Company Brief
Titus Interactive was founded in 1985 by brothers Eric Caen and Hervé Caen in Paris, France. They originally began releasing titles on the Commodore Amiga and PC, eventually moving on to home consoles. They also operated a US branch named Titus Software Corporation. The company went public on the French stock market in 1998.
After experiencing several years of rapid growth (at once point approaching the size of rival Electronic Arts), Titus made a number of what at the time were high profile acquisitions including BlueSky Software, Digital Integration, Virgin Interactive Entertainment (renamed to Avalon Interactive in 2003) and a majority stake in the also publicly traded Interplay Entertainment Corp. which was experiencing financial difficulties. After acquiring their stake in Interplay, Hervé Caen was named its CEO after co-founder and long time CEO Brian Fargo announced his resignation.
In the years following, Titus releases began a rapid and continuous decline in quality (the low points of which are the infamously awful Superman 64 and Robocop for the original Xbox), with few receiving even mediocre review scores and experiencing very poor sales as a result. They were also unable to turn around Interplay's fortunes, experiencing poor sales on their titles as well, even the few that reviewed well. Titus continued to pour their resources into Interplay, hoping that they would ultimately lead a return to success for both companies. This never happened and resulted in the sudden collapse of both companies (including all their subsidiaries) in 2004, leading to a number of highly publicized legal battles with employees, investors, developers, landlords and tax agencies, many of which are still ongoing. Eventually, the French government forced Titus Interactive into liquidation but named Hervé Caen as the person in charge of administring said liquidation, after which he reportedly promptly transferred what few assets Titus had left to Interplay, leaving investors with absolutely nothing. Interplay does continue to exist as a publicly traded company with Hervé Caen as CEO and is reportedly working on new internally developed projects.
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