The companies that made gaming what it is today: Ére Informatique and it’s ‘French Touch’

The first in a multi-part series tracing the history of the early pioneering video game companies that brought us to where we are today.

The 1980s were a mad time for games. Growing up as a kid in the UK we had the likes of Matthew Smith and his oddball platformers such as Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. We had entrepreneur turned tycoon Sir Alan Sugar and his Amstrad range of computers, of which I had one. Then we had Sir Clive Sinclair, who was hellbent on inventing the next mode of personal transport with the Sinclair C5, as much as he was interested in computing.

The States gave us genius designers such as David Crane, who, even though I didn’t know it as a young one, was responsible for one of my first favorite games, Pitfall! on the Intellivision – go and play it on the Intellivision Sprint today. Again, later on the Amstrad, I loved the Ghostbusters game, again Crane, but in the UK, the huge early games from the States were less prominent than from European programmers.

At this time, ‘game dev studios’ would be way too grandiose a term for what was happening. Largely, it was bedroom coders, beavering away and sending off their efforts to publishers in the hope of a yes.

After a few years of playing similar platform games or standout titles from companies such as the UK’s Ultimate Play the Game (who eventually became the iconic Rare) such as Knight Lore, and another personal fave Alien8, all of a sudden a shift from across the channel arrived, seemingly out of the blue.

I remember the magazines I read at the time, things like Amstrad Action and Computer Gamer, suddenly all began getting super excited about French games and one company in particular. This is the story of Ére Informatique and the rest of The French Touch.

How to describe those first few French games

This is tough: Beautiful. Weird AF and wilfully obtuse. Occasionally they seemed to have been designed by somebody who had seen a computer game once and decided they could improve it by adding philosophy, eroticism, French comic-book art and a bonkers interface. I mean all of that as a compliment, not a slur

A lot of what eventually became known as the French Touch can be traced back to the early 1980s, when a handful of small companies began turning France’s rapidly growing home-computer scene into an actual games industry.

Infogrames was there. Loriciels was there. Cobra Soft and Coktel Vision would become important names a little later on.

But few companies sum up those wonderfully strange early years quite like Ére Informatique.

It existed for barely half a decade in recognisable form, yet somehow found time to publish Macadam Bumper, Crafton & Xunk (Get Dexter on these shores), Bubble Ghost, Sram and, eventually, the glorious oddity that was Captain Blood. You can see my copy of that last madness below. More on this later.

That’s not a bad list is it for a company that essentially began with one bloke trying to sell some software?

France discovers the microcomputer

Ére Informatique was founded in 1983 by Emmanuel Viau. Until then, computing had largely belonged to businesses, universities and enthusiasts with the money and patience to get involved. The arrival of the relatively affordable micros changed everything.

France had its own Thomson machines, while British computers such as the ZX Spectrum and Oric found enthusiastic audiences. The Commodore 64 was around too, but it would be the arrival of the Amstrad CPC in 1984 that really lit a fire under French home computing.

That particular machine is hugely important to the following story, even though it is not seen as one of the two main British microcomputers of the 80s by most people.

The CPC became huge in France and Spain in a way it never quite managed elsewhere, even the UK, and suddenly there was a sizeable audience looking for games made for the machine that also gave them a computer monitor as part of the deal.

Suddenly, there was a generation of people realizing they could make games themselves.

Emmanuel Viau was typical of that generation. After studying medicine, completing his national service, and training as a programmer, he began writing small games and utilities in his spare time. When French Sinclair importer Direco expressed interest but asked him to provide around 100 copies, Viau left his conventional job and formed Ère Informatique in 1983.

His plan was not simply to sell his own software. Ère would also publish programs submitted by other creators, offering an outlet for talent that might otherwise have remained confined to computer clubs and bedrooms.

Viau could release his own games, but he could also find other people making interesting things and get their work into shops.

The French games industry was full of talented programmers scattered around the country, many of them working alone. There wasn’t a career ladder. There weren’t job adverts asking for somebody with three years’ Unity experience and a shipped AAA title, followed by being laid off as soon as the game shipped. These were much simpler times.

There were just people with computers and ideas, and Ére gave some of them somewhere to take those ideas, even if they were a little bit out there to the rest of us.

Enter Philippe Ulrich

One of the most important arrivals was Philippe Ulrich. Ulrich had been making games himself, and his early title Panique helped bring him into Viau’s orbit. Before long he was deeply involved in Ére and would become one of the most recognisable characters in the emerging French industry.

If Viau was the businessman holding the operation together, Ulrich represented something else: the belief that computer games could be more than simply attempts to recreate what had already worked in the arcades.

Ére also understood presentation earlier than many small software companies did. Michel Rho’s artwork became part of the company’s identity, and Ére’s games increasingly looked like things you wanted to pick up. That might sound obvious now, but walk through a computer shop in 1984 and you’d find plenty of software that looked as though somebody had photocopied the cover during their lunch break. Looking back through my collection is hard to imagine how bad some of the art was back then – of course, there were amazing jobs, but it was certainly the minority

Ére’s games had artwork. There was personality. There was a sense that the programmer, musician and artist actually collaborated and created something in symbiosis.

In many ways Ére treated developers more like authors than production-line employees. People brought projects to the publisher, often working independently and receiving royalties from sales.

That arrangement wasn’t necessarily comfortable for everybody. If your game didn’t sell, creative freedom wasn’t going to pay the rent. But it also meant Ére’s catalogue never felt particularly corporate. You couldn’t say there was an obvious Ére game. And that’s why I became so interested in it. it seemed more… random.

Macadam Bumper changes things

The breakthrough was Macadam Bumper. Created by Rémi Herbulot and released in 1985, it was ostensibly a pinball game. The clever bit was that it also allowed you to build your own tables.

You could move components around, create layouts and essentially construct their own pinball machines rather than simply playing the one somebody else had provided.

Construction games were hardly unprecedented – Electronic Arts had already released Pinball Construction Set – but Macadam Bumper was stylish and accessible and arrived at exactly the right moment to become one of Ére’s first genuine international successes.

Ports appeared on the Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, Commodore 64, Oric, MSX, Atari ST and PC, while overseas publishers helped push it beyond France. In America it was released by Accolade as Pinball Wizard.

For a tiny French publisher, this was a significant moment indeed. Until then, France had largely been consuming computer-game culture arriving from elsewhere. Here was a home-grown game travelling in the opposite direction. And more followed.

Crafton & Xunk was French gaming showing off

If I had to pick one Ére game that captures what was happening in France at the time, though, it might be Crafton & Xunk.

You may know it better as Get Dexter!, the name used for its international release. Again developed by Rémi Herbulot, it arrived in 1986 and looked sensational on the Amstrad CPC.

This was the era of isometric adventures, of course. Knight Lore had already changed everyone’s expectations of what these little machines could display, and suddenly computer games were full of rooms viewed from that familiar elevated angle.

Crafton & Xunk could have been just another one but it wasn’t.

Its world was colourful and wonderfully chunky, packed with robots, furniture, machinery and objects you could pick up and use. Crafton himself wandered around the screen accompanied by Xunk, a little floating creature who looked as though he’d wandered in from a completely different game. There was humour and so much character to it.

Most importantly, it didn’t feel like Ére was desperately trying to produce a French version of a British hit. The influences were obvious, but the finished game had its own Gallic personality.

That’s where you begin to see the roots of what people later called the French Touch.

French developers seemed less worried about sticking rigidly to established genres. They loved strong artwork, comics, science fiction and cinema. They weren’t frightened of odd interfaces or lengthy stories. Sometimes that produced something brilliant that we had not seen before.

Sometimes it didn’t. Such was life.

Loriciels was building something too

Ére wasn’t operating in isolation. At almost exactly the same time, Loriciels was helping build the other side of the French software industry.

Founded by Marc Bayle and Laurent Weill in 1983, the company’s wonderfully dated name came from combining Oric with “logiciel”, the French word for software.

Loriciels quickly expanded beyond the Oric, supporting machines including the Thomson computers and, inevitably, the Amstrad CPC.

Its catalogue was huge and occasionally all over the place, but several releases became memorable French hits.

L’Aigle d’Or was one of the early standouts, an adventure that mixed exploration with action and atmosphere at a time when many home computer adventures still meant staring at a parser and typing OPEN DOOR.

Then there was Sapiens, which sent players thousands of years into the past and asked them to survive as a prehistoric human. It was ambitious, unusual and difficult to compare neatly with anything else, so I am not even going to try. The French industry seemed to thrive on games like this.

As for me, my favorite Loriciels game was nothing exotic, it was a racing game called Rally II, which from memory had a desert setting. I don’t know why it has stuck in my head so much. In fact, I am loading it now on my MiSTer FPGA to see. Man, the music has got me again. It’s so… French.

Ére, Loriciels, Infogrames and their contemporaries were not simply making French equivalents of international games. Increasingly they were producing things that could only really have emerged from that particular scene.

Cobra Soft would create mysteries and adventures. Muriel Tramis at Coktel Vision would bring subjects and settings into games that the wider industry largely ignored. Froggy Software – yes it was actually called that – happily wandered into satire and politics.

There was no single French genre. The common thread was that nobody seemed particularly interested in behaving themselves.

Even Ére’s adventures were a little strange

Ére’s own Sram games fitted neatly into this environment. Text adventures presented a particular problem for European developers because so many of the genre’s conventions had been built around English-language parsers and Sram was designed around French.

That alone made it important to France’s domestic players, but the game also included illustrated scenes and a comparatively sophisticated parser, creating something much more approachable than many imported adventures.

Then came Bubble Ghost.

Released towards the end of Ére’s independent period, Christophe Andréani’s game involved guiding a ghost through a mansion while gently blowing a bubble past candles, spikes and other hazards.

That’s it. That’s the premise of the game. And it’s brilliant.

The idea was simple enough to explain in one sentence and Bubble Ghost eventually escaped the French computer scene entirely, appearing on numerous systems and even reaching the Game Boy. Once more, Ére had found an idea rather than a genre.

But the game that would come to define the company was considerably harder to explain.

WTF was Captain Blood?

I remember my brother, and I couldn’t wait to get hold of Captain Blood. We must have seen it in a magazine or something, and it looked mind-blowing. Legendary French composer come showman Jean-Michell Jarre’s Zoolook provided the soundtrack – Zoolook – one of the greatest electronic albums of all time. On a game. On my Amstrad’s single speaker. Just as Jarre had always intended.

Originally released in 1988 as L’Arche du Captain Blood, the game was created by Philippe Ulrich and Didier Bouchon. You played a game designer who had become trapped inside his own creation and we literally did not know how to play it. It was just too bizarre for a couple of English kids brought up on Hunchback and Commando.

For plot’s sake, an accident had created 30 duplicates of Captain Blood, each stealing some of his life force. Twenty-five had already been found. Your job was to travel the galaxy hunting the remaining five. Except hunting them meant talking to aliens. And you couldn’t just type questions – nooo, that would be too simple.

Captain Blood used an icon-based language called UPCOM containing more than 150 symbols. You assembled messages out of pictures representing concepts, actions and objects, trying to make yourself understood by species that might help you, insult you, lie to you or send you halfway across the galaxy on a wild-goose chase.

And remember, this was all before recreational drugs took over Europe.

Exxos turns the weirdness up

Around Captain Blood, Ére began using the Exxos label for some of its more ambitious work. Like Captain Blood wasn’t tapped enough.

Calling it a label doesn’t quite convey how gloriously pretentious the whole thing would become. Exxos was presented almost as a creative philosophy. Its developers talked about themselves in terms that sounded closer to an art collective or science-fiction cult than a software company.

Again, I mean that affectionately but to a kid, it was absolute nonsense.

Games including Purple Saturn Day and Kult continued down the same path: bold graphics, unusual worlds and absolutely no fear whatsoever of confusing the crap out of the person who had just bought the game.

Infogrames moves in

By the late 1980s, Ére had become increasingly tied to a publisher you will likely be much more familiar with. Infogrames was growing rapidly and offered the kind of distribution and financial muscle that a relatively small outfit such as Ére needed. In fact, just a few years later, it would also gobble up huge UK software house Ocean as well.

It also changed the atmosphere and culture forever. Ére’s loose collection of authors and philosophical eccentrics didn’t sit particularly naturally inside a larger publishing operation.

In October 1988, visitors to Paris’s Festival du Micro were invited to witness something approaching a public execution. In front of a crowd gathered around the enormous Atari display, an Amstrad CPC 664 was ceremonially smashed to pieces.

The machine did not go quietly. “We had to smash it a few times before it was really broken,” Emmanuel Viau told British magazine The Games Machine, which had travelled to Paris to report on the company’s leap into the 16-bit era.

It was a piece of theatrical software-industry bravado, but the symbolism was difficult to miss. The French studio that had grown from the chaotic beginnings of the country’s 8-bit scene was killing the machine that had helped make its name. The future belonged to the Atari ST, Amiga, and a new generation of games with grander graphics, digitized sound, and ambitions extending far beyond France.

Financial disagreements and creative tensions followed, and by 1989 many of the people who had made Ére what it was were moving on. To be fair, the industry itself was a shifting landscape. The money men were moving in.

The company itself effectively disappeared. but the ideas didn’t.

From Ére to Cryo and beyond

Soon after however, Philippe Ulrich, Rémi Herbulot and several other members of the Ére/Exxos crowd went on to become part of Cryo Interactive and published the seminal licensed version of Frank Herbert’s Dune with Virgin Interactive. It’s cool to see the same old names from the 80s as a team once more.

If you’ve ever played Dune, Lost Eden, MegaRace or Atlantis games, you can see the lineage almost immediately – elaborate worlds with occasionally questionable decisions about what actually constitutes fun.

Cryo would become one of the companies most closely associated with the French Touch during the CD-ROM years, but the DNA had ben biologically modified into a weapon on the Amstrad and Atari ST.

Elsewhere, Infogrames became an international giant. Ubisoft, founded in 1986, eventually grew into something vastly bigger. Coktel Vision became a major name in adventures and educational software, while Loriciels lasted into the 1990s before finally disappearing.

France had its owns videogames industry, which most countries in Europe could not say.

Six years that changed everything

The story of Ére Informatique is so fascinating, in the main because it wasn’t around very long.

There was no 30-year dynasty to celebrate and look back on. No endless procession of sequels. No Ére Informatique logo sitting on the front of modern AAA games. Nobody has brought them back to life like MicroProse or Atari – although, if you want an Easter egg I discovered while researching this, there is a small electronics repair shop in Paris called Ére Informatique.

Yet between 1983 and 1989 it managed to capture almost the entire transformation of French gaming and change Europe with it.

What began in a world of Orics, Amstrads Spectrums, duplicated cassette tapes and programmers trying to persuade somebody – anybody – to publish their games ended in the 16-bit era with Captain Blood being sold internationally and French developers becoming recognised for having a style of their own, with a little help from Jean-Michel Jarre.

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