Hey gamers, d’you ever think about France?
France is the second-largest producer of video games in the world, behind the USA.
Video games are one of France’s biggest industries. And France has the largest European population of gamers.
A dubious honor if I’ve ever heard one.
On top of all that, in France. Video games. Are legally. ART.
Basically, games are about as French as a robust cabernet. But fun fact, it’s only a
jeu vidéo if it comes from the jeux vidéos region of France. Otherwise, it’s just sparkling
digital amusement.
It seems kind of counter-intuitive. I mean, France is known for its food and its paintings
and its mimes. Art, but the low-tech kind. I wanted
to find out how and why France got so big in video games — basically, how did we end
up in a world where Nintendo looked around and said “Um... yeah we wanna work with the Rabbids?
That’s what we like? GIVE MARIO A GUN.”
All of this can be traced back to the early, weird days of French video games — before
the industry went global, before AAA games really even existed. A time when French developers
were making offbeat, sexy, political games that reflected their own reality.
[robotic masculine voice speaking French] J'ai vraiment un faible pour les cheveux Simone. Texture, longueur, soyance, brillance,
fourches ou pas fourches... couleur. Êtes-vous blonde?
[Simone] - This is La Femme Qui Ne Supportait Pas Les Ordinateurs — The Woman Who Couldn’t Stand
Computers, written by Chine Lanzmann and published by Froggy Software in 1986. In it you play
a woman in an online chat room encountering various characters who ALL want to have sex
with you, one of them being your own sentient computer.
Robot: Le sexe vous intéresse, mmmmm? Woman: Non.
Robot: Le sexe vous intéresse, mmmmm? Woman: ...oui.
Robot: AYAYAYAYAYA. Et avec un ordinateur, moi par example, ça vous branche?
Woman: Non. Robot: Tant pis.
- The writing is so good: it feels nasty and uncomfortable to play, but... it’s also
really funny? The characters are just so ridiculously thirsty and pathetic. But still, there’s
no way to get out of being harassed and talked down to. La Femme has a branching narrative
that can lead to six endings: all of them suck.
The game was based on Lanzmann’s own experience moderating discussions on the French network
Calvados, a sort of pre-Internet message board, among other things. And if you’re thinking
wow, wild that one of the earliest French video games is about being a woman getting
harassed online, THAT sounds weirdly topical, well — that was not really out of place
for French games in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Sure, you had your racing games, and faux-Donkey Kongs, and your Chess sims. But there were
also a surprising amount of developers who were using games to explore their FREAKIN’ ISSUES.
Some of the main culprits here were Froggy Software, a company started by Jean-Louis
Le Breton and Fabrice Gille. Offbeat, political games were Froggy’s whole MO,
and oh, did they play both sides. Along with La Femme, they published a game called Baratin Blues,
which satirized right-wing Parisian mayor Jacques Chirac’s attempts to privatize
the Parisian water system. It’s also topical!
But they also published Le mur de Berlin va sauter — the Berlin Wall is gonna BLOW — a
game where you’re trying to stop a gay leftist terrorist from yeah, blowing up the Berlin
Wall. I think that’s the plot of the next Far Cry game?
Le Breton and Gille were both “soixante-huitards” — participants in the May '68 protests that
almost tore France apart. May ‘68 was about protesting capitalism, consumerism,
and American 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 had always taken center stage in the United States, but France developed
a reputation for making, well…
Weird games. But what this guy saw as “weird” is probably just the fact that French games
were by the French, for the French. Instead of fantastical action-focused titles, developers
were exploring France’s difficult history, and its depressing present. In Mario you’re
throwing fireballs at giant turtles in a rainbow-colored dream world. It’s weird, but it doesn’t
reflect anyone’s reality, which almost makes it more accessible. In French games, you’re
going to le Tabac to buy a pack of Gauloises and having depression about what your father
did in the War.
This mix of past and present is maybe most obvious in games from Betrand Brocard, the
founder of Cobra Soft. In Meutre a Grande Vitesse, the first game in Brocard’s “Murder”
series, Brocard sets the action on the TGV, France’s brand-new high-speed train which
started running in 1981 — hey hey! Once again! Topical! The murder victim is a senator who had sold out one of
the other passengers to the Gestapo during the war — history! And in the second game
the player is trying to catch a serial killer on the island of Sark — and regrettably,
once again, there are Nazis. They keep coming back.
And meanwhile, over at Ubisoft — no, no, it's not Assassin's Creed. It's a different
game where past and present collide. In Conspiration you play a modern person who gets knocked
on the head and transported to 1795, in the fallout of the French Revolution.
You have to choose between supporting the monarchists, or upholding the new Republic.
26 years before Assassin’s Creed Unity! Nowadays Ubisoft is one of a few massive global
powerhouses in the games industry, but back in the 80s they were just one of several companies
making funky and yes… political… adventure games, set in the real world.
But the most groundbreaking 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 give it up and make games. Tramis eventually landed at Coktel Vision, where she was given
free rein to make whatever the hell she wanted. Seriously, she made educational games. She
made a classic puzzle-adventure series called Gobliiins. She made EROTICA just because SHE
FELT LIKE IT.
But the two games she’s perhaps best known for are Méwilo and Freedom. Méwilo is an
adventure game set in Tramis’ homeland of Martinique, and co-written with Creolité
author Patrick Chamoiseau. The game stars a paranormal psychologist in 1902, investigating
a city LITERALLY haunted by France’s imperialist past. Present. Both?
But that’s just a pre-text for experiencing the “economic, political and religious life,”
in St. Pierre. The game earned Tramis a Silver Medal from the Ministry of Culture in 1988.
Her follow-up project was Freedom: Rebels in the Darkness, a strategy game in which
you play an enslaved person in Martinique organizing a rebellion against slave owners.
It’s bloody and violent, but also complex: a lot of the strategy is simply trying to
convince people to join you, despite the risks to their lives and their families. It was
a revolutionary narrative for its time, AND ALSO FOR NOW, THE NOW TIME.
In the 80s, French games were also taking inspiration from French comic books. By this
time, comic creators had fought back against “save the children” censorship and they
were going wild with freedom. Adult-focused stories like Les passagers du vent were adapted
into video games.
Elsewhere, magazines like Heavy Metal, founded in France as Métal Hurlant, influenced the
way that French games looked:
Captain Blood was one of the biggest games to come out of this time. It sold over 100,000
copies worldwide. In it, you play a game designer who gets sucked into his own game, don’t
worry about it, and has to communicate with and gain the trust of various aliens using
a symbol-based keyboard with 150 icons. The aliens each have their own languages and different
associations with the symbols — one alien’s term of endearment, might be another’s raunchy
insult! BEWARE! Basically, you want to peacefully negotiate across the language barrier.
(Gonna tell my kids this was Undertale.)
Captain Blood’s gameplay was praised and criticized in equal turn, but no one had a
problem with its visuals, which combined the twisty mechanical designs of H.R. Giger with
the bright colors and surrealism of sci-fi artists like Enki Bilal.
Bilal’s work also inspired a wee little company called Ubisoft, to publish B.A.T.,
a sci-fi adventure where you’re hunting down SPACE criminals in SPACE dystopia. B.A.T.
also plays like a comic — new scenes load up as different panels in the interface — it
looks really freaking cool. Oh yeah, it’s also anti-capitalist.
So, these are the games of the 80s. But how did we get from here… to here?
The French government did play a role in founding France’s game industry, beyond fueling the
hatred of a million French people. France got a late start in games: In the early ‘80s
Japan and the U.S. dominated the home console and arcade markets. But then — DISASTER!
The video game crash of ‘83! Lucky for France, they didn’t have a game industry — YET.
The French were JUST GETTING STARTED: the government begins making its own MICROCOMPUTERS!
Household PCs got more popular in France. SIDE EFFECT? A lot of first-time programmers
get to muck around and make games.
AND THEN — CULTURAL RECOGNITION? YES!!! Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture wants to
VALIDATE POP CULTURE! Video games are PART OF OUR HERITAGE - says Lang.
(I'm paraphrasing here)
He forms OCTET, a GOVERNMENT AGENCY that supports French games with contests and
grants.
A lot of these moves were pragmatic: France wanted to grow its tech industry. Promoting
games was a way of making more programmers.
But that wasn’t what made the industry special: it was these countercultural creators coming
in and treating games as a great place to explore their own lives: “Humour, politics
and new technologies seemed to be an interesting way to spread our state of mind,” Le Breton
said about creating Froggy Software.
More succinctly, Muriel Tramis said in an interview: “France loves stories.” And
video games were just another way to tell them.
But this counter-cultural moment … still couldn’t survive its old enemy… capitalism.
As the industry matured into the 90s, consoles came back in a big
way, and while these weird narrative text adventures were great and all... action games
were where the money was.
The Circle of Life continued: some companies folded, or their founders just moved on. Others
were devoured by bigger companies. Coktel Vision, where Muriel Tramis did so much of
her work, merged with Vivendi in 2003, and Tramis found that she just didn’t like the
new company culture — she had less creative freedom, so she went to FOUND HER OWN COMPANY
AND STILL MAKES 3D SOFTWARE TODAY. DAMN, MADAME.
That little story is pretty indicative of the way games publishing as a whole has gone.
Companies become larger, make games for a broader audience — and when you appeal to
a broad audience, everything is diluted.
In the case of French developers (and all developers, let’s be real) “broad” eventually
came to mean an anglophone playerbase. A lot of games that come out of European developers
will have a majority English-speaking… and more importantly, majority American audience.
Games are being made to cater to us.
But the legacy of those early French games still lives on.
They were so unique at the time that academics had to coin a phrase to describe them. "French Touch" came to mean
a “cinematic look and approach to storytelling,” or “Strong narratives,” or “Real-life
settings.”
They're still arguing about it.
Nowadays, we’ve come to expect all of that from AAA games. But in the ‘80s, France
was doing it better than anyone. Those early adventure games helped show the
rest of the world that games can tell great stories, and they don't have to be action-packed to be interesting.
Massive publishers like Ubisoft may dominate the news cycle these days, but there are still
French indie developers out there making their own offbeat, sexy, political games that
reflect their own reality, just like the auteurs of the 80s once did.
But nowadays, these ones are a lot more fun to play holy cow have you ever tried to play
a game from 1983, that was several years before I was born,
they didn't even have mice back then.
It is sometimes a challenge to figure out what the game wants you to do!!!!
I had a good time! It was great. I don't want to devalue their contribution to the culture but OH. MY. GOD.
I'm just. I'm too young for this. I'm too YOUNG for this!! Oh! Dear! Oh dearie me! Haaaaaa....