TITUS: PLAYER OR PRETENDER?

It's like a new term at computer gaming school. The traditional cool guys are back, Electronic Arts sporting a shiny new duffel bag and, strangely for a student, not already broke. Epic are there in the corner, showing off the (slightly) unexpected success of Unreal Tournament to Cryo, the tatty-but-improving Gallic developer who finally has an above-80% review score to go with his screwed-up imagination and the cuts and bruises of many years of battling. Then the register is called. Some of the old faces have left. Interplay and Virgin Interactive Entertainment have cut the class, still licking wounds, and unable to pay for tuition. But there is someone in their place. Wearing their bomber jackets and carrying their bags! Ah, yes. He must be the guy with the French accent. "Hey, dude! What's your name?" "Titus," he mutters.

Titus, to quote its website, is "Europe's fastest growing games developer and publisher." But yet they are still the guy at the back of the class whom no one has heard of. Up until the point where he ate three of your classmates, and started coming after you. Then ID Software, Epic and the crew all started taking notice. So, you may ask, to quote Busta Rhymes "Where the hell you comin' from?" They are coming from "Le Noveau Marche" in France, led by brothers Herve and Eric Caen.

I follow with an extract from their 1999 financial results: PARIS, France, September 27, 1999 - Titus Interactive (Euro NM:TITP), the leading interactive entertainment software company, today reported its results for fiscal year ended June 30, 1999. In line with expectations, the company realized spectacular growth of both net revenues and net income. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1999, net revenues grew 87 percent to FF260 million compared to net revenues of FF139 million for the prior year. Net income increased 80 percent to FF16.8 million or 15FF per share compared to FF9 million or 8FF per share for the same period in the prior year.

During the fiscal year ended June 30, 1999, Titus launched four major games, Virtual Chess for the Nintendo 64, Evil Zone for the Sony PlayStation, Superman for the Nintendo 64 and Quest for Camelot for the Color Game Boy. Titus sold in excess of 1.5 million games for the fiscal year and grew from 43 to 120 employees as a result of the successful integration in 1998 of the California based developer, Blue Sky Software and the UK publisher Digital Integration. Sales projections for the current fiscal year for Titus products are FF400 million, showing an organic growth of over 50 percent.

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