Studio Tanuki: The (incomplete) history of a french Flash Studio
When we go back on the history of web games, we mostly talk about independent creators. It is especially true for Flash games, where the most recognizable figures made their names on platforms like Newgrounds. These people who rose from amateur developers to respected indie figures are inspiring and provide good stories, but it makes us forget that Flash games were often produced by professional studios.
Nowadays, the idea of a studio solely dedicated to making Flash games may feel like a joke. But in the early 2000s, the Flash format was the new big thing, and many new companies were branded as “Flash Studios”. The Internet was already developing an identity of transgression, and these companies wanted to put themselves in contrast to the predictable, clean-looking video game industry. But how do you conciliate the philosophy of the early Internet with a company’s reason for being: making money?
To better understand this era of game making, I want to talk about Minami Hamazaki Dating Simulation.
Minami Hamazaki Dating Sim (often simply called Dating Sim) was a French Flash game published in 2002. You play as a Japanese teenager who bets with his friends that he will seduce Minami, the most popular girl of their high school, before Valentine’s day. Like any dating simulator, the goal is to balance school, work, character improvement and time spent with Minami in order to win her affections before the deadline -and, thus, your bet. The game was very popular among French teenagers, although some of its content makes me feel that it was aimed more at young adults. One factor of its popularity might be very simple: The game owned the domain DatingSim.com, making it highly visible on the relatively small Internet of the time.
What made this game stand out among the thousands of dating sim Flash games around the Internet were its many undeniable qualities: the writing is funny, the art style is gorgeous, clean, colorful and full of details. On top of this, it is fairly long. There is a large amount of options and activities, making it very easy to immerse yourself in the universe of the game: you can go to the cinema, study and/or train hard to get prestigious jobs. You can even read mails, and reply with a nice, neutral or mean response. To sum it up, Dating Sim is a very well-polished game, against which very few Flash games of the time could compete. Obviously, as the introduction suggests, it was not created by amateurs, but by Studio Tanuki.
Founded in Lyon (France) in 2000, Studio Tanuki was self-described as a group of artists and developers, specialized in Flash projects. Their first notable production was a short animated film called Pinpin Lelapin — L’attaque du Poulpe Rouge Géant, which won the Public Award at the Annecy Festival, and was eventually turned into an animated series for the television. Studio Tanuki was an incredibly prolific studio on the Internet. Among their most popular productions, you can find an online multiplayer Strip Poker game, a manga-oriented art portal, a game to learn Japanese, the list goes on. All these projects are very different, but also have very clear points in common: an interest in the Japanese culture and the Anime art style, a focus on the Flash format, and a desire to build a community around free contents.
When I started writing this article, I wanted to tell the full story of Studio Tanuki, but it quickly appeared to me that it was almost impossible. Many of their creations got lost over time, and there are no exhaustive list of their projects, so it is hard to get a grip on how many Flash games and websites they created. On top of that, nearly every website they worked on is now defunct. In fact, the very few remaining informations about the studio are on their quite short Wikipedia page.
Instead, I decided to examine the history of Studio Tanuki and the evolution of their identity by focusing on the website DatingSim.com, by far their most recognizable production. A lot of the informations in this article are based on various snapshots from the WayBack Machine, articles from other websites and a little bit of speculation. I also contacted Nicolas Flory, co-founder and art director of Studio Tanuki to ask him a few questions, but I didn’t get all the answers I needed. I also tried to get in touch with Utku Kaplan, but to this date I haven’t received any answer.
With Mekolaï Chauvet and Utku Kaplan (the other co-founders), we had noticed the craze for this genre of games in Japan, said Nicolas. We were all three gamers, and […] we wanted to create a game in this genre, free and online.
Over the years, we can see how Studio Tanuki tried to capitalize on the growing popularity of the game. In 2003, DatingSim.com got its first update, moving from a simple frontpage for the game to a fully user-oriented website. Visitors could subscribe in order to track down score, participate to special events, or simply interact with each other. Around the same time, the website started to host advertisements. To be fair, it was very tame in comparison with other websites of the same era, taking the form of product placement into the game, or brand-related articles.
The game became quickly well-known and got a large community, said Nicolas. Considering the very large amount of connected players, the game started to cost us money.
By the end of 2004, DatingSim.com went under construction, preparing for a third version. The original game was still playable on the front page but many of the user interfaces were no longer available, until they completely disappeared after a major technical problem in 2005. Despite the setbacks, Studio Tanuki published a blog post announcing their new project: Takeshi Yamada Dating Simulation, a more ambitious sequel to Dating Sim where you play as a woman and try to seduce a man.
After the announcement, DatingSim.com remained in that state for a very long time. A few informations were given about the new game, before the website went completely silent, acting just as a front page for the Dating Sim game, as it was in the first place. Although there are no official reasons for the complete lack of communication, Studio Tanuki might have been going through an identity crisis, where they were not sure how to continue producing free content on the Internet and make a living out of it. According to the Wikipedia article, in 2004, Tanukis Design, which existed almost since the beginning of the studio, separated itself from Studio Tanuki, who “wanted to continue making Flash content as a passion”. The new company, renamed Tanukis, “preferring a more professional approach”, was meant to produce games and animations in Flash commissioned by other companies. That structure is not that uncommon; we can easily understand why they decided to shift their business model around it. But what impact did it have on their other projects, the ones made “as a passion”?
By the end of 2008, a new version of DatingSim.com was available, very different from what they advertised over the past years, and with no mention of Takeshi Yamada Dating Simulation. The website was now very professional and clean-looking, with English and Spanish versions available. The original Dating Sim game was no longer the main focus of the website (before being completely erased a few years later). Instead, the spotlight was put on Lovely Juliet, a new visual novel clearly inspired by the previously abandoned project. More on point, the games were not free anymore, with the main game being divided in chapters, each of them costing a certain amount of in-game currency.
The number of players made us think about a way of generating income in order to support development and hosting costs, said Nicolas Flory. […] we didn’t want to lose the spirit of the game. We finally opted for a pay-per-episode model.
The most interesting change in the website was not notable at first glance: Studio Tanuki wasn’t credited anymore, the website being now attributed to Tanukis. DatingSim.com was now fully integrated in the business strategy of the company and no longer considered a passion project. Also, a new major actor was credited: Lexis Numérique, as co-producer and editor. You might know this French game studio for the infamously bad Xbox 360 game Amy from 2012. Nicolas Flory stated that their influence was positive for the game and the studio. It was certainly true, as it appeared Lovely Juliet grew a large audience on the Internet, probably different from the one of the original website.
This video from a local TV channel gives an idea of the various projects of the studio in 2010. While Lovely Juliet is shown in the background, Utku Kaplan mostly talks about their animation work, the pilots for the television series they were working on.
As for their Flash games production, this portfolio for serious games published in 2011 shows some of their projects, mostly commissions for companies or viral ad campaigns. Flash was already on the decline and had a bad press as a unsecure web plugin, it is not hard to imagine there wasn’t a big market anymore for professional Flash game creators.
Despite the success of Lovely Juliet, and an announced season 2 for the game (now curiously advertised as an “interactive web-serie” and no longer a dating sim), in 2014, Lexis Numérique went under liquidation, and not long after, the website DatingSim.com was put offline. According to Nicolas Flory there was no direct correlation between the ends of Lexis Numérique and DatingSim.com, stating that “Tanuki’s financial situation was difficult around the same time”. Although it is not a stretch to imagine that, with their producers and editor closed, Dating Sim couldn’t be financially supported anymore.
In 2016, Tanukis also went under liquidation. Although there are no official statement about the end of the studio, it is clear that the original identity of Studio Tanuki was long gone by that time. The original makers of Dating Sim probably parted ways to undergo their respective careers, and Studio Tanuki’s official website, last remnant of the studio as it was originally, is now reduced to a mere frontpage.
And here we are today, with Studio Tanuki gone and none of their websites still available. But what about the original Minami Hamazaki game? Well, several websites copied the Flash file, so it can still be played in some way, but it doesn’t work properly. When launched, the game tries to load resources from a server that doesn’t exist anymore. As a result, many key items are invisible, making the game almost impossible to play. I have no proof to corroborate the claim, but I suspect these resources are the product placement I talked about earlier in the article.
I used to love Dating Sim as a teenager, I spent so many hours in that game. Despite some conflicting feelings I have about some of its content, as one of the very few French Flash games I knew, it has a special place in my heart. This game was at its core a passion project, not made with a monetary goal in mind, but a desire to create something unique. And, more importantly, it shaped the identity of Studio Tanuki for the twelve next years.
The game Minami Hamazaki Dating sim […] initiated and contributed to the identity and the creative process of the studio, said Nicolas Flory. After this, companies like Lego, Orange, Universal,etc… contracted us for creating games and animated movies.
Studio Tanuki (and Dating Sim) allowed many talented people to work with prestigious companies on a lot of projects. With three offices in France and many young artists employed, it might not exist anymore, but its legacy lives on. As an example, Nicolas Flory is now Art Director at Foliascope, an animation studio where they work on projects that are very reminiscent of the animated series Tanukis was working on around 2010.
To me, the story of Studio Tanuki feels like many other web companies, starting with great ambitions, producing a large amount of content, and then slowly shutting off, not because of the quality of the content, but simply because the Internet evolved beyond what they wanted to do. Very few of them were able to manage the shift of trends on the Internet. Motion Twin, who started by making free-to-play Flash games and massively online browser games, are now best known for their PC and console game Dead Cells. Recently, Nitrome, the very prolific Flash game studio announced that they will port all their games in HTML5, still federating a community around them.
Studio Tanukis didn’t fail in any way: companies come and go, that is simply the way of business. But the identity of Studio Tanuki, what made them special, is what eventually disappeared, letting all their projects slowly fade away. Sadly, sometimes you can’t live from your passion.
As a conclusion, I hope this article will reach people who know a little more about Studio Tanuki and their productions. There are so many other websites, games, animations I couldn’t talk about, so many projects I have very few informations about. Nothing would please me more than hearing from people who remember them, were part of these communities and played these games. Share your stories, write about past games and websites, help them not to fall into oblivion.
That’s the best we can do.
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Thanks to Nicolas Flory for answering my questions.
Thanks also to Antoine Dailly and Francis Janvier for their very useful proofreadings, and again, for being very good boys.
Sources : Wikipedia, Archive.org, Societe.com, Linkedin, Foliascope.com, Youtube
