Yullaby

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

~ the obituary ~

WiiWare was a storefront I never opened. The downloadable-console-game moment of 2008 to 2011 happened on hardware I had never bought, during the years I was moving out of university and into work. Yullaby's one visible product lived on that storefront, which tells you how narrow a window this studio was working in.

Five people left Gameloft in 2006 and started their own company: David Nicolier, Etienne Périn, Romain Gauthier, Kévin Delbrayelle, Victor Bernot. The French register gives SARL Yullaby, SIREN 493 662 480, with activity beginning on 18 December 2006. Wikipedia puts the company in Paris. The registry does not. The registered seat is 2 route de Donnemarie, in the hamlet of Leudon at Maison-Rouge, a village of about a thousand people in Seine-et-Marne, filed first at the Provins commercial court and later at Melun.

They started the way almost every small studio of that decade started, by doing other people's work. Horse Life in 2007 and Horse Life 2 in 2008, both for Neko Entertainment. Then they tried to turn the contract money into something of their own, and that is where it came apart.

~ the case file ~

~ magnetis ~

Magnetis came out in 2009 for WiiWare and for PC, a puzzle game built around magnets pulling blocks together, and it is the title the studio is remembered under if it is remembered at all. Fire Panic shipped the same year. A racing game called Astro GP was announced and cancelled.

Wikipedia's summary of what went wrong is unusually blunt for an encyclopedia: they tried funding and creating original games at what was the beginning of indie development, and did not meet success. That is 2009, before the storefronts and the funding models that made small-team originals survivable existed in any reliable form. They were about three years early with no publisher behind them.

~ the twentieth of june ~

The French court bulletin has the ending, and it does not agree with the article. BODACC carries an entry for the company reading cessation of activity with dissolution, with an effective date of 20 June 2011. It was published in parution 177 of 2011, which went out on 13 September. English Wikipedia gives 2 September 2011 and cites societe.com for it. That date sits between the decision and the publication, which is where a registry filing date normally falls, but no source I can reach says what it marks.

So the studio stopped on 20 June and the paperwork caught up over the following three months. The last annual accounts on file cover the year ending 31 March 2010, which means the final filed year was already more than a year old when they wound it up. The radiation, the removal of the company from the register altogether, was published on 17 December 2015.

~ what the tools became ~

Yullaby built its own engine and its own tools rather than licensing someone else's, which for a five-person studio in 2007 was either stubbornness or necessity. That engine was GameStart 3D, and GameStart 3D is an earlier version of Harfang 3D, which is still a product you can go and get today.

The address did not fare as well. www.yullaby.com answers at nine kilobytes with a Japanese blog about health foods and Korean restaurants in Akasaka, an SEO site sitting on a recycled domain with no connection to anything the five of them ever made.

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