White Birds Productions

» see white-birds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

White Birds Productions was registered in August 2003 at Joinville-le-Pont, a suburb on the eastern edge of Paris, with a payroll that stayed around twenty people. The founders were Benoît Sokal and Olivier Fontenay, together with Jean-Philippe Messian and Michel Bams. All four came from Microïds, where they had worked on Amerzone and on both of the Syberia games. A credit list like that gets a new studio a publishing deal before it has an office.

What it shipped was adventure games, mostly on PC. Paradise came in 2006 and Sinking Island on 4 October 2007, under a Microïds label. Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals followed on 10 September 2008, adapted from the Enki Bilal comics. There were Nintendo DS titles on the side, two of them built on the Martine children's books. A forensic game called Crime Scene arrived in February 2010, and a short run of iPhone releases closed the catalog.

Michel Bams told the press in January 2011 that the company had gone down in late 2010 after several months of trouble, caused mostly by one large project that was canceled and never paid for. He did not name it. For a twenty-person studio living contract to contract, one unpaid invoice of the right size is the whole story, and the court record that follows is just the paperwork of that sentence.

~ the chronicle ~

~ four people from microids ~

Sokal was a Belgian comics artist before he was a game designer, and the studios he worked in carried that: hand-built worlds, and a puzzle rhythm that assumed you had an afternoon free. Syberia had made that style briefly commercial again in 2002. White Birds was the attempt to own it rather than rent it, which meant the four of them took on the risk their old employer used to carry.

Microïds stayed close anyway. It published Sinking Island, so the company they left was still the company putting their work in shops four years later. The studio also joined PlayAll, a cross-platform middleware project shared with other French developers and university labs, because a mid-size European studio could not afford an engine team of its own.

~ the court in créteil ~

The French commercial register carries the ending in three notices, filed under RCS 449 801 224 at the Créteil court. A receivership notice published on 10 August 2010 fixes the date payments stopped at 22 April 2010 and appoints Gilles Baronnie as administrator with Gilles Pellegrini as creditors' representative. The notice is internally muddled, giving a judgment date of 22 September that falls after its own publication, which is the kind of error the register makes and never corrects.

The clean one is the next notice. On 8 December 2010 the court converted the receivership into a liquidation, left Pellegrini in place as liquidator and ended the administrator's mission, which is the legal moment the company stops being a going concern. Published 24 December 2010. The file then stayed open until 24 May 2017, when it was closed for insufficiency of assets, which means there was not enough left to pay what was owed.

~ the two that were never finished ~

Two announced games never shipped. Aquarica was a Sokal project announced in 2006, and Broadway was a second one that survives only inside a 2007 interview. English Wikipedia gives both of them one word in the release date column, the word a game gets when its studio dies before the ship date.

~ an afternoon game in an online decade ~

These games went past me, and not for the usual reason of distance. My home line had turned into ttnet broadband around 2006, and everything I did with a computer after that had somebody on the far end of it, messenger most of all. A French point-and-click adventure was a boxed single-player object asking for three uninterrupted hours and offering nobody to spend them with.

The genre survived on exactly the audience that did want those three hours, mostly in France and Germany, and that audience was too small to absorb a canceled contract. Sokal's name kept working after the company stopped, and Syberia carried on at Microïds years later. Adventure series tend to go that way, with the brand outliving whichever studio happened to be holding it.

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