The best Speccy game by Infogrames: discussion

[PeteProdge]

Still in the Adventures section of YS #19 and Infogrames - not exactly known for any text adventures because it didn't make any - is mentioned because YS are doing that Compo On (Nearly) Every Page thing.

Infogrames is of course a produit de France, tu vois. I was expecting them to be a big thing on the Amstrad CPC platform as France est le pays de l'Amstrad CPC, but it's not exactly a list much bigger than the one I've made here for the Speccy:

Hostages
The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas
Lee Enfield: Space Ace
Light Corridor, The
Mandragore
Mystical
North & South
Prohibition
Sidewalk
Sidney Affair, The
Sim City
Stir Crazy featuring Bobo
Tintin On The Moon
Vera Cruz
Welltris

Infogrames of course bought Ocean and Imagine in the post-Speccy era for £100m. And they rebranded as the famous gaming name Atari and... well, it's all detailed better than I can say, over on Wikipedia.

Please check the above list is all good, let me know if it isn't, then from next Sunday we can run the poll in which Sim City will win (if I have my way), but could well have a strong showing for North & South.

[Andre Leao]

Some wonderful games: Vera Cruz /Sidney Affair, North & South, Sim City... Not easy to choose one...

[Frankie]

Light Corridor for me. Might be North and South, but I've never played the Spectrum version

[AndyC]

They did a lot more on the CPC, you just need to look in the right places:

https://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?pag ... &exporter=

Not sure how many of those made it to the Spectrum though

[PeteProdge]

They did a lot more on the CPC, you just need to look in the right places:

https://www.cpc-power.com/index.php?pag ... &exporter=

Not sure how many of those made it to the Spectrum though

Interesting, although there are some Loriciels, Cobrah Soft and Magic Bytes games listed in there. Now, Cobrah Soft was owned by Infogrames, that's kind of understandable but I don't see how Loriciels and Magic Bytes have a connection.

Although I have now just learnt that there are Tom And Jerry games for the ZX Spectrum, thanks to Magic Bytes. Wow!

[AndyC]

Interesting, although there are some Loriciels, Cobrah Soft and Magic Bytes games listed in there. Now, Cobrah Soft was owned by Infogrames, that's kind of understandable but I don't see how Loriciels and Magic Bytes have a connection.

Although I have now just learnt that there are Tom And Jerry games for the ZX Spectrum, thanks to Magic Bytes. Wow!

The Loricels one is the somewhat infamous Bumpy/Pop up debacle. A contract was signed with Infogrames to publish versions of Bumpy, only the guys at Loricels had thought it was for conversions to other platforms and were surprised to see Infogrames do a CPC version (or something to that effect).

As for the Magic Bytes ones, I think Infogrames were just acting as a distributor in certain regions.

[Stefan]

Interesting, although there are some Loriciels, Cobrah Soft and Magic Bytes games listed in there. Now, Cobrah Soft was owned by Infogrames, that's kind of understandable but I don't see how Loriciels and Magic Bytes have a connection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumpy_(video_game)

Seems like there was a rerelease for Amstrad after they did the 16 bit version.

[Ralf]

They still exist and some time ago they changed name to Atari but they aren't Atari, my feeling is that they hadn't "moral right" to do it

But they made good games in the past. My favourite would be North&South. Actually I played it more on PC and Amiga than on Spectrum but the Spectrum version is very good too. And very colourful.

If you check it, you'll discover that the Spectrum version was actually made by guys from Spain and not France Just like Hostages, another big game from them:
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/3 ... orth_South
https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2 ... m/Hostages

I wonder if any French guy from Infogrames actually wrote any code for Zx Spectrum or was it below their dignity

[catmeows]

Vera Cruz has French and Belgian authors. I'm not sure which of them was the coder but considering the long english tradition to wrongly recognize Mr. Poirot as French, I would count it.

[worcestersource]

I’m looking forward to voting for this one. My kinda games.

[Matt_B]

They still exist and some time ago they changed name to Atari but they aren't Atari, my feeling is that they hadn't "moral right" to do it

There's a company called Atari, but they're not even Infogrames at this point, as they went bankrupt in 2013, closing down all their studios and selling off the IP. Prior to that, they'd been owned by Hasbro, who bought the brand in a bankruptcy auction from JTS, who picked it up by merging with Jack Tramiel's Atari Corporation, who in turn bought it from the ailing Warner Communications after the video games crash. So yeah, it's been an orphaned brand for nearly 40 years at this point.

They've been through two owners since then, too. The first, Fred Chenais, was mostly interested in using the brand for cryptocurrency, NFTs, casinos and hotels. The latest guy, Wade Rose, seems a lot more interested in games though, and they've put out a few decent ones.

Just to confuse the issue, there was also Atari's arcade division, which was at various points owned by Namco and later Midway Games, before going bankrupt and ending back up at Warner in the 2000s.

[Timmy]

I don't understand, aren't games like Captain Blood not by Infogrames?

[Matt_B]

I don't understand, aren't games like Captain Blood not by Infogrames?

Yes, at least in the Ocean/Imagine sense where you had two labels owned by the same company. Captain Blood was made by ERE Informatique, who got bought out by Infogrames just prior to the game being released and promptly rebranded to Exxos just to confuse everyone further. The only other Spectrum game published under that deal was Purple Saturn Day.