Wizarbox

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

~ the obit ~

Four people who worked together at Visiware registered a company in Sèvres, southwest of Paris, on 31 January 2003. Fabien Bihour ran it, David Vesa Cohen was the technical side, François Francken managed projects and David Gallardo was the fourth name on the filing. The French register records it as a jeune entreprise innovante, which is a tax status, and at some point it employed fifty five people.

What it actually did for a living was move other studios' games onto other companies' consoles: Arx Fatalis to the Xbox, Panzer Elite Action to the PlayStation 2, Risen and Venetica to the Xbox 360, then Risen 2 to both of the big consoles in 2012. Around that core sat a decade of licensed work, from Scrabble editions through Winnie the Pooh to a long run of Nintendo DS titles. It is a respectable business and a brutal one, because the margin lives entirely inside somebody else's schedule.

A few times its own name went on the cover. So Blonde in 2008 was an original adventure game, Captain Morgane and R.A.W. followed in 2012, and in 2010 it finished Gray Matter, which Jane Jensen had been trying to get made since 2003. None of them sold the way a studio needs a self-published game to sell.

I have almost certainly played something Wizarbox worked on without ever reading the name. The gap between me and this studio was never a matter of geography. Port houses do not get the cover or the trailer, and the studios whose games they rescue are the ones readers remember afterwards. A name like this becomes visible at the point where it turns up in a court bulletin.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ gray matter ~

Gray Matter was announced in 2003 as Project Jane-J and was supposed to ship in 2004. It went on hold, got revived by the German publisher Anaconda in 2006, and in 2008 the work was taken away from the Hungarian studio Tonuzaba and handed to Wizarbox. DTP Entertainment published it, Germany first on 12 November 2010, France on 2 December, North America in February 2011.

The reception is the part that matters to the company's survival. Metacritic settled at 72 on the PC version. The A.V. Club called it the best traditional adventure game in a decade and gave it an A minus; Edge gave it five out of ten and the Telegraph gave it four. Jeuxvideo.com liked it at 17 out of 20, Official Xbox Magazine UK did not at 4 out of 10. A game with that spread does not fail, and it does not pay for a fifty-person studio either.

~ nineteen march ~

BODACC has the whole sequence, and it is tighter than anything the press printed. The Tribunal de commerce de Nanterre opened a redressement judiciaire on 12 December 2012 and backdated the cessation des paiements to 31 October 2012, so the company had been unable to pay its debts for six weeks before the court heard about it. On 19 March 2013 the receivership was converted into a liquidation judiciaire, with activity authorized only as far as 27 March.

On that same 27 March the court approved a plan de cession, the sale of what was left. Interaction Games, the serious-games arm of Groupe Interaction, took part of the team. The creditors' schedule went to the registry on 17 December 2013, and the case was closed on 17 March 2015 for insufficiency of assets, meaning there was nothing left for anybody to claim.

Note which of those dates the secondary sources picked. English Wikipedia files the company as defunct in 2012 and calls the December event a bankruptcy. The French article's infobox says 23 March 2013 while its own timeline says the 19th. The court said the 19th.

~ two kilobytes of grey box ~

wizarbox.com answers today with about two kilobytes of grey box announcing "Interaction Games acquiert Wizarbox" over a copyright line reading 2019. The text explains who Interaction Games is and asks you to make contact about serious games for energy and industry. Partway through that French paragraph an online casino link has been spliced into the prose, by somebody who found an unpatched site with nobody minding it.

So the tombstone is real and nobody has touched it since 2019 at the latest, except whoever came in to sell casino traffic through it. The court closed the file on 17 March 2015, and the page has outlasted that by eleven years without anybody updating the news on it.

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