Why, and to what extent, did France like different games (and computers)to elsewhere?

[Megalomaniac]

https://amr.abime.net/issue_6_pages (pages 74-77) is my jumping-off point for this - 'Why Are French Games So Weird?', an article which always intrigued me. Note that the writer (Jonathan Davies, ex-Your Sinclair and later editor of AP and PC Gamer) was largely enthusiastic about French games once he'd spent some time with them. France did later give us Flashback, Titus the Fox (an accidentally conventional game once Moktar had been removed from it), Vroom and Ishar, which are reasonably conventional in theme and concept, but still, even post-Amiga there was a quirkiness to e.g. Little Big Adventure. As such, some of their games travelled poorly, with a few adventures like Future Wars a rare exception at the article's time.

Dominique Cor of Infogrames notes here that French consumers didn't tend to go for shoot 'em ups, hence the adventurous and inventive nature of many French games, and we tended to like either complex strategy or simple shooters, but little in between. The idea that Brits weren't taken by puzzle games as a rule is touched on (not 100% accurate when you think how many Game Boys Tetris sold here, not to mention that we came up with Lemmings and most of its clones), perhaps explaining why Ocean France were given Puzznic and Plotting to convert?

Ignoring the clumsy inclusion of Sim City (though Infogrames did import it to Europe and convert it to the ST/CPC/Spectrum, as they did for Prince of Persia for the first two of those), most of the games covered in this article do exude Frenchness - you'd struggle to imagine Alpha Waves being British, or BAT being American, or The Toyettes being German, when compared to same-genre games from those countries. Another theme is that few of them seem fast-scrolling-action dependent.

Also, French culture is generally quite distinct. it's discussed here that very distinctly French comics (including the one which spawned North and South) took precedence over the Turtles and the like, something which may have shone through in their games. Plus, I remember reading in a UK music magazine the idea that youth culture, and youth separatism, isn't a big tradition in France, the article derided Jean-Michel Jarre as an unfortunate consequence of this. I'm sure this cultural gap has narrowed now as we all get more global, maybe EU integration (1992 and all that) has been a factor too? That's probably beyond the scope of this forum.

I wonder if there's something else behind this. France is the only place where the ST remained bigger than the Amiga for any length of time, and also the only place where the Amstrad CPC was the biggest 8-bit system (not to mention the Oric, which gave Loriciels their name, and the Thomsons). The latter may be partly explained by the French SECAM TV system of the time meaning that every machine needed a monitor to display colour, meaning that Amstrad's integrated monitor wasn't a cost disadvantage in France the way it was in the UK, and perhaps by France taking to home computers later than many countries (though things like the Diamond system used by their police was advanced for its time, and the Teletel system was a forerunner to the Internet that was especially big there) where earlier systems like the C64 or Spectrum took hold first. Incidentally, if you want to see the Amstrad pushed to its limits by commercial back-in-the-day games, generally check out French-coded stuff - no Spectrum ports there. It's also unfortunate that very few French adventures for the Amstrad were ever translated into English, many featured lovely Mode 1 4-colour graphics especially.

I do notice, though, that both the ST and the CPC are widely seen as having poor scrolling. This isn't 100% accurate for the Amstrad, though very few commercial titles do it well. The question is, did France prefer games without scrolling because its computers couldn't do it well, or did they nor mind about computers with poor scrolling because they didn't like those types of games anyway? Indeed, Agony (which is quite out-there for a shooter), Pang (a conversion of a Japanese coin-op) and Jim Power (if we use a broad definition of a shoot 'em up) aside, I'm struggling to think of major French shooters for the Amiga. You can quickly think of big Amiga shooters by Danes, Swedes, Dutchmen, Finns, not to mention Brits and Germans, but there's a relative paucity of French shooters, or other games dependent on fast 2D scrolling. The same is true among French games on the CPC, with exceptions like Xyphoes Fantasy.

So I'm interested in people's thoughts on all this. Especially French people, do you feel like the rest of the world doesn't 'get' what you like, or tended to underappreciate your country's finest games?

[gimbal]

I think Metal Mutant would summarize it. That game is as French as it gets. Weirdly wonderful, as is their cinema output.

I think it's the food man. If you could go out every morning and get the best croissant in the world, with chocolate, right on the corner of the street. With a cup of coffee which absolutely does not suck. Wouldn't you be bursting with creativity?

... Amiga shooter by Dutchies? There is such a thing?

[Adropac2]

I remember French games being wonderfully different both in their art style but also the games themselves so figured it must be baked into their culture. Very distinct but beautifully so

[dlfrsilver]

Prince of Persia was converted by Microids in France for Broderbund France (the french subsidiary opened by Laurant Weill, the CEO of Loriciel with agreement from Broderbund US, in a distribution/trading contract).

The Amiga version was translated in France by Loriciel, and they asked Microids to redo the ST and CPC versions (the ST version is very smooth, and beautiful, a comment that doesn't apply to the amiga version, straight converted from the PC version by Dan Gorlin). The CPC version was simply the best 8 bits version.

Domark handled those version for the English and German market, and Microids gave them both ST and CPC version translated in english.

Infogrames is not linked to PoP.

[aeberbach]

French things are just weird. Citroen, Peugeot, AMX tanks, films like Themroc and Delicatessen, Le Tour, les vacances, gitanes, eating snails - all very weird but strangely good. Other things like cheek kissing (men please learn to shave better), dog poo on footpaths, Pacific nuclear tests, I can do without those.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I think Metal Mutant would summarize it. That game is as French as it gets. Weirdly wonderful, as is their cinema output.

I loved Metal Mutant as a kid!


As for it's 'Frenchness', I think it's quite obvious it's inspired by the whole Metal Hurlant scene, and you can see the connection to French comics throughout many French games.

[kamelito]

They called it « The French Touch »
Coming from the Oric I very much like adventure games and it’s still true to this day.

[TCD]

Gobliiins sums up the 'French touch' for me. A little weird and very funny.

[Megalomaniac]

Correct about Prince of Persia, I should have checked that, being honest I'm pretty much he only person in the world who's not a huge fan of the game. The wider 'created in America but brought to Europe by a French company, and converted to systems popular in France' point does stand up though. Great conversions though, as you say - I'd put the Amstrad version of PoP above the not-even-for-a-standard-C64 version. Broderbund and Microids had this association for a long time, including Karateka and The Ancient Art of War (also seemingly France-only and French-only). Ubi Soft also converted Defender of the Crown to the Amstrad in French only, the still artwork for which looks impressive.

For Dutch coders I was thinking of SWIV, I know it's not all Ronald Pieket Wesserik's work but it worked as an example of how people from much smaller countries than France had done more shoot 'em ups than them.

[dreadnought]

I'm not French but I've always appreciated their games. Starting with Vera Cruz on Spectrum, which was such a far-out change from the usually juvenile fare in the AD 1985.

Zombi and Captain Blood had cemented that rep, and since then I've always paid attention to the releases from Infogrames, ERE, Delphine, Ubi and other big players from France. I rank Future Wars & Cruise For The Corpse very highly, and it only makes sense that Mr Eric "Best Amiga Game" Chahi came out of that environment. B.A.T is my top 5 Amiga game, and Kult and North and South are other original titles which also need mentioning.

In the modern era UbiSoft and Infogrames either turned "normal" or folded but Arkane carried the "somewhat different" torch.

[NorthWay]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

the ST version is very smooth, and beautiful, a comment that doesn't apply to the amiga version

Wait what? Do we need another hostile port now?
(You learn something new every day...) (PoP never really jived with me - might have been the cycling animation/movement. I just briefly played the re-done version on PS2 Sands of Time and liked that better.)

[jotd]

The Ancient Art of War (also seemingly France-only and French-only)

There is an english version for PC, I adapted it for amiga so you Brits and other english speakers can play it

I used to have an Oric, and bizarrely the french software developers liked this machine (originally UK, Oric was bought by a french company and it remained better than Thomson in terms of software!). There were a lot of good games (Aigle d'Or/Golden Eagle, Hunchback, Defence Force) and also turds (arcade "ports").

It looks like the french spirit followed from the Oric to the Amiga. Eric Chahi coded games on Oric then he did Another World. Technically, the games are often not so great, and were more good adventure games (Delphine, Cocktel) but there are also outstanding arcade stuff like Another World & Flashback.

[CCCP alert]

From what I remember France had a love for Thomson, ORIC and Atari ST over rival choices. French pixel art for the ST I remember being quite different in palette options selected etc too, think the name of the magazine I had was STart or something, layout style was similar to ST world/ST User but the artwork etc was in a different style.

[TEG]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I wonder if there's something else behind this. France is the only place where the ST remained bigger than the Amiga for any length of time, and also the only place where the Amstrad CPC was the biggest 8-bit system (not to mention the Oric, which gave Loriciels their name, and the Thomsons). The latter may be partly explained by the French SECAM TV system of the time meaning that every machine needed a monitor to display colour, meaning that Amstrad's integrated monitor wasn't a cost disadvantage in France the way it was in the UK, and perhaps by France taking to home computers later than many countries (though things like the Diamond system used by their police was advanced for its time, and the Teletel system was a forerunner to the Internet that was especially big there) where earlier systems like the C64 or Spectrum took hold first. Incidentally, if you want to see the Amstrad pushed to its limits by commercial back-in-the-day games, generally check out French-coded stuff - no Spectrum ports there. It's also unfortunate that very few French adventures for the Amstrad were ever translated into English, many featured lovely Mode 1 4-colour graphics especially.

The answers for the ST and the CPC predominance are quite simple.

- The ST was simply more affordable than the Amiga for a long time and so more in line with purchasing power of French people at the time. The MIDI connectors can have play a role too, synthesisers being quite common in the country. Perhaps the success of J.M. Jarre being not a stranger to the thing.

- For the CPC it's all due to the achievement of Marion Vannier.





She organized an intensive and successful marketing campaign in France for the Amstrad brand (not like another brand which the name start by the C letter...). If I remember well, this is even her who invented the crocodile mascotte and it simply... worked! Two ads among many others:




Gunhed did a video about her (French):

[ Show youtube player ]


Now for the distinct culture, perhaps the location of the country play a role. I mean this a country with a lot of diversity, mountains, seas, forests, plains, all you want concentrated on a relative small area and so with a lot of vibrant energy.