Dotemu

Founded: 2007

Headquarters:

Paris, France

Dotemu is a French video game company specialising in modern releases of retro games. Founded in 2007, Dotemu used the technological know-how of its IT crew to maintain the original spirit of classic games while giving them a second life as rediscovered gems on modern platforms. In 2014, the company partly shifted from game remastering to video game development.

History

Founded in 2007 by Xavier Liard and Romain Tisserand, Dotemu is a video game developer and publisher. Based in Paris, they are specialised in retrogaming: they bring back the best games from the past on the most recent platforms. The company name was first stylised as DotEmu before settling for Dotemu, without a capital E.

They worked with talented creators from all around the world including companies like SNK or Square Enix and living legends like Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia, The Last Express), Yoshihisa Kishimoto (Double Dragon series), Frederick Raynal (Little Big Adventures, Alone in the Dark), Shinji Hashimoto (Final Fantasy series) or Eric Chahi (Another World).

For 10 years, they re-published a lot of classics from the West and Japan, porting them to modern platforms, sometimes by adding improvements over the original versions. To help them in this task, they created their own digital distribution service in April 2010 that sold games without digital rights management, similarly to Good Old Games. But they closed their online store on 1 June 2017 because of the strong competition in the Electronic Distribution Service market and their shift from video game distribution to video game development. In September 2015, Liard and Tisserand sold their company to an unnamed, private investor. Later that month, they founded a new video game publisher, Playdigious. Subsequently, in October 2014, Cyrille Imbert was appointed as Dotemu's chief executive officer. In March 2018, Dotemu announced the creation of The Arcade Crew, a publishing label that would support small development teams.

They first venture into complete remakes with Pang Adventure in 2016, which was quite a failure, and with Lizardcube and the digital release of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap in 2017. From then on, they started the development in parallel of the sequels of 2 video game series, cult series in France: Streets of Rage 4 in 2020 and Windjammers 2 in 2021. Those successes based on Japanese series led Nickelodeon to contact them to develop a videogame adaptation based on one of their licences. This resulted into the publication of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge with Tribute Games as the development studio in 2021.

Dotemu is the contraction for dot emulation, dot being the Japanese loanword to mean pixel.