the checkbook do the arithmetic and decline.

~ the game that never shipped ~

The thing being built when the lights went out was a football game with Dino Dini, who had made Kick Off and Player Manager and was, to a certain generation of European players, the name on the only football games that mattered. Montelatici called it the best game the company ever had in development. The hope at liquidation was that someone would buy the assets, hire the team and finish it. "Both the project and the team deserve this," he said. Nobody did.

The earlier football title, Football Generation, was further along and had MiDaS lined up to publish it, so Trecision asked the court for permission to complete and deliver that one under supervision. It came out for PC in 2003. A PlayStation 2 version of it surfaced in 2006. Trecision had been wound up for three years by then.

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