STUDIO PROFILE

The journey from Garfield and Pixar tie-ins to A Plague Tale and Flight Simulator

By Jon Bailes

When one door closes, they say, another one opens – and of that, Asobo Studio appears to be proof. The French studio came into being when the doors of another closed in 2002, as Nightmare Creatures developer Kalisto Entertainment declared itself bankrupt. Asobo was the phoenix from the ashes, founded by a dozen ex-Kalisto staff because they wanted to complete the game they’d been working on, an arenabased party game called Super Farm. “When Kalisto collapsed, we were so close to finishing it,” co-founder and CCO David Dedeine recalls. “It was so sad to not see this product go to market, so we were like, ‘We need to finish this thing’.” And they did. From that first closed door, it wasn’t just one that opened, but another and another.

Working in Asobo’s favour when it started was that it had a proprietary engine and a nearcomplete game on its books. Pooling their limited resources, the staff were able to buy the Super Farm IP and the tech they’d developed. “The value of it was very small,” Dedeine says of the latter, “because only we could use it.” What they didn’t have was any expertise in bringing a game to market, or enough cash left over to rent office space. “We were a group of friends that wanted to continue their adventures together,” says Martial Bossard, another co-founder and now executive producer of Flight Simulator. They set up in co-founder (now CEO) Sebastien Wloch’s living room. “His wife was sitting on the couch, watching us, like, ‘What is going on?’” says Bossard, describing how they pushed the furniture aside to make room for PCs. This “temporary” arrangement lasted almost two years.

Super Farm found a publisher, though, in the shape of Ignition Entertainment, and after shipping a finished game the studio was able to attract contract work to keep the lights on. Dedeine describes the situation back then as like being on a boat that’s sinking, looking for any piece of land to steer towards. He could dream at night of the games he really wanted to make, but there was no such luxury during the day. “When you invest in a new product that you create by yourself, there’s no money to be received,” he laments. “So you need to have contracts.”