Zoonami

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

~ the goodbye ~

Zoonami Limited was incorporated on 28 July 2000, with a registered office at 15 Millers Yard on Mill Lane in Cambridge and a trade description that reads "other computer related activities". Martin Hollis set it up after leaving Rare, where he had directed and produced GoldenEye 007, one of the few console games of the nineties that people who did not play games have heard of. He left before Perfect Dark shipped. Other senior people from the same team went to Nottingham and started Free Radical Design; Hollis went to Cambridge and started something about a tenth of the size.

The studio never grew past roughly ten people and it released three things. Eidos announced Zendoku in October 2006, a sudoku game with fighting attached, and it came out on the DS and the PSP in spring 2007. Go! Puzzle arrived as a PlayStation 3 download in February 2009, designed at Zoonami and coded by Cohort Studios. Bonsai Barber, published by Nintendo on WiiWare, reached North America on 30 March 2009 and Europe on 7 August.

Then it stopped. The last accounts filed at Companies House are made up to 31 July 2009, the last annual return to 28 July 2009, and on 7 September 2012 Hollis replied to a journalist on Twitter with a correction: he had closed Zoonami a couple of years back, so he could not claim to be the head of it. The company did not collapse and no administrator was ever appointed. It was shut by the person who owned it, and the paperwork then outlived the decision by five years.

~ the chronicle ~

~ five years of notices ~

The filing history reads like a small argument with the state. A first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off went up on 23 November 2010 and the action was discontinued on 4 December. A second notice came on 15 May 2012, suspended that June. A third on 12 November 2013, suspended that Christmas Eve. On 8 July 2014 the company applied to be struck off voluntarily, and that was suspended too, in September.

The last attempt, a voluntary strike-off notice on 24 March 2015, finally ran its course, and the Final Gazette on 7 July 2015 records the company dissolved via compulsory strike-off. Five first notices in all, four of them stopped by an objection or by a late filing landing. Something interrupted the process four times and the register does not say what. Closing the company took longer than making its three games had.

~ three games ~

GoldenEye was an N64 game, and the N64 was not the console that reached my part of the world. Turkey in those years belonged to the PlayStation, so the console shooter everybody cited arrived as something read about rather than played, and it stayed that way. The director's own studio was even further off: a British company of ten people shipping puzzle games on Nintendo's download store.

Bonsai Barber is the one worth remembering. You play a barber whose customers are plants, trimming them to order with the Wii remote, and Nintendo sold it on WiiWare for 1,000 Wii Points. Japan got it in 2010, a year behind the west and after the studio had effectively stopped working. The shop it was sold in is gone as well, because the Wii Shop Channel closed in 2019, so there is no storefront anywhere that still carries it. A man whose largest credit was GoldenEye 007 spent the end of his studio's life on a barber simulator for houseplants, and it is by a distance the more interesting of the two decisions.

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