Years will pass and what Pyro Studios achieved in the late 90s with the Commandos saga will always remain in the memory. We pull history now that its remastered version is released.
If something characterizes this country, it is not necessary for someone to throw stones at us from outside, since we ourselves are experts in doing so on our own roof. This is seen, and very well, with everything related to cultural material, and more specifically in the videogames sector.
There is no doubt that this vision remains today in 2020, although it is true that it is gradually disappearing from the collective imaginary. Of great blame is, of course, the excellent releases that occur in our country, and proof of this is that GRIS took a GOTY in the past The Game Awards or that Blasphemous and Temtem are bursting the sales list.
However, 25 years ago it was not so easy to take off this sambenito that today still colea. Who knows if by fighting this one, the Pérez Dolset brothers (Javier and Ignacio) founded the famous developer Pyro Studio. Now that Commandos 2 HD is launched, we remember the beginnings of the study and what the saga meant for it.
Embryo
For many, 1998 is the best year in the history of video games. Metal Gear Solid, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Starcraft, Half Life and a long etcetera that would give for dozens of paragraphs. Although at that time the simultaneous launching was a small chimera, it is still curious that the people of Pyro Studios chose that year to go to market. But before going to 1998, you have to go two years ago.
It all started in 1996. Ignacio and Javier Pérez Dolset wanted to develop a video game that was capable of competing with the main international developments. Ambition was not lacking in the project, so the first thing they did was to look for improper economic support for the time: almost 150 million of the old pesetas to carry out the production, which translated means 900,000 euros.
If you look from a current prism, the figure itself is astronomical for a Spanish video game. However, there was so much confidence in what was being done that even the agreement with Eidos, publisher of the first Commandos, was signed before the study existed.
“The idea of the game is prior to the creation of the company. Pyro is created later, with the contract with Eidos signed, ”says Gonzo Suárez, director of the first two deliveries, to the Deus Ex Machina publication in an interview. “Commandos was sold by chance. I believe that the people of Eidos received us for complying, without being interested in the game, but it happened that we were teaching them Commandos when Ian Livingstone came in the door and said: ‘This game looks good. We need a strategy game in the catalog. Buy it ’. And so we get the contract with Eidos. ”
That the co-founder of Games Workshop fell in love with Commandos as soon as he saw it for the first time was a vital requirement for Eidos to bet on production. But in this story one of the best known names in Spanish production, Gonzo Suárez, has just come out. His overwhelming personality earned him the reputation of being quite hard in development, something that he has never denied in interviews: “I am from the old school, from an already outdated model, that of the vertical direction. It wasn't nice working with me. ”
Suarez was able to lead the work team he had under his tutelage with the Dolset brothers and the last great piece missing in this puzzle: Jorge Blanco. Commandos stood out for many things that we will discuss next, but one of these sections was the artistic style. Blanco was behind it, which earned him to give him that characteristic tone he possessed. Four pieces of a gear consisting of a team that combined like a charm to create Commandos.
The origin
Eidos loved the idea and soon Pyro Studios was founded. Commandos rolled with very clear ideas; Now, what were these? The development was based on two basic pillars: the real-time action of several elite soldiers and the Second World War as a backdrop.
Like dozens of creatives – there are the founders of Medal of Honor or Hideo Kojima himself – the components of Pyro Studios grew with military cinema in their veins. Movies such as The Great Escape, The Canyons of Navarone or The Longest Day are part of the popular iconography of much of that generation. Dolset gave this idea and Gonzo, who came from the world of cinema (his father is nothing less than director Gonzalo Suárez), set the game mode.
"I wanted to make a game of five or six specialized entities in such a way that by combining them they would allow us to solve different situations," he said in an interview with Xataka. “Javier Pérez Dolset, Ignacio's brother, proposed setting him in World War II. I loved the idea because suddenly I imagined a little boy who could play in a diorama of the old ones. If you take a child to an exhibition of World War II dioramas, what he wants is to play with the little soldiers, but they won't let him play those scrupulously made models. ”
The "soldiers" quickly became six characters that will always remain in the memory of millions of players: the sapper, the sniper, the marine, the spy, the driver and, of course, the green beret. Six soldiers who had their own characteristics, each more varied, to overcome the missions that the game had, but always with the player's expertise as a central point.
The missions of Commandos had all the same outcome, but how it came to this was very different. The skills of the green beret were very different from those that the spy could have, hence the wise combination between them was what determined how the game was going to be. The importance was not a character, but the group as a whole.
This way of posing the gameplay was accompanied by a graphic and artistic section that is still remembered today. Thanks to an isometric perspective that suited him, the player always had control of everything that happened on the screen. He gave the tools and the plan, but the execution of them depended on him. In addition, the graphics engine fluently the animations and the whole set, something that was further enhanced by the output of the second part.
When the development ended and the game was put in stores, the reception took everyone by surprise: Commandos sold more than two million copies worldwide, a figure within the reach of very few games. “I remember a bet I made with someone on the team. He said that Commandos sold 400,000 copies and I said no, that if he sold them he invited him to eat at the restaurant he wanted, ”Suárez emphasizes in the interview. “I calculated about 100,000 and I was already happy. It was intended to be a niche game that started a license and became a mass market that saved Eidos accounts. ”
The editor, who received “by grief” to the developers a few years ago, now saw that she had a top-notch game. He was a sales leader in a total of 17 different markets, so the next move was clear: expand the experience.
To do this, the first thing they requested from Eidos was to create an expansion of missions. The idea was to expand what had been seen in the base game, but since Pyro Studios again bet hard and Commandos: Beyond duty is considered by many as an independent game. However, it was good for the coffers to continue to expand with a clear purpose: to make the best Commandos of all.
Commandos 2 and following
Performing a second part is always complicated. The task becomes even more complex if the first has been an overwhelming success, as happened in the Commandos saga. However, in the face of such adversity, Pyros Studios grew more than ever and gave birth to what is the best game in the entire franchise.
Commandos 2 updated the graphic section and introduced new characters to those already known, which led to a greater range of possibilities – and probabilities -. To carry out this development, the team grew – and a lot – to such an extent that the cost of development rose almost to 6 million euros. In addition, an arduous task was carried out: that of bringing the game to consoles (PlayStation 2 and Xbox), with everything that entails in a genre as difficult as that of the strategy.
After this second part, which surpassed the first and highlighted the supremacy of the Spanish study in our country, Pyro Studios began embarking on new projects. The first was Praetorians in 2003, an excellent tactical game that also swept sales. The proposal was almost similar to that seen in Age of Empires, but with Julio César's campaigns as a starting point. And the second was Imperial Glory in 2005, another strategy title that was closer to what Total War is in terms of military approach. Again, success in shelving.
In Pyro Studios everything they played was gold, but going back, it was at the end of 2003 when the first touch of attention came. In October of that year, Commandos 3 was released. Although the reception was good, it was below what was seen with the first and second delivery. The development team had changed (for example, Gonzo Suarez was gone), and some design decisions were made that are still today.
Some mythical characters of the saga did not enter the selectable template, something that the players did not like. Likewise, the number of available missions was reduced to almost half. Despite this, the game sold well and the Commandos saga already accumulated more than six million copies sold worldwide, but there were signs of exhaustion. And this ended up coming.
In 2005, the Madrid study presented Commandos Strike Force in society. Taking advantage of the boom in World War II games in the first person, the team considered it appropriate to make a title of this caliber, but with the Commandos saga as a backdrop. The result in 2006 was that of a product that was not bad, but that was far from the main competitors.
For many, Strike Force was the beginning of the end of Pyro Studios. Not only did Commandos have a better life as a saga, but the developments that ran in parallel did not end. This was the case of Cops, a game that never saw the light and was in preproduction during a whopping five years (for a while, in parallel with Strike Force).
“They left a pastón in a game that was in preproduction for five years. Three iterations were made: the first was an open world in the first person that was completely discarded until a linear game was agreed in the third person ”, a source commented to the journalist Jaume Esteve in his article in IGN.
Cops fell into a rookie mistake, something improper from a study like Pyro. He began to hire high-level people without a marked deadline, without someone who knew how to take the reins. In other words, it was a hole through which only the money was going, but there was no return on investment or the prospect of having it, which was the worrying thing.
The development is over and Pyro Studios laid off a total of 30 people, according to Gaming Bolt sources. But the problem – that it was – was not only that thirty developers, but Pyro had just sentenced his death: he never got to take a big game (beyond the adaptation of the Planet 51 movie), what which ended up causing a merger in 2012 with the developer Play Wireless.
From that moment, the study was renamed Pyro Mobile and its focus would be the games for mobile phones and tablets. Outcome? Smaller games and cessation of activity in 2017, when the worst news happened.
Of trials and courts
In summer of 2017 the hare was lifted: Ignacio and Javier Pérez Dolset were arrested in the framework of Operation Hanta, a police investigation that began in 2016 to clarify the complex framework of a supposed millionaire fraud in public aid and subsidies. Javier Pérez Dolset entered prison for three weeks, during which he paid a bail of 60,000 euros to be released.
Regarding Commandos, Pyro Mobile S.L. and Zed Worldwide S.A. (also a Dolset company) received almost one million euros in grants to carry out "an experimental development project to create the new generation Commandos video game." Simply lend a hand to the newspaper archive to see that the game never reached the market, although its deadline should have been December 2016. The sources consulted by Meristation at the time also confirmed that the game had been canceled, as demonstrated by the time three years later (and, in fact, even public aid stopped by this process).
At this time, the Hanta operation is still in the instruction phase. Sources close to the case admit the complexity of this cause, since other entities such as the Russian tycoon Mikhail Fridman, the largest shareholder of the Day group and related to the network of Zed. Fridman and Pérez Dolset now maintain a litigation that goes for long.
Who knows if for all this legal maelstrom in which they are still immersed, and just a year after the UDEF (Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit) launched its operation, Kalypso Media took all Pyro Studios licenses to date , which included the Commandos brand, as well as strategy games.
Now, luckily, we have Commandos 2 HD, in addition to an important new version of Praetorians. A new life for the franchise far from the legal and media focus that so little thanks, and with Pyro Studios remaining, beyond judges and judgments, as it really was: a giant that David defeated by trusting and making fun of God.
