Entertainment related companies in Spain

Dear all,

Here you are some stuff regarding the Spanish/European entertainment market. Let me introduce you some of the videogame companies working in Spain. You might contact them this year at GDC (http://www.gdconf.com/). Here you are the web links plus some contextual information:

• Digital Legends Entertainment (http://www.digital-legends.com/): quite famous for two titles: Blade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance:_Blade_of_Darkness), distributed by Codemasters several years ago and introducing real-time dynamic shadows for the very first time, and One (http://www.one.n-gage.com/), a fighting game for Nokia’s nGage platform…they work a lot within Apple’s I-Phone platform (check Kroll at iTunes…)…they do have a really nice and adaptable 3D engine for all kind of mobile platforms.

• Gameloft (http://www.gameloft.com/): with a quite long “tradition” on fringe titles for cell phones…

• Arvirago (http://www.arvirago.com/): they have both offices in Barcelona and Madrid. The CEO and some of the “seniors” there were former workers at Pyro (a really big studio in Spain…as you will further). There they developed an international blast, Commandos, and all the series beyond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandos_(series) It seems they have a nice “current” project, The Lord of the Creatures…

• Pyro Studios (http://www.pyrostudios.com/index_ing.asp?33) and its Animation division, Illion (http://www.ilion.com/home/index.php): we might say this is “the big one” in Spain. Quite successful thanks to their Commandos saga (see previous paragraph) plus other nice strategy titles such as Imperial Glory and Praetorians (check the main site if interested). The animation side is producing Planet 51, “An inverse alien invasion adventure” as they say…check this link out (http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/planet51/).

• Mercury Steam (http://company.mercurysteam.com/html/?language_code=en): with recent titles including American McGee’s Scrapland (http://www.scrapland.com/) and Konami’s Lords of Shadow (http://www.lordsofshadow.com/).

• Virtual Toys (http://www.virtualtoys.net/index.php?lang=en): they also have offices in Barcelona and in Valencia. Pretty famous thanks to Horsez (http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/Info.aspx?pId=4898) distributed by Ubi Soft for the NDS platform. They are developing for lots of other platforms. Do not hesitate to check their “8 Bit Computers” section with really neat titles from the 80’s for the “quite spread” european platforms at that time. That means Spectrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX_Spectrum), Amstrad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad) and MSX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX).

• Revistronic (http://www.revistronic.com/web-corp/index.htm): a quite old company (alive since the 80’s) located in Madrid, the capital city in Spain. They have several projects but I would say they are quite good at producing graphical adventures (yes, there are still people who want them, fortunately enough :)… Do you remember the Monkey Island saga??? that kind… In addition to that, they seem to like Western genre. They have developed several games based on that “field”, like Fenimore Fillmore's Revenge (http://www.revistronic.com/web-corp/card-revenge/index.htm).

• Pendulo Studios (http://www.pendulostudios.com/): famous, again, for a graphical adventure saga,  Runaway (http://www.runaway-thegame.com/en/index.htm), also available for NDS!!! (by 2007 they would say something like “…the first true point Point ’n’ Click on Nintendo’s handheld”). In fact it was the best console adventure game in 2007 (http://www.runaway-thegame.com/en/news-22.htm).

• Alcahofa Soft (http://www.alcachofasoft.com/): with The Abbey, they recovered a very well-known 8-bits game (at least in Europe, I’m not sure about US) based on the wonderful The Name of the Rose (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose) book and film (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film)). Some info regarding “the original” game can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Abad%C3%ADa_del_Crimen.

• Exelweiss (http://www.exelweiss.com/): founded by Jose Vicente-Pons, a “dinosaur producer” of the 8-bits er. Sorry but the website seems to be only in Spanis. They are located in Valencia, on the east coast in Spain.

• Grin (http://www.grin.se/): Grin is an european games studio with several offices, one of them in Barcelona (Spain), next to the beach. They opened there about a couple of years ago (http://www.grin.se/about.aspx?i=3).

• FX Interactive (http://www.fxinteractive.com/): its gold star is Imperium, a strategy game based on historical battles, characters and places towards military conquest. It hit 1,000,000 and became Platinum in 2006. Check this PDF file for the latest Imperium title (http://www.fxinteractive.com/int/us/p084/images/IMPERIVM%20GBR%20Key%20Points.pdf).

Please feel free to check more studios of all kinds (tiny, independent…) here: http://www.doid.org/empresas/