Digital Jesters
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Digital Jesters was a British video game publisher, based in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. The company was founded by Leo Zullo and Terry Malham in 2003 by veterans from CDV UK (after the UK office was shut by CDV), and their first UK-releases were TrackMania and Virtual Skipper 3, both by Nadeo.
In the beginning, they concentrated on the UK market only, but began publishing games in other regions as well. Notable releases included TrackMania Sunrise (UK & Scandinavia), Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich (UK & Scandinavia), the Pro Rugby Manager-series (UK) and Chaos League (UK).
In January 2006 it was announced that a winding-up order had been made in the UK High Court for the company [1]. This followed a period where the company was accused of withholding payments to various developers [2] they had worked with, resulting in some developers terminating contracts with the publisher. [3] It is not known whether this was the official end of the company, but their website disappeared soon after.
The last game the company released was a racing game based on the Crazy Frog-license in November 2005. The rights to the title are now said to be in the hands of Mercury Games, a company which has yet to publish any games, but is partly made up of former Digital Jesters employees.
[edit] Criticism
Digital Jesters was known to use Starforce copy protection that installs hidden drivers on a system, and is said by some users to cause problems with hardware and has compatibility issues with certain operating systems.
A well publicised "investment" by i-TAG (lead by Rakesh Gandhi) in the UK did not save Digital Jesters.
The company appears to have transferred its assets (e.g. the Crazy Frog Racer game) and key employees (Graham Chambers, Leo Zullo) to a new British Games Publisher called Mercury Games Limited, which claims on its website to be owned by Myriad Interactive Limited. Noesis UK Limited* appears to manage those UK companies. How these companies are linked to Myriad Interactive Limited and Mercury Games Limited in Hong Kong is not clear but they have shared directors and managers (some in UK: Richard Holland, Spencer Pratt, Rakesh Gandhi; David JW Bailey and some in Hong Kong: Kelvin Chan) who have previous associations with Rakesh Gandhi. The Mercury Games Limited company ownership and directors appear to terminate in Samoa from which corporate information is not easily obtained.
Although Digital Jesters described itself as a "Britsoft Publisher", none of its products were developed in the United Kingdom.
Terry Malham is no longer associated with the company as of 09/2006
* Please note that "Noesis UK Ltd" is in no way connected with the successful business consultancy Noesis Ltd, based in Esher, Surrey.
