At first there were four floppy disks.
The team nicknamed them “mad scientists.” They didn’t mean it in a bad way, on the contrary. Three students from the University of Oldenburg, in northwestern Germany, were developing their own engine in the 1990s. After finishing a demo, they sent it out on four discs to eight different companies – and two of them were interested in their work. In the end, they settled on Greenwood Entertainment, a name that won’t ring a bell. But it was here that the foundations of Gothic were laid, and later Piranha Bytes. A studio with a quarter-century history that has been struggling with problems in recent months, to which, unfortunately, it has succumbed.
One of the three was Bert Speckels, who was studying computer science and information technology at the time. “In our demo, you fought with a sword, a gun, or a fireball. It was just a demo, not a finished game,” he recalls in an interview with the World of Gothic fan site. The engine was then called Finster, which means “dark” in German. Of course, no one knew what would follow, but even in these basics there was a hint of the future gaming hit.
Speckels and his friends Ulf Wohlers and Dieter Hildebrandt also laid out the story of the game they wanted to create. The main character, Pimpom, was supposed to leave home to find a job in the city and earn some money. But he got involved with local scientists, had to deal with all sorts of monsters and mutants, and it was supposed to end in a big battle between good and evil. Unsurprisingly, Greenwood wasn’t interested in them, but at the time, their engine was of great interest to a small team. So the young men interrupted their studies and set out to create the RPG of their dreams.
From Engine to King Eurojack
They joined a handful of core developers who wanted to work on something like this for a long time. One of them was Michael Hoge, and Speckels remembers working with him almost from the early days. For example, on a demo in which they built a cathedral together. The engine gradually changed, and as a result, the name under which the game was being developed. When it came out in 2001, it was signed not by Greenwood, but by a newly founded studio with Bloodfish in its name.
The group of developers believed in their “brainchild” so much that they decided to take the plunge and founded Piranha Bytes in 1997. And their “Gothic” was indeed a success. For its time, it was incredible how the game handled the sometimes long loading times when moving to a new location. 3D open worlds or more lively secondary characters were not as common in RPGs as they are today, and many computers could not handle the game due to the high hardware requirements.
After the game’s release, however, Speckels returned to university. “I definitely wanted to finish it. And to be honest, the games industry was an exciting adventure for me, but it wasn’t my career goal,” he recalls now, while still working as a developer, but no longer in the video game industry. Although he and his two mad scientist friends left, Piranha Bytes continued to work and decided to lay the groundwork for something even bigger with their medieval RPG.
After just 11 months of development, Gothic 2 was released. Textures were more detailed, graphics were better. Viewing distances were increased, lighting looked more realistic, and a variety of objects were added that made the entire world feel more alive again. But here was something that is the hallmark of a peculiar subgenre with the offensive label Eurojank: bugs. Lots of bugs, but most of them were gradually fixed, so in the end it didn’t hurt the game’s positive reception.
Bigger world, more mistakes
More and more titles followed. First, the third part of “Gothic”, which players had been waiting for a long time. The developers had huge goals: they wanted to further expand the open world and continued to strive to move around it without long loading times. At the same time, there were only about twenty of them on the team, which, among other things, caused a delay of about a year. And then there were those errors again. But this time the situation was not so rosy. The studio underestimated their scope, which was included in more than one review. For example, in the then article on GameSpot (as well as in many other media) fps fluctuations were mentioned, the ability to accidentally walk through a wall, or a real delicacy: long searches for characters that you had to lead somewhere, but you lost them, got stuck on the way … in a piece of wood.
All this indirectly led to a break with the then Austrian publisher JoWooD Productions. There were many disputes, but one of them was the publisher’s desire to create a huge patch that would fix many errors in the existing game. However, the developers themselves wanted to pay a little more attention to the possible addition. In 2007, the studio found a new publisher in the Deep Silver brand, part of the Koch Media company. Several developers left Piranha Bytes, but nothing ended, the team survived everything again. And a few years later, he released a game from a completely new world.
At the very beginning you can go crazy in the countryside, but you will probably get cut down in the first fight.
Risen was smaller, and its development was “less punk” this time around, such as more focus on testing the game before release and achieving the goals agreed upon with the publisher. Again, there was a nameless protagonist, magic, swords. And again, you could go crazy in the countryside at the very beginning, but you would probably get cut up in your first fight.
Then followed two other parts, surprising with either a pirate environment or sea battles. And then came a complete novelty. An RPG with a bit of a sci-fi, but at the same time fantasy genre. Elex was released in 2017 under the management of THQ Nordic, which bought the “toothy fish” two years later. But as soon as the game’s story developed in a kind of post-apocalyptic world, the situation with Piranha Bytes began to become increasingly gloomy.
At the time, Piranha Bytes belonged to the huge Embracer family of studios, which gradually began to struggle with financial problems. More than two years ago, a sequel, Elex, was released, which essentially followed all its predecessors. Reviews mention clumsiness, bugs, difficult gameplay in the first few hours, where your hero is a fragile Judas. But the future of the studio itself, whose core at that time consisted of about thirty developers, was fragile.
Horrible ending
Embracer was in debt after a billion-dollar deal with Saudi Arabian group Savvy Games fell through. Last year, it continued to cut costs, which gradually became more and more radical. The company laid off workers, closed studios. Since the end of the year, the company has been trying to find a buyer or investor for Piranha Bytes, but to no avail. What followed was a creeping round of layoffs that ate away at the studio.
Back in January, Piranha Bytes assured that nothing was lost. They said they were looking for a financial partner to save themselves. But now it turns out that the studio closed down for good at the end of June. Many things are still unclear. What will happen to the originally planned third part of Elex, for which the studio received more than three million euros (equivalent to 80 million crowns) from the German Ministry of Economy? What will happen to the Elex brand as a whole, as well as to Gothic and Risen, as well as to Piranha Bytes itself, to which Embracer has the rights?
Perhaps their spirit will live on, albeit under a different name. Piranha veterans Björn and Jennifer Pankratz left the studio last November after various disagreements (and, they say, involuntarily). Behind the scenes, it was partly due to the direction of the studio: Björn Pankratz, as creative director, was aiming for an Elex-like product, and some of the developers expressed a desire to return to Gothic. Now the pair have jointly announced the creation of Pithead, a studio into which they have invested some of the money they made from selling the studio five years ago.
The economy said: no way
“The gaming industry is not doing very well right now, not only in Germany but all over the world. This has led to the fact that over the last many months (…) large studios or publishers have had financial problems, many development studios have closed, an incredible number of people have lost their jobs,” Jennifer Pankratz describes in a recent video. “And that’s why we are sitting here now.”
“That’s when we and our colleagues at THQ Nordic thought: oops, now we’re going to make games until we all go grey and retire,” he recalls of the moment they were acquired by a major company. “But that was just our plan. The economy said: no way, that’s not happening,” he adds with a smile. At Pithead, they want to focus on indie games, but are keeping the details to themselves for now.
Will their core be similar to what they started with at Piranha Bytes? “Every game had its strong point at the time,” recalls one of Gothic’s three “mad scientists,” Bert Speckels. “For example, Tomb Raider and Thief were influences. Tomb Raider popularized the third-person perspective, and Thief introduced new ways to solve problems. Gothic introduced a game world that worked really well. I think we were the ones who moved from a text-based, relatively static RPG to a highly interactive game at the right moment. And our world was really dangerous. You couldn’t just go and destroy the monster on the corner. You had to be careful! That was one of the innovations that stuck with Piranha Bytes, and I think that’s great.”
Source :Indian TV
