Infogrames
French games in British magazines
A Lyon publisher whose games reached the British press from 1986 — police procedurals and odd puzzle games among the arcade conversions, and evidence that the 8-bit era was never a national story.
Infogrames was founded in Lyon in 1983, and by 1986 its games were being reviewed in CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amstrad Action alongside British and American releases. The interesting thing is not that they crossed the Channel. It is how different they are from what was crossing it in the other direction.
Fast facts
- Seen in the British press: from 1986 to 1994, in CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amstrad Action and Amiga Power, at £8.95–£9.95 on 8-bit.
- Published: L’Affaire Vera Cruz, The Sydney Affair, Inheritance, Prohibition, Bubble Ghost, The Amazing Shrinking Man, Amazon Adventure, Tournament of Death, and later Sim City Deluxe on the Amiga.
- Kept its French titles: CRASH reviewed L’Affaire Vera Cruz under that name in November 1986, at £8.95, credited to Gilles Blancon.
A different idea of what a game is
L’Affaire Vera Cruz is a police investigation. You are handed a body, a case file and a set of forensic details, and the game is the paperwork: interviews, records, cross-referencing, drawing a conclusion you can defend. There is no arcade element at all.
It sat in the same CRASH issue as Street Hawk, Nightmare Rally and Return to Oz. The contrast is the whole point. The dominant British and American mode was the arcade conversion and the reflex game; a strong French line ran instead through investigation, atmosphere and slow puzzle games — the tradition that produced Another World and Alone in the Dark later on, and it was already visible in 1986.
Bubble Ghost is the other side of the same sensibility: you blow a fragile bubble through a haunted house without popping it. Nobody in Manchester was making that.
Why it crossed at all
The barrier to a French game reaching Ludlow was never technical. An Amstrad CPC in Lyon ran identical code, and the CPC was far more successful in France than in Britain — which meant a French publisher had a home market big enough to fund games, and a strong reason to look for more.
What had to happen was commercial and linguistic: someone to translate it, box it and get it to British shops. L’Affaire Vera Cruz kept its French name through all of that, which is a small thing and a telling one. Nobody thought a British buyer would be put off.
Why it mattered
Infogrames belongs to the non-Anglophone eighties, and is a corrective to a history written from British and American magazines alone. The same machines were in bedrooms across Europe, and different places used them differently — the games that came out of France, Spain, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet bloc are not lesser versions of the British ones but answers to different questions.
The company itself outlived nearly everyone in this Vault, eventually buying Atari’s name and using it. That is a much longer story, and it starts with a police procedural at £8.95.
Before it bought anybody: the comic-strip years
Infogrames reaches most British readers as the company that acquired Ocean in 1996 and Gremlin in 1999 — the end of two entries in this Vault. The period press knew it as something else entirely, and the difference is the interesting part.
Through the late eighties, Infogrames was the French house that adapted French comics. Amiga Action, April 1990:
In the past, Infogrames have based some brilliant games around French cartoons. Next up to join the ranks of North and South and Stir Crazy, you can expect to meet the Toyottes — a race of purple rats who are the only survivors of a nuclear war.
Passengers on the Wind (1987) is the clearest case, and ACE’s review is a British magazine visibly reaching for a category that does not exist yet:
Based on a classic French comic strip… Somewhere between a story and a jigsaw puzzle (and a long way from anything you’d normally call a game)… It’s very much the comic strip equivalent of Cinemaware. It’s easily the equal of (say) Defender of the Crown visually, but Cinemaware’s gameplay shortcomings are also in evidence.
ACE rated it 665 on the ST and 659 on the C64 — respectable numbers attached to a review that spends most of its length arguing about whether the thing is a game.
Reviewed as French
The other thing the period record preserves is that British magazines treated Infogrames’ nationality as an explanation. ACE, reviewing Sidewalk on the ST in October 1987, on finding the game’s 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.
The company was also working licensing seams the British houses were not. Championship Water-Skiing (1987) is built around a real waterskiing champion and real championships — a personality licence of the Martech kind, applied to a sport no British publisher had thought worth buying.
That is the company that eventually owned Ocean, Gremlin and the Atari name. A publisher of bande dessinée adaptations, reviewed in Britain as an eccentric import, ended up holding the biggest British publisher of the eighties and the most famous American brand in the industry.