VectorCell

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

~ the obit ~

Paul Cuisset is one of the few names the French industry built its reputation on in the early 1990s. Future Wars and Les Voyageurs du Temps came out of Delphine Software under that name, and then in 1992 came Flashback, a cinematic platformer with rotoscoped animation that sold in numbers French studios had not seen before and still gets ported to whatever hardware is current. VectorCell was the company Cuisset was running two decades later, registered on 24 August 2005 and eventually working out of a building called Le Femto in Villebon-sur-Yvette, south of Paris, co-owned with Lexis Numérique.

Its register entry describes the business as design, production, consulting, publishing and training in video games and interactive applications on any medium, which reads like a small studio keeping every door open. In practice it shipped three things in eight years. Mister Slime came out on the Nintendo DS in 2008 under the Lexis Numérique label, published abroad by SouthPeak. Amy, a survival horror game about escorting a child through an infected city, arrived on PlayStation 3 and Xbox Live Arcade in 2012 and was received badly. A game called Jesus Christ Super-Star was announced for iOS and the Zeebo and never appeared.

Then came the third one, which was Flashback again, remade twenty-one years after the original.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ remaking your own 1992 ~

The remake shipped in 2013 and did not work, commercially or critically. English Wikipedia's account of the studio's end is blunt about the causal chain: the titles were unsuccessful, so the company went bankrupt. Whatever the remake was supposed to do, which was presumably to convert the affection people still have for Flashback into a working studio, it did the opposite.

There is a particular cruelty in the arithmetic. A designer's most famous work usually keeps them employed for decades. Here it was the one thing finally handed back, and handling it cost the studio.

~ what the court record says ~

The Tribunal de commerce d'Évry opened a judicial liquidation on 18 November 2013 and appointed Me Souchon Alain-François of Évry as liquidator, with creditors given two months to file claims. The English-language article carries the same date with no citation behind it, so the register is the thing that actually fixes it.

The procedure ran another four years. On 9 November 2017 the court closed it for insufficiency of assets. One oddity worth recording: the national business register still lists VECTORCELL with an administrative state of active and no closure date at all, nine years after the liquidation opened. A dead company can stay technically open in a government database for a decade, and this one has.

~ the credits nobody reads ~

Cuisset kept working. Subject 13 came out in 2015 and a Flashback sequel in 2023, so the designer has now outlasted the firm by more than ten years, which is how careers in this industry usually run and no comfort at all to the staff who were not the owner.

Everybody knows the game. Hardly anybody knows either of the companies, because a studio's name is the part of a game that stops at the credits. The name people carry around is Flashback, on both the 1992 original and the 2013 remake, and Delphine Software on one end and VectorCell on the other were never what anyone thought they were buying. The second of them was wound up in Évry without most of the first game's audience ever learning it had been there.

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