From The Archives: Coktel Vision
Best known for its Gobliiins series of games and a wealth of educational titles, Coktel Vision also taught the gaming world how to explore this groundbreaking medium as a powerful storytelling device
We speak to the French developer about its popular edutainment and adventure games
There was a time when the term ‘very French’ was used as a short-form label for Gallic games that were deemed a tad offbeat. It would typically be found nestled within articles by journalists grappling for a better description and it hadn’t gone unnoticed by those who worked in French game development.
“The UK press considered games made in France to be ‘different’,” affirms Emma Kreuz, former PR manager of the Parisian publisher Coktel Vision. But there was a reason for this. They were different to an extent. French games were typified by their creative, high-quality coding, technology-pushing techniques and penchant for adventure/arcade-style titles. And Coktel Vision was among the pioneers.
Founded in 1984 by engineer Roland Oskian, the publisher made an immediate impact in France by specialising in simulations, action and adventure games. “I was passionate about movies, music and technology,” Roland tells us. “I’d discovered a business simulation game during my studies and I loved it.”
Roland had worked for the space division at Matra and he saw a good business opportunity for software, believing it to have a great future. He also believed it was important for developers to be innovative and he would eventually see this as a key for success. “We had to fight the foreseeable rival of the Japanese giants with their consoles and define a real strategy,” he says. Freedom of expression would play an important role.
Also in 1984, issue 14 of the French videogame magazine TILT had published a lengthy article by journalist Guy Delcourt which not only explained that gaming was still in its infancy in France, but also found that developers valued originality and wanted to produce games which reflected their country rather than simply ape the more lucrative scenes of the UK and USA. One way of doing this was through narrative. The impressive graphic text adventures La Malediction De Thaar and Poséidon, both released in 1985, were evidence of that.
Poséidon was cocreated by Jean-yves Baxter and Michel Denajar with input from Laurent Korngold, Coktel’s first employee. At the time, the company was tiny. “We began working in the Oskians’ house,” Laurent recalls. “Roland would create music and his wife made covers and produced graphics.”
Concentrating on games for the Thomson computers and the Amstrad CPC to begin with, the publisher soon grew. As well as producing titles for the gaming masses – such as Laurent’s racing game Raid Sur Ténéré – Coktel also sought to capture the educational market in a bid to appeal to parents and teachers.
“I’d just finished my engineering studies when I met Roland at the beginning of 1985 and that’s when
I proposed Coktel publish software that would help French children learn English,” says Coktel coder Arnaud Delrue. Released as Balade Au Pays De Big Ben, Coktel’s first stab at such a title was followed by a mathematics game called Équations-inéquations and the crossword app Mots Croisés Magiques’. By 1987, edutainment titles were a key part of Coktel Vision’s output and Arnaud had become the company’s equivalent of a CTO.
From the perspective of the general gamer, Coktel’s golden period fell between 1985 and 1994 when it seemed to run at full speed with a plethora of releases. It mixed original games with lucrative licences, some of which were pulled from French-belgian comics.
Among them was Astérix Et La Potion Magique for the Amstrad CPC and Thomson MO and TO machines – a fun, cartoonlike platformer bundled with a mini-puzzle and a black-and-white comic called In 50BC. There was also Lucky Luke who starred in the 1987 game Nitroglycérine which tasked the hero with guarding a train over five episodes.
Coktel also had its own characters, among them James Debug who made his debut in Marianne Rougeulle’s platformer Le Mystere De L’ile Perdue.
This provided mystery escapism and tasked players with collecting pieces of a cassette recorder. It nestled among more lacklustre titles as the beat-’em-up Duel 2000 (which failed even to offer style over substance) and the marginally better racer Cap sur Dakar.
It wasn’t until 1987, however, that Coktel Vision really got into its stride thanks to the huge talent of Muriel Tramis who had joined following five years as a specialist in automation and computer science at the French weapons manufacturer Aérospatiale where she programmed military drones.
Despite being new to game design, Muriel – along with all of the other developers – was given freedom to pursue the projects she felt comfortable with. As a fan of adventures, she designed Méwilo for the CPC, TO7, Amiga and Atari ST, drawing upon Antillean culture as a nod to her roots in Fort-de-france on the Caribbean island Martinique.
Joining forces with Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the founding figures of the black literary movement Créolité, Muriel was convinced the tales and legends from that part of the world would make for a strong scenario within her game. In doing so, she took gaming in an bold, artistic direction, having players assume the role of a parapsychologist in a firstperson point-and-click adventure set in the days before Mount Pelée unleashed its destruction.
Published in French and German, it highlighted the island’s history, primarily through multiple-choice
puzzles, and it earned Muriel a silver medal from the Parisian department of culture, cementing a reputation for Coktel Vision in the process. Roland’s decision to allow developers to experiment had paid off, creativity if not economically. As such, Coktel continued to greenlight some sterling original work: the slave rebellion game, Freedom – a title that mixed adventure with role-play, strategy and combat – certainly ensured Muriel was able to continue marking herself out as a pioneering game designer.
The move was not always appreciated or understood. Issue 40 of Amstrad Action in the UK didn’t know what to make of Freedom, for example (“For: strong plot, historical setting etc. Against: trite rubbish, bad taste, etc”, it wrote). Eyebrows were also raised over Muriel’ more daring adventures, notably Emmanuelle: A Game Of Eroticism in 1989, based on the novel by Marayat Rollet-andriane about a woman on a voyage of sexual self-discovery.
Muriel produced Geisha and Fascination in the same erotic vein, promoting women in lead roles years ahead of Tomb Raider. She continued this trend with the pointand-click adventure Lost In Time, a boundary-pushing title that blended graphics with live action. Muriel would later say that she wanted her heroes to use logic, intuition and persuasion rather than blast their way out of the situations they faced. It helped set Coktel Vision apart from other studios.
Not that the publisher didn’t pump out tried-and-tested games. It released Asterix At Rahàzade (which was divided between a point-and-click and mazelike game). It also created more straightforward licensed racers such as Dakar 4x4 and Dakar Moto. At the same time, it continued to strengthen its educational portfolio and so a decision was made. “We created Tomahawk as a trademark label for the games and used Coktel for the education software,” says Arnaud.
Another division, MDO, was created too. Named after Matthieu Marciacq, Arnaud and Roland, this was responsible for the bulk of the company’s engineering, leaving graphic and design to be produced from Coktel’s offices on the outskirts of Paris, in 9 Rue Jeanne Braconnier, 92360, Meudon-la-forêt. All the technical departments were placed within MDO and the games it worked on included Muriel’ Gobliiins series which she developed alongside Pierre Gilhodes from 1991.
Gobliiins soon became the game most associated with Coktel Vision, putting the player in control of three creatures, one strong and athletic, one magical and one able to pick up and carry objects. They were used to solve difficult puzzles, sometimes by trial and error, and
the game made for an addictive, good-looking jaunt that achieved huge success outside of France, too.
Coktel’s solid background in development prompted Sierra On-line to acquire the publisher in 1992, with Sierra’s bosses, Roberta and Ken Williams, believing the company’s penchant for point-and-click adventures to be a good fit. Sierra’s strategy was to take Coktel’s success and capitalise on it worldwide, translating the French games into English and working to make them sit better with an American audience while getting Coktel to translate Sierra’s game into French.
Gobliiins II was published by Sierra as was the pointand-click Inca (an off-beat game that began in an ancient Incan temple but saw players shoot into space before settling on a floating, smoothly 3D-rendered Spanish galleon). Other titles included Gobliiins III, Inca II, Ween: The Prophecy, Bargon Attack and The Last Dynasty, all of which were marketed by Emma who loved the approach the French designers were taking.
Emma worked closely with the rest of the company. “I was based in the same building and on the same floor as the management, sales, marketing and development teams,” she says. “There were development teams for each games but since all of them were written in-house by the same staff, the same graphic artists, programmers and so on worked on various games, sometimes one after the other and sometimes at the same time.”
Thanks to her efforts, Coktel had a strong relationship with the French press and it grew its contacts in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain too. “I think the Coktel games were very aesthetic which is a very French thing in general,” she says of the reasons the titles seemed to go down well. “Inca was quite beautiful and the Gobliiins range had real original cartoon graphics. Games like Fascination, Geisha and Emmanuelle also had the ‘erotic’ touch that was not common in British or American games.”
As the Nineties wore on, however, Coktel became less prolific. It created an adventure series called Playtoons which ran for five games in 1994 and 1995 but it also suffered a major blow when Urban Runner, a sequel to Lost In Time, flopped in 1996. By this stage, Coktel had cornered as much as 75 per cent of the edutainment market in France, following Roland’s dream, making characters such as the alien Adi and his cousin Adibou well-known in schools up and down the land. It was decided that Coktel should become more focussed on education rather than adventures. Sierra On-line, meanwhile, continued to use Tomahawk as a distributor for its own games in Europe.
From that point on, Coktel pumped out one Adibou game after another and, when Sierra was acquired by Havas Interactive in 1999, the educational titles truly became its sole focus, with distribution mainly confined to Europe. “It was still a good time for Coktel,” contends Yaya Gacko who joined around this time. “Coktel was in a strong position with the Adi and Adibou series which were market leaders.”
Nevertheless, Roland left in 1999 and, three years later, trouble brewed when Vivendi – the company which bought Havas Interactive and renamed it Vivendi Universal Publishing – posted a non-cash loss of €13.6 billion in 2002, forcing the French chairman Jean-marie Messier, to resign. “It was a big turning point because the new management team thought the future was videogames and not education so the idea was to subcontract some Coktel titles such as Adiboud’chou,” Gacko says.
Muriel continued working on education games until 2003 and, two years after she left, the company was snapped up by Mindscape, with Coktel concentrating on edutainment titles again. The good times really had come to an end. “But for me, it was a great adventure,” Arnaud laughs, the irony certainly not lost on him.
coktel was in a strong position with the Adi and Adibou series which were leaders Yaya Gacko