Silmarils | Code Like It's 198x

In most role-playing games of the early 1990s the player’s party did as it was told. In Silmarils’ Ishar it argued back. A stranger met on the road could join only if the rest of the party voted to let them in, characters formed friendships, and a player who murdered an unwanted companion might find the victim’s friend turning on the killer. Silmarils, a small studio east of Paris run by the brothers Louis-Marie and André Rocques, made three Ishar games, and then Robinson’s Requiem, a survival game in which the hero had to treat his own wounds and, if a leg turned gangrenous, cut it off.

Fast facts

Registered: 16 October 1987, at Lognes, east of Paris.
Run by: Louis-Marie Rocques and André Rocques, credited as authors on most of its games.
Known for: Crystals of Arborea (1991 in Britain), Storm Master (1992), the Ishar trilogy (1992–1994), Transarctica (1993), Robinson’s Requiem (1994).
Platforms: Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Falcon, Amiga, PC.
In Britain: marketed by Daze Marketing of London.
Closed: 2003.

Beginnings

Louis-Marie Rocques had made a name before Silmarils existed. He created L’Aigle d’Or (1984), a graphic adventure for the Oric published by Loriciels, which Retro Gamer later called the best example of its kind on the machine. Silmarils itself was registered in October 1987. Its first game to reach British readers was Manhattan Dealers, a beat-’em-up that The Games Machine gave away as a competition prize in November 1988. On the Amstrad CPC it released Windsurf Willy, Targhan, Xyphoes Fantasy and Bunny Bricks.

Ishar

The road to Ishar began with Crystals of Arborea, an earlier role-playing game set in the same land, reviewed in Britain in 1991. Amiga Format was blunt about it in 1992: “Remember a game called Crystals of Arborea? Probably not; it wasn’t very good.” Ishar: Legend of the Fortress (1992) was its sequel. Arborea has become Kendoria, and an evil ruler named Krogh has built a fortress called Ishar. The player starts alone with a sword and recruits up to four companions on the way.

The party was where Silmarils broke with the American games it was compared to. Amiga Format explained that a new recruit joined “only after a vote from the rest of your team”, that each character had “their own psychology, so friendships may form between them”, and that a player who wanted rid of a companion had “two options: dismissal or murder”. Kill a popular one and “the dead one’s friend … may very well attack the murderer”. Amiga Power gave Ishar 78%. When the American magazine Amiga World reviewed Ishar II: Messengers of Doom in December 1993, it described the party as “a democracy” in which “the other members have a vote”, and called it, as far as the reviewer could tell, “the first RPG in which characters have personal likes and dislikes”.

American reviewers placed Ishar beside SSI’s Eye of the Beholder. Henning Vahlenkamp, reviewing the AGA version for Amazing Computing in April 1994, wrote that it was “a role-playing game (RPG) by Silmarils, a French developer, in a similar vein as Eye of the Beholder (EOB). While Ishar may not break any new ground in the idea department, its implementation helps it stand out in a crowded RPG field.” Unusually, most of it took place outdoors. Vahlenkamp admired “lush and detailed” graphics and the way “objects in the distance have a wonderful hazy, unfocused quality which disappears as you move toward them”, the box claiming over 100,000 views, though “things do seem a bit static”. The game had no character generation: “you simply start out with one predefined character”.

Ishar 2 (1993) let players bring their party over from the first game. Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity followed in 1994. Amiga Computing, previewing it that April, said Silmarils had risen to “a position of remarkably high stature” in role-playing over two years, “much of the success … down to the Ishar titles”.

Silmarils also supported Atari’s Falcon, which few publishers did. Louis-Marie Rocques told ST Format in 1993 that converting the PC Ishar to the Falcon had taken a month, and that the Falcon Ishar 2 would use the machine’s true-colour mode and its DSP chip.

Storm Master and Transarctica

Not everything was a dungeon. Storm Master (1992) was a god game with a Gothic feel, mixing arcade and strategy sections with “religious wind ceremony” scenes, in which the aim was to dominate a land by sending out armies; Amiga Format gave it 90%. Transarctica (1993) was stranger. In its back-story, an attempt to reverse the greenhouse effect by causing a nuclear winter has worked far too well, and Europe lies under ice. The player runs an armoured, coal-fired train across a map of Europe, the Far East and North Africa, adding carriages and fighting the Viking Union, which controls the world’s transport, with cannons, infantry and even mammoths, while searching for a way to bring back the sun. Louis-Marie Rocques, the project leader, told Amiga Power that the game’s old Russian style came from the Trans-Siberian express: “the huge coal-fired trains themselves represent a strong symbolism, when placed against the ice-locked world”.

Robinson’s Requiem

Robinson’s Requiem (1994) took Silmarils’ interest in simulation further than any of its role-playing games. The hero is stranded on a prison planet with no hit points or health bar. Instead a monitoring system called Sesame reports his blood pressure and pulse rate. The merest sip of the planet’s water could prove fatal, rain without a hat gave him a cold, and ST Format listed the treatments the game expected: bandages and disinfectant for cuts, stitches for large wounds, a splint for a fracture, quinine for malaria. Gangrene “requires amputation. Sorry.” The reviewer explained: “your leg goes gangrenous, you’re the one who has to lop it off.” Amiga Format noted that the manual included a survival handbook explaining “how to amputate your own gangrenous limbs”.

Not everyone was won over. Amiga Power found the graphics “slow, badly-drawn and unimaginative” and much of the game a matter of “charts and electrocardiograms”. ST Format thought the slow pace “annoying” but concluded that it was “not only a rare game but a rewarding one too”. Deus (1996), which PC Zone called “a sequel of sorts to Robinson’s Requiem”, was by its account “one part combat, two parts exploration, three parts survival”.

Later years

Silmarils moved to the PC as the Amiga and ST markets faded. Edge listed it in 1995 among French developers as an “adventure game specialist responsible for titles such as Robinson’s Requiem”, with offices in Nancy as well as the Paris area. Asghan: The Dragon Slayer (1999), a third-person action game, struck PC Zone as “a distinctly average affair”. The company’s head office closed in April 2003; according to French Wikipedia, it had gone into judicial liquidation. Its games are still sold: GOG offers an Ishar Compilation, with Crystals of Arborea and the three Ishar games, published by Dotemu.

Sources

Retro Gamer issue 29, 2006, p. 47: L’Aigle d’Or (Loriciels, 1984), created by Louis-Marie Rocques.
The Games Machine issue 12, November 1988, p. 4: Silmarils and Manhattan Dealers.
Retro Gamer: The Videogames Hardware Handbook (2010), p. 133: Silmarils’ four CPC 6128 releases.
Amiga Power issue 11, March 1992, p. 32: Storm Master (Silmarils, Daze Marketing; André and Louis-Marie Rocques).
Amiga Format issue 37, August 1992, p. 86: Ishar review (Crystals of Arborea; Kendoria and Krogh; the party vote, friendships, dismissal or murder).
Amiga Power issue 21, January 1993, p. 28: Transarctica preview (authors; Louis-Marie Rocques as project leader; the Trans-Siberian inspiration; the map and the Viking Union). Issue 23, March 1993, p. 34: Transarctica review.
ST Format issue 49, August 1993, p. 28: Rocques on converting Ishar to the Falcon and Ishar 2’s use of true colour and the DSP.
Amiga Power issue 28, August 1993, p. 65: Ishar 2 review (credits; carrying the party over; Ishar 78% in Amiga Power issue 15).
Amiga World, December 1993, p. 90: Ishar II review (the party as a democracy).
Amiga Format Christmas 1993 issue, p. 131: Storm Master (90% in Amiga Format issue 33). Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992, p. 48: Storm Master as a god game.
CU Amiga, May 1991, cover: Crystals of Arborea among the month’s reviews.
Henning Vahlenkamp, “Ishar: Legend of the Fortress”, Amazing Computing vol. 9 no. 4, April 1994, p. 91.
Amiga Computing issue 72, April 1994, pp. 128–129: Ishar 3 preview.
ST Format issue 64, November 1994, pp. 54–55: Robinson’s Requiem review and first-aid panel.
Amiga Format issue 65, November 1994, p. 66: Robinson’s Requiem review (Sesame; the survival handbook; Daze).
Amiga Power issue 43, November 1994, p. 54: Robinson’s Requiem review.
Edge issue 20, May 1995, p. 56: Silmarils among French developers.
PC Zone issue 47, February 1997, p. 87: Deus. Issue 75, April 1999, p. 97: Asghan: The Dragon Slayer (Silmarils/Grolier Interactive).
Répertoire Sirene (INSEE), SILMARILS, SIREN 342602984, via recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr (web, secondary): created 16 October 1987 at Lognes; head office closed 28 April 2003.
Wikipedia (French), “Silmarils (entreprise)” (web, secondary): judicial liquidation in 2003. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silmarils_(entreprise)
GOG, “Ishar Compilation” (web, secondary): developer Silmarils, publisher Dotemu. https://www.gog.com/en/game/ishar_compilation