Delphine Software: Another World and the French Art of the Cinematic Game

In the early 1990s, while most games were about points and lives, a small studio in Paris was quietly making cinema you could play. Delphine Software gave the world two of the most influential games ever built in France: Eric Chahi's Another World, a wordless, rotoscoped science-fiction dream made almost single-handed, and Paul Cuisset's Flashback, a hand-animated action-adventure that became the best-selling French game of its era. Both looked and moved like films, and both proved a video game could carry real atmosphere, real artistry, real feeling.

This is the studio's run: the cinematic platformers that changed the medium, the Cinematique point-and-click adventures that led to them, and the games that followed. Here is the map.

The cinematic game, made in France

Delphine's signature was motion. Where other studios drew characters as sprites that snapped between poses, Delphine rotoscoped real movement, so its heroes ran, jumped and stumbled with a weight and grace nothing else had. Paired with widescreen framing, moody colour and stories told through action rather than text, it created a house style that felt unmistakably cinematic and unmistakably French. Two of the games it produced this way, Another World and Flashback, are still studied as landmarks.