Infogrames | Code Like It's 198x

In September 1986 British Spectrum owners opening CRASH found a page written by an armadillo. It was the first issue of Le Tatou, Infogrames’ newsletter, and it explained who was behind the strange French games starting to appear in the shops. “Infogrames was created in June 1983 and at that time there was only two people, Bruno Bonnel and Christophe Sapet, two computers and a telephone!” Three years later the Lyon company employed more than 90 people and was opening an office in Britain, and it gave British players the credit: “Your software is so good that in France we had to produce software that was better.”

What Infogrames sent across the Channel was unlike most of what British houses were making: police investigations, adaptations of French comic strips and puzzle games about blowing a bubble through a haunted house. Magazines often did not know what to make of them. Two decades later the same company owned Ocean, Gremlin and the Atari name.

Fast facts

Founded: June 1983 in Lyon, by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet.
Emblem: an armadillo, le tatou.
In Britain: from 1986, through Infogrames UK, run by David Crosweller.
Published in France: its own games and those of two other French developers, ERE Informatique and Cobra-Soft.
Best-known game of the period: Alone in the Dark (PC, 1992), designed by Frédérick Raynal.
Bought: Ocean (1996), Philips Media’s French business (1997), Gremlin, Beam Software and Accolade (1999), most of GT Interactive (1999) and Hasbro Interactive (2001).
Renamed: its businesses traded as Atari from 2003; the parent company became Atari SA in 2009.

Two people and a telephone

Computer & Video Games profiled the company in October 1987. Infogrames had begun by writing for the French home market, and in France that meant Thomson computers, “still the most popular machine in France, with at least one in every school, similar to the BBC in the UK”. Within two years it had 30 staff. By 1987 it employed about 100 people, 30 of them programmers, and it published everything made by two other French developers, ERE Informatique and Cobra-Soft. It wrote as much as it could in C so that a game could move between the Amstrad, the Commodore 64, the MSX, the Spectrum and the new 16-bit machines, and dropped into machine code for anything that needed speed, such as the shooting gallery Prohibition. It had chosen the armadillo, the magazine was told, because “it’s an animal that’s been around for a long time and has adapted itself to cope with each new change in the environment”.

The company was frank about why it wanted Britain. “The English market leads the French one,” Catherine of Infogrames told C&VG, “so we needed immediate feedback in order to be able to satisfy the needs of the British market, and be ahead of the game back in France.”

A detective game in Saint-Étienne

CRASH reviewed L’Affaire Vera Cruz in its adventure column in November 1986, at £8.95, credited to Gilles Blancon. It was not an adventure in the British sense. You play a newly appointed detective sergeant in the crime squad at Saint-Étienne. On 8 August 1986 a caretaker reports a body in a block of flats, apparently a suicide with a shotgun. The rest of the game is police work: taking statements, ordering an autopsy, comparing one suspect’s alibi with another’s evidence, and working the codes of a police computer network to do it. Arrest the wrong person, the reviewer warned, and you are “a . . . Clouseau type of incompetent”.

He found it hard to get into and complained about the blinding white screen and the “boring black and white” photofits of the suspects, but rated it 85% overall and called it “a much more promising release than Infogrames’ last”, the adventure Mandragore. The same page reviewed a £1.99 text adventure and U.S. Gold’s Return to Oz. The Sydney Affair, another investigation, followed.

Comic strips in a box

Infogrames went after French comics. Its most ambitious adaptation was Passengers on the Wind, from François Bourgeon’s strip Les Passagers du vent, set among slave ships and African kingdoms on the eve of the French Revolution. The Games Machine explained in December 1987 that Bourgeon was “a master of the comic strip in France” and had only agreed to the conversion because the programmers tried “to capture the true spirit of his world of make believe”. You clicked on the characters in a large picture to piece their dialogue together and move the story on. “The graphics in all versions are very nice indeed,” it concluded, “it’s a shame the same cannot be said of the gameplay”, and it gave the game 43%.

ACE reviewed the sequel, Passengers on the Wind II, in January 1988, and struggled with the same question: “Somewhere between a story and a jigsaw puzzle (and a long way from anything you’d normally call a game)”. It was “very much the comic strip equivalent of Cinemaware”, as good-looking as Defender of the Crown but sharing its “gameplay shortcomings”. ACE still rated the Atari ST version 678, the Amstrad 665 and the Commodore 64 659.

The comic licences kept coming. When Amiga Action announced The Toyottes, “a race of purple rats who are the only survivors of a nuclear war”, in April 1990, it noted that “in the past, Infogrames have based some brilliant games around French cartoons”, naming North and South and Stir Crazy.

Reviewed as French

British magazines often reached for nationality to explain an Infogrames game. Reviewing the ST adventure Sidewalk in its first issue, in October 1987, ACE admired its caricatures but found its internal logic inconsistent: “the game seems to lack the logic the French are reputed to have so much of – buy one ticket in one place, two more in another and you’ll still have only two tickets afterwards.” CRASH’s Vera Cruz reviewer made jokes about “interminably boring French lessons at school”.

The strangeness also sold. Bubble Ghost, made by ERE Informatique and published by Infogrames, asked you to steer a fragile soap bubble through a haunted house by blowing on it with a small ghost. ACE called it “spectral fun” and rated the Atari ST version 814 in January 1988. According to Retro Gamer, Infogrames had rescued ERE with an injection of capital in 1986 and later bought the whole company, which went on to make Captain Blood under its Exxos label.

Alone in the Dark

The game that made Infogrames’ name abroad came from a programmer it had hired because of a free Breakout clone. Edge told the story in 2005. Frédérick Raynal joined a studio of about 20 people and was set to work on ports; in 1989 he converted the 3D ST game Alpha Waves to the PC, and began to imagine characters moving through scenes that looked like film. Bonnell proposed a cheap game in which the player lit three matches to glimpse a dark room. Raynal turned the idea into a horror game set in a 1920s manor, with polygon characters moving across hand-coloured backgrounds seen from fixed camera angles. The monsters came from H. P. Lovecraft, through a Call of Cthulhu licence that Bonnell had bought from Chaosium, though the game was not released under the Cthulhu name.

Alone in the Dark came out for the PC in November 1992. Reviewing its sequel a year later, Edge called the original “one of last year’s visual jaw-droppers” and said it had won “a slew of important industry awards”. Its influence showed within a few years. In June 1996 Edge wrote that Alone in the Dark, “with its atmospheric, haunted house setting, was virtually a blueprint for Capcom’s recent adventure title”, Resident Evil.

Raynal’s account of what happened next is his own. He told Edge that an Infogrames manager asked for the credit “Game created by Frédérick Raynal” to be replaced with “Infogrames”, that the company ordered a sequel on the same engine, and that the game “sold two-and-a-half million copies” without the recognition he felt he was owed. Edge reported in 1996 that Raynal had left Infogrames in 1993, “disillusioned with the company’s reluctance to employ new ideas”, and that some of his team had followed him to his new company, Adeline Software, which made Little Big Adventure. The tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds entries follow the techniques Alone in the Dark passed on.

Buying the British

In 1996 Infogrames bought Ocean Software, for “a reputed $100 million” according to The History of Ocean Software; the Ocean entry tells that side of the deal. In April 1997 Bonnell explained to Edge how the brands would divide: “The Infogrames brand, in Europe at least, means family entertainment and multimedia products and we intend to keep it that way. The Ocean brand will be the action-based label, directed primarily at teenagers and arcade fans.” He had also bid for Philips Media, he said, mainly for its distribution network.

The buying went on. In 1999 Infogrames paid £23 million for Gremlin, which had itself bought DMA Design, the makers of Grand Theft Auto; Take-Two bought DMA from Infogrames before the year was out. It bought the Australian studio Beam Software, which became Infogrames Melbourne House, and Accolade in America. At the end of 1999, PC Zone reported, it paid $135 million for 70% of the American publisher GT Interactive, which kept “their more adult identity” for games such as Duke Nukem Forever while Infogrames kept “a wholesome family image”. In December 2000 it agreed to buy Hasbro Interactive for $100 million, $5 million of it in cash and the rest in new Infogrames shares. Edge listed what came with it: MicroProse and Civilization, a 15-year licence for Hasbro’s board games such as Monopoly, and the Atari games Hasbro had bought, Centipede and Pong among them.

Becoming Atari

The Hasbro deal also brought Infogrames the Atari name. In February 2002 Edge visited its offices in Hammersmith to ask what the company planned to do with it. In 2003 it answered by dropping its own name. “It’s official — Infogrames has dropped its moniker in favour of ‘Atari’,” Edge reported from that year’s E3, adding that Bonnell believed “the Atari brand is synonymous with innovation”. The American trade press was blunter: Electronic Gaming Monthly said Infogrames had changed its name “to the more famous and less French ‘Atari’”. Studios that Infogrames had bought changed names again; Infogrames Melbourne House, for instance, became Atari Melbourne House.

Later history is recorded in public reference works rather than the period press. According to those accounts, Bonnell left in April 2007, 24 years after founding the company, and in 2009 the parent company itself, Infogrames Entertainment SA, became Atari SA. Its American subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2013. Wade Rosen, who had become chairman in 2020, took over as chief executive in 2021. In April 2024 Atari revived Infogrames as a second publishing label for games outside its Atari brands, starting with the purchase of Totally Reliable Delivery Service from tinyBuild.

Sources

CRASH issue 32, September 1986, p. 101: Le Tatou issue 1, Infogrames’ own page (founding in June 1983 by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet; more than 90 staff; the armadillo; David Crosweller and Infogrames UK; “Your software is so good…”).
Computer & Video Games issue 72, October 1987: company profile (the Thomson; 30 staff within two years, about 100 by 1987, 30 programmers; ERE Informatique and Cobra-Soft; writing in C, Prohibition in machine code; the armadillo; Catherine on the English market; Crosweller).
CRASH issue 34, November 1986, pp. 96–97: adventure column, L’Affaire Vera Cruz (Infogrames, £8.95, Gilles Blancon; Saint-Étienne; 85% overall; Mandragore) alongside Moron and Return to Oz.
The Games Machine issue 2, December 1987: Passengers on the Wind review (Bourgeon; 43%).
ACE issue 4, January 1988, p. 64: Passengers on the Wind II review (ACE ratings 678, 665 and 659); p. 85: Bubble Ghost (ERE Informatique/Infogrames; ACE rating 814).
ACE issue 1, October 1987: Sidewalk review.
Amiga Action issue 7, April 1990, news: The Toyottes announced.
Retro Gamer Collection volume 2 (2008), Captain Blood feature: Infogrames’ investment in ERE Informatique in 1986 and later purchase of the company; Captain Blood.
“The Making of… Alone in the Dark”, Edge issue 150, June 2005, pp. 105–107: Raynal’s hiring, Alpha Waves, Bonnell’s matches idea, the Call of Cthulhu licence, the November 1992 release; Raynal’s account of the credit, the sequel and the sales, and Adeline Software.
Edge issue 3, December 1993, p. 24: Alone in the Dark 2 preview (the first game’s awards).
Edge issue 31, April 1996, profile of Adeline Software: Raynal leaving Infogrames in 1993.
Edge issue 33, June 1996, feature on Frédérick Raynal: Alone in the Dark as “virtually a blueprint” for Resident Evil.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013): the 1996 purchase, as set out in the Ocean Software entry.
Edge issue 44, April 1997: interview with Bruno Bonnell (the Infogrames and Ocean brands; Philips Media).
Edge issue 71, May 1999: “Infogrames gobbles up Gremlin” (£23 million), as set out in the Gremlin and DMA Design entries.
The purchase of Beam Software in 1999 and its renaming, as set out in the Beam Software entry.
Computer Gaming World issue 180, July 1999, p. 52, news: “Infogrames Buys Accolade” (the purchase of Accolade announced in April 1999).
PC Zone issue 85, January 2000, news: $135 million for 70% of GT Interactive.
Edge issue 93, January 2001, news: “Monopoly money for Hasbro” ($100 million; $5 million cash and $95 million in shares; MicroProse, the Hasbro licences and the Atari games).
Edge issue 107, February 2002: “What Atari did next”, Infogrames’ plans for the Atari name.
Edge issue 125, July 2003, E3 report: Infogrames drops its name for Atari.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 169, August 2003, news: “the more famous and less French ‘Atari’”.
Wikipedia, “Atari SA” (web, secondary): the purchases of Philips Media (1997) and Accolade (1999); the 2003 reorganisation under the Atari name, Bonnell’s departure in April 2007, the renaming of the parent company in July 2009, the bankruptcy filing of January 2013, Wade Rosen, and the Infogrames label relaunched in April 2024 with Totally Reliable Delivery Service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SA