Octopus Overlords

Went to their website, has NO links to Support or Contact us.

Bought one of their stuff on Clerance (read: very cheap), but it won't run, keeps on insisting for the CD or some stupid error like that.

It's mostly junk any way.

I haven't seen anything by them in several years now, and I'm pretty sure they weren't at E3 last year. They sure seemed to come and go rather quickly - I think the only game I had by them was Takeda.

And X-Plane

Though previously they did Jane's Attack Squadron, and F/A-18 from Graphsim.

But that was several years ago.

I could be wrong, but I think they were bought out by another company, perhaps JoWood.

How does JoWood buy anybody? I thought they were still bankrupt?

JoWooD neither is bankrupt nor ever was bankrupt. It was really close in late 2002, when a number 1 hit in the German market (Gothic 2) saved their asses. Now they´re once again struggleing. They pulled the emergency break a few weeks ago. The whole supervisory board quit and the CEO´s contract was not renewed. The new CEO closed 2 studios and put every problem he found into a catastrophic 2004 financial statement.
The closed studios are JoWooD Ebensee (Giant series) and Wings Simulations (Panzer Elite, Söldner). The first earned money, so it´s clear that JoWooD has serious problems if they have to close a profitable studio. Wings´ closure is a shame. Of course Söldner was a more or less unavoidable (-> compare Teut Weidemann´s post mortems on video and in the latest Gamestar issue!) failure, but Wings went through some changes mid last year and had an obvious upward trend, not to speak about the enormous know-how they collected during the last years. I bet they could have made a kick ass game out of a smaller project like Panzer Elite 2.


Xicat is bankrupt, afaik. Plus some of their business partners sued them for unpaid royalties, etc.

Oh well I was right in the end, the answer was bankruptcy either way