The video games of the 1980s that made the video game industry in France

France plays a huge role in the global gaming industry. It is the second largest video game producer in the world, and the road is paved with strange little adventure games. Before the industry went global, before AAA games really existed, French developers were creating eccentric and sexy political games that reflected their own reality.

These include games like The woman who couldn’t stand computersby Chine Lanzmann. The Femma is a text-based game whose interface is designed to resemble the first French Calvados network.

In it, you play a woman in an online chat room who meets various characters who want to have sex with you, one of them being your own sensitive computer. The writing is excellent. It feels unpleasant and uncomfortable to play, but it’s also quite fun. The exaggerated and thirsty reactions of the characters made me laugh constantly. At first, if you tell the computer that you are blonde, it reacts with the textual equivalent of Pepé le Pew seeing that damn cat.

The woman it’s a branching narrative that leads to six endings, all of which suck. The game was based on Lanzmann’s own experience in moderating discussions on the Calvados message boards. And if you’re thinking: “Wow, how crazy that one of the first French video games is about online harassment of a woman, that sounds strangely current ”, well, this was not entirely out of place for the French games of the 80s and early 90s!

Sure, you had your racing games, faux-Donkey Kongs, and your chess simulators. But there were also a surprising number of developers who used games to explore their problems with the world around them.

Some of the main culprits here were Froggy Software, a company founded by Jean-Louis Le Breton and Fabrice Gille. With The woman, they published a game called Blues Spiel, which satirized the attempts of the right-wing Parisian mayor Jacques Chirac to privatize the Parisian water system. At the other end of the political spectrum, they published The Berlin wall will explode – the Berlin Wall is going to explode – a game where you try to stop a gay leftist terrorist from himself, blow up the Berlin Wall, which looks like it could be the plot of the next Far Cry game.

Le Breton and Gille were both “soixante-huitards”, participants in the May ’68 protests that nearly destroyed the country. May 68 tried to protest against capitalism, consumerism and US imperialism. According to video game scholar Filip Jankowski, Le Breton and Gille brought that rebellious energy to Froggy Software, developing and publishing games that gave the middle finger to the status quo.

Arcade and action games have always been at the center of the United States, but France has earned a reputation for creating … “weird games.” Or at least, they were strange to non-French in the same way as those Orangina’s attractive advertisements are. Instead of fantastic action-focused titles, the developers explored the difficult history of France and its depressing present.

The most innovative of these games might have come from Muriel Tramis. Tramis was a programmer working on military drones for Aerospatiale, but in 1986 she decided to quit and make games. Tramis landed at Coktel Vision, where he was unleashed. He made educational games, like The head of mathematics. He did a classic puzzle adventure series called Gobliins. She did erotica, like Emmanuelle Y Fascination, and in the 1990s it experimented with fair market values ​​such as Urban corridor.

But the two games for which she is perhaps best known are Méwilo Y Liberty. Méwilo is an adventure game set in Tramis’ homeland, Martinique, and co-written with Creolité author Patrick Chamoiseau. The game stars a paranormal psychologist in 1902, who investigates a city literally haunted by French imperialism. But that’s just a pretext to experience the “economic, political and religious life, ”At St. Pierre. The game earned Tramis a silver medal from the Ministry of Culture in 1988.

Image: Coktel Vision

His follow-up project was Freedom: rebels in the dark, a strategy game in which you play an enslaved person in Martinique who organizes a rebellion against the slave owners. It is bloody and violent, but also complex: much of the strategy is simply trying to convince people to join you, despite the risks to their lives and families.

This countercultural moment of the French gaming industry still could not survive the growth of the industry and the black hole of capitalism. As the industry matured in the 90s, consoles and action games pushed PCs and adventure games aside.

Coktel Vision, where Muriel Tramis did much of her work, merged with Vivendi in 2003, and Tramis found she just didn’t like the new company culture – she had less creative freedom. He currently runs his own company, Avantilles, where he makes 3D software.

That little story is pretty indicative of the way game publishing has gone as a whole. Businesses grow, they make games for a wider audience, and when you attract a wide audience, everything dissolves. In the case of French developers (and all developers, let’s face it), “broad” eventually came to mean an English-speaking player base. Many games that come from European developers will have a large majority of English speakers and, more importantly, American audience. Games are being made to serve us.

Mass publishers like Ubisoft may dominate the industry these days, but there are still French indie developers making their own wacky, sexy political games that mirror their own reality, just like the authors of the 80s did. Games like Refuge Y Dordogne now carry the torch.

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