Zyrinx

~ the obit ~

The box said Sega. That is how nearly everyone who ever played Sub-Terrania met Zyrinx, which is to say they did not meet it at all, and it is the normal condition of a contract developer. A small Danish team working for a Japanese platform holder out of an office in Boston was never a name anybody bought a game for. Least of all where I was, which was primary school in Turkey, several years before it occurred to me that games were made by companies at all.

Zyrinx came out of the Amiga demoscene. In December 1991 the groups Crionics and The Silents released Hardwired at The Party in Aars, with music by Jesper Kyd, and took second place in the Amiga demo competition. Crionics broke up afterward and The Silents followed. Its Swedish members became Digital Illusions, which is DICE today. Its Danish members became Zyrinx, in Copenhagen, in 1992.

They chose the Mega Drive for the way it handled sprites. Sega would not give them a development kit, so they built one out of Amigas and wrote the game on that. Sega published Sub-Terrania in North America in April 1994 and in Europe the month after, by which point Sega's money had moved the team to Boston. Red Zone followed in November 1994 for Time Warner Interactive, doing full-screen rotation and real-time zoom on hardware that was not designed for either.

The last one was Scorcher, under contract to Scavenger Inc. It shipped on PC in December 1996 and on the Saturn in March 1997, by which time the company paying for it had run out of money.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a demo group knows ~

The demoscene trained people to do a specific thing: get more out of a fixed machine than the manufacturer thought was in it, with nobody paying for the time. That skill transfers directly to console work, where the hardware is frozen for five years and the only variable left is how well you understand it. Zyrinx is one of the cleanest cases of that transfer, and Jesper Kyd is the clearest individual example, having gone from demo soundtracks to scoring games for three decades and counting.

Sub-Terrania itself is a rotate-and-thrust game with real inertia and gravity, and it reviewed well almost everywhere: ninety or better from GamePro, Mean Machines Sega, Edge, MegaTech. Tony Van, who produced it at Sega of America, has put it among the worst-selling games the company ever released. Both of those are true at once. A hard game shipped late in a console's life tends to collect exactly that pair of outcomes.

~ the paperwork that killed it ~

GT Interactive's own SEC filings carry the whole story, because Scavenger sued GT and the litigation sat in GT's annual reports for years. The contract is dated 28 November 1995 and covers four PC games: Amok, Scorcher, Into the Shadows and Mudkicker. GT paid two million dollars of royalty advances in January 1996, half a million per game. Scavenger delivered Amok and Scorcher and never delivered the other two. GT stopped paying, and on 18 September 1997 Scavenger filed in the New York Supreme Court.

The fourth cause of action in that complaint is where the date comes from. Scavenger asked for a hundred million dollars in consequential damages on the allegation that GT's failure to pay the further advances had forced it out of business, and valued itself at that figure as of January 1997. That is the publisher putting its own time of death in a pleading. It won on the first cause of action. Judgment was entered in March 2000 for two point four million, being the one point nine million claimed plus interest, and the Appellate Division affirmed that June. GT paid about two point six million in January 2001. The hundred-million claim was thrown out on reargument on 8 September 2000. Scavenger was never declared bankrupt. It simply ran out of money, and Zyrinx had no other customer.

~ the saturn game that was not called hardcore ~

Scorcher spent its development under the name Vertigo. Scavenger put it on PC in December 1996. Sega took the Saturn version, March 1997 in North America and May in Europe, and Acclaim handled Japan that August. Reviews landed around seven out of ten and nobody has thought about it since.

There is a persistent story that Zyrinx made a 32X game called Hardcore. Hardcore belonged to Digital Illusions and Psygnosis. It was cancelled in 1994 and finally came out in 2019, renamed Ultracore. The confusion is understandable given that Digital Illusions was the Swedish half of the same demo group. Zyrinx's real unreleased work was a Batman Forever game it lost when Acclaim took the license and an X-Men title that died along with the 32X itself. There was also a five-minute 3D technology demo, never a game, which Sega used in a 32X promotional video.

~ what the people did next ~

The team regrouped in 1998 under the name Reto-Moto, and that September the name IO Interactive appeared on a Danish company. The register shows what that actually was: an entity incorporated in November 1990 as ASX nr. 14.811 ApS, renamed Mermaid Invest ApS in 1991, and renamed again to IO Interactive ApS on 16 September 1998, with a new board including David Guldbrandsen and Janos Flosser. Three of IO Interactive's seven founders came out of Zyrinx. Nordisk Film held half the company and the founders the other half, until Eidos bought it in 2004.

Zyrinx's own shell outlived all of it quietly. The Danish register has a ZYRINX ApS at CVR 70445212, which started life in December 1982 as a company called Kompagni 14 and took the Zyrinx name on 1 October 1993, care of David Guldbrandsen in Birkerød. It was wound up by owners' declaration, solvent, on 4 February 2003, six years after the studio had stopped working and five after everyone in it had moved on.

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