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Delphine Software

The Paris studio a record label paid for

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Delphine Software was set up in Paris in 1988 as the games arm of Paul de Senneville's Delphine record label, the company behind Richard Clayderman. Paul Cuisset led its games, from Future Wars and its Cinématique adventure system to Flashback; it published Éric Chahi's Another World, turned to 3D with Fade to Black, and found a new audience with Moto Racer. It was sold in 2003 and liquidated in 2004.

Delphine Software was a games studio paid for by easy-listening piano music. Its owner, Paul de Senneville, had made his fortune writing and recording for Richard Clayderman, and when Edge visited in 1995 the company’s gold discs hung on the office walls beside four professional recording studios. From that unlikely base in Paris, a small team led by the programmer Paul Cuisset made the Future Wars and Cruise for a Corpse adventures and Flashback, and published Éric Chahi’s Another World: games the period press reviewed as much for their animation as for their play.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1988, in Paris, as the games arm of the Delphine record label.
  • Owner and chairman: Paul de Senneville (1933–2023), composer and record producer.
  • Games led by: Paul Cuisset, credited on Bio Challenge, Future Wars, Operation Stealth, Cruise for a Corpse and Flashback, later the company’s director.
  • Published: Another World (1991) by Éric Chahi.
  • Partners: Palace Software sold its first games outside France; US Gold its adventures and Flashback; Electronic Arts its games from Shaq Fu to Darkstone.
  • Ended: sold to Doki Denki in 2003 and liquidated in July 2004.

A record label goes into games

The British press met Delphine in the spring of 1989. The One reported that Palace Software had signed a distribution deal with “newly-formed Delphine Games”, owned by “one of France’s leading independent record labels”, and that its millionaire owner was known to the French press as Goldfinger. The magazine passed on a story it introduced with “As the story goes”: de Senneville had wanted a team of programmers who were still at university, so he drove to the gates in his Rolls-Royce, wound down the window “and did a deal on the spot”. Your Commodore called him “France’s answer to Richard Branson” and the software house an “offshoot of an extremely successful music company of the same name”. Amiga Computing put it more plainly: Delphine Software was “the label newly formed by Paris-based Delphine Records”. The name came from de Senneville’s elder daughter, Delphine.

France’s ST Magazine enjoyed the Palace deal. “C’est un palace!” ran its headline in April 1989: the publisher’s offices did look like a palace, it admitted, but the pun was about Palace Software, which would sell Delphine’s games in every country except France.

The first game, Bio Challenge, was written by Paul Cuisset and the artist Denis Mercier. It was a scrolling action game in which a robot fights its way through four levels, with parallax scrolling and, Delphine claimed, more than 160 colours on screen. Reviewing the Atari ST version in March 1989, ST Magazine wrote that “pour un premier soft, Delphine Software frappe très fort”: for a first program, Delphine was hitting very hard. Castle Warrior followed later that year.

Cuisset had come from Ere Informatique. In 1987 he and Patrick Guillemet wrote Phoenix for the Atari ST, which Infogrames brought to Britain; The Games Machine described him as an analyst-programmer, born in Saigon, who spent “every waking moment on computer games”.

Cinématique

Delphine made its name with adventure games that needed no typing. Future Wars, due on the Amiga and ST at the end of October 1989 at £24.99, put a window cleaner in the middle of an alien plot against Earth’s history. The One reported that its Cinématique system had been devised by Paul Cuisset “who has spent the last three years” working on it, and that Delphine claimed to be the first to build a complete adventure “controlled with arcade simplicity”. Every action came from a menu and a mouse click. Computer and Video Games gave it 79 per cent, praising the graphics and sound but finding the system’s “come a little closer” replies and frequent deaths irritating. The game’s lead artist was Éric Chahi.

Operation Stealth (1990) used the same system for a spy story: CIA agent John Glames goes after a stolen stealth fighter in the South American country of Santa Paragua. The One gave the Amiga version 85 per cent in September 1990, and Interplay published it in America with a real licence as James Bond: The Stealth Affair. Cruise for a Corpse (1991) was a murder mystery on a millionaire’s pleasure cruise, with the player as a police inspector questioning the guests; Amiga Power compared it less to Monkey Island than to Infocom’s detective game Deadline. It was late, and Delphine’s new general manager, Thierry Brialle, explained why to The One: the team had changed the graphics routines halfway through, because Cuisset “got so excited when he first saw Broderbund’s Prince of Persia”. The new routine scaled the characters as they walked towards or away from the player. US Gold sold it in Britain at £27.99.

Another World and Flashback

The polygons that scaled Cuisset’s characters were taken much further by his former artist. Chahi left the Future Wars team to work alone, and Delphine published the result, Another World, in November 1991. Delphine’s own staff were careful about the credit. “Another World was developed by Eric Chahi independently from Delphine,” Philippe Chastel told Edge in 1997, “so one can’t say that the cinematic genre started with Another World or Cruise for a Corpse.”

Flashback was Delphine’s own. It began as a commission for a Godfather game from US Gold’s Geoff Brown, which Cuisset moved into the future; the Flashback entry tells how. Edge called it the work of “a team of nine” that “redefined the perceived limits of graphics on 16bit systems with its spectacular character animation”. It was also Delphine’s first console game: the team made it for the Mega Drive alongside the Amiga, because Cuisset “had been promised that the console market could bring millions of sales”. Chahi, who had worked on Another World for Delphine as a freelance, set up Amazing Studio in 1992, and members of the Flashback team joined him.

Delphine’s reach grew in the same years. A group of Infogrames developers led by Frédérick Raynal, the designer of Alone in the Dark, left to form Adeline Software. One of them wrote to Edge in 1994 that they had formed Adeline “as part of Delphine”, and Edge later described Delphine as Adeline’s publisher in France when Little Big Adventure came out. Delphine also developed the fighting game Shaq Fu (1994) for Electronic Arts.

Into 3D

Flashback’s sequel was announced as Crossfire and released in September 1995 as Fade to Black, with Conrad Hart in a real-time 3D world and movement recorded with optical motion capture instead of traced from video. The success of Flashback, the team said later, was what let them afford the capture system. Edge gave the PC version nine out of ten and called it “one of the most enjoyable PC games ever created”, apart from “an absurdly complicated control system”. Computer Gaming World agreed about the controls, calling them “one of the most anti-intuitive control schemes I’ve ever seen”. A PlayStation version followed in 1996 with simpler controls, and the French comic artist Moebius drew the box art for the American PC release.

Moto Racer

By 1997 Delphine had 23 staff, and its next series came about by accident. The team was building Dragon Blade, a 3D role-playing game, when Cuisset, testing its collision detection, set some cubes moving over an undulating landscape. “We thought they looked like motorbikes,” Thierry Gaerthner told Edge. The result was Moto Racer (1997), an arcade motorbike racer for Windows 95 and 3D cards, published by Electronic Arts. Edge gave it eight out of ten and called it “an exhilarating white-knuckle ride”. Moto Racer 2 followed in 1998, and Dragon Blade was released in 1999 as Darkstone, which Edge rated six out of ten. Moto Racer World Tour, for the PlayStation, was published by Infogrames.

The end

Public sources agree on how Delphine ended. It filed for bankruptcy in December 2002 and was bought in February 2003 by the French developer Doki Denki. Its developers were laid off at the end of 2003, and the courts ordered its liquidation in July 2004. A Flashback game for the Game Boy Advance, Flashback Legends, was never released; Retro Gamer reported in 2007 that it had obtained a copy of the unreleased game “by the defunct Delphine Software”.

Paul de Senneville died on 23 June 2023, aged 89. Paul Cuisset carried on with the game he was best known for: he led the 2013 remake of Flashback with members of the original team, and the design of Flashback 2 in 2023.

Sources

  • The One issue 7, April 1989: Palace Software’s distribution deal with “newly-formed Delphine Games”; de Senneville, “Goldfinger” and the Rolls-Royce story; Bio Challenge as the first product.
  • Your Commodore, May 1989, news: “France’s answer to Richard Branson”; the “offshoot of an extremely successful music company of the same name”.
  • Amiga Computing, June 1989, p. 60: Delphine Software “the label newly formed by Paris-based Delphine Records”; Bio Challenge by Paul Cuisset and Denis Mercier; 160 colours.
  • ST Magazine (France) issue 28, March 1989: Bio Challenge review (“pour un premier soft, Delphine Software frappe très fort”). Issue 29, April 1989: “Delphine Software : c’est un palace!”. Issue 31, June 1989: Castle Warrior as Delphine’s next game after Bio Challenge.
  • The Games Machine issue 3, February 1988: Phoenix by Paul Cuisset and Patrick Guillemet for Ere Informatique, published in Britain by Infogrames.
  • The One issue 13, October 1989: Future Wars and the Cinématique system devised by Cuisset; release at the end of October on the Amiga and ST at £24.99.
  • Gordon Houghton, Future Wars review, Computer and Video Games issue 98, January 1990, p. 58: Amiga, £24.99, 79 per cent.
  • Retro Gamer issue 24, 2006, p. 35: “The making of Another World” (Chahi as lead artist on Future Wars).
  • Gary Whitta, Operation Stealth review, The One issue 24, September 1990: Amiga, £24.99, 85 per cent.
  • Classic Gamer Magazine, volume 2 issue 2, July 2004: James Bond: The Stealth Affair, Delphine’s game published by Interplay.
  • Retro Gamer issue 109, December 2012: Operation Stealth, released in the US with the official Bond licence.
  • Amiga Power issue 6, October 1991: Cruise for a Corpse review (US Gold, £27.99; Cuisset, Philippe Chastel and Denis Mercier among its programmers; the inspector, the murdered host and the comparison with Deadline).
  • The One issue 34, July 1991: Thierry Brialle on rewriting Cruise for a Corpse’s graphics after Cuisset saw Prince of Persia.
  • Edge issue 11, August 1994, p. 73: letter from Serge Plagnol (the Alone in the Dark team forming Adeline Software “as part of Delphine”).
  • Edge issue 20, May 1995: survey of European developers (Delphine “set up in the late-’80s by French entrepreneur Paul de Senneville”; Delphine as Adeline’s publisher in France; Chahi’s departure to form Amazing Studio with members of the Flashback team).
  • “Delphine: Crossfire”, Edge issue 21, June 1995, pp. 30–33: founded in 1988; de Senneville, Richard Clayderman, the gold discs and recording studios; Cuisset as director; Flashback’s team of nine; motion capture for Crossfire.
  • Fade to Black review, Edge issue 26, November 1995, pp. 68–69: PC CD-ROM, Electronic Arts, September release, nine out of ten.
  • Fade to Black review, Computer Gaming World issue 137, December 1995, p. 288.
  • Fade to Black PlayStation preview, Computer and Video Games issue 175, June 1996.
  • “Audience with Delphine”, Edge issue 46, June 1997: interview with Philippe Chastel, Thierry Gaerthner, Thierry Perreau and Denis Mercier (23 staff; Chahi’s independence; motion capture paid for by Flashback; Moebius and the American box; the origin of Moto Racer in Dragon Blade).
  • Moto Racer review, Edge issue 45, May 1997: Electronic Arts, £40, eight out of ten.
  • Moto Racer 2 review, Edge issue 68, February 1999: Electronic Arts.
  • Darkstone review, Edge issue 76, October 1999: Electronic Arts, six out of ten.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 201, April 2001: Moto Racer World Tour advertisement (Delphine Software International, Infogrames).
  • Retro Gamer issue 52, 2008, p. 80: Shaq Fu (Electronic Arts, developed by Delphine Software International, 1994). Issue 35, 2007: the unreleased Flashback Legends for the Game Boy Advance.
  • “The making of Flashback”, Edge issue 163, June 2006: Delphine three years old in 1991; Cuisset (called “Delphine’s founder”) and de Senneville (chief executive); the Mega Drive decision.
  • Justin Carter, “Obituary: Delphine Software founder Paul de Senneville died at age 89”, Game Developer, 26 June 2023 (web, secondary): his death on 23 June 2023, his founding of Delphine Software International in 1988 “as an extension of the record company”, Cuisset heading the studio. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/obituary-delphine-software-founder-paul-de-senneville-died-at-age-89
  • Nerces, “Delphine Software : quelques années au firmament du jeu”, Clubic, 15 August 2021 (web, secondary): the name from de Senneville’s elder daughter; bankruptcy in December 2002, Doki Denki in February 2003, liquidation in July 2004. https://www.clubic.com/mag/jeux-video/actualite-380502-les-quelques-annees-de-delphine-software-au-firmament-du-jeu.html
  • Achille Micral, “Delphine Software : grandeur et décadence d’un studio mythique”, Rom Game, March 2026 (web, secondary): the layoffs at the end of 2003, the second bankruptcy filing in March 2004 and the liquidation in July 2004. https://www.rom-game.fr/news/6691-delphine-software-grandeur-decadence.html
  • Wikipedia, “Delphine Records” (web, secondary): the label named after de Senneville’s first daughter, Delphine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_Records

See also

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