Cryo Interactive: Dune, Atlantis and the French CD-ROM Dream

Cryo Interactive was the most ambitious French studio you have probably never heard of. Founded in Paris in 1990 by Philippe Ulrich and Remi Herbulot, it fell hard for the CD-ROM, and for a decade it poured that new storage into lavish, arty, exotic adventures that looked like nothing else. It made the very first Dune game in 1992, a haunting blend of adventure and strategy that beat Westwood's real-time-strategy classic to the desert. It built the sunken world of Atlantis, the FMV races of MegaRace, and a dozen other beautiful, strange experiments.

This is the studio's run: the first Dune, the exotic CD-ROM adventures, and one of the boldest, most distinctly French visions in games. Here is the map.

The French dream of the CD-ROM

When the CD-ROM arrived, most studios saw more storage. Cryo saw a canvas. It filled discs with hand-painted worlds, full-motion video, ambitious soundtracks and settings no one else would touch: ancient Atlantis, Egypt, the far future, Carthage, Dracula's Europe. The results could be uneven, even janky, but they were always ambitious and unmistakably French, more interested in atmosphere and beauty than in polish. Few studios have ever swung this big, this often.