Pendulo Studios S.L. is a Madrid-based video game developer founded in 1993 by Ramón Hernáez, Felipe Gómez Pinilla, Rafael Latiegui and Miguel Angel Ramos. Since the company's 1994 debut project, Igor: Objective Uikokahonia, it has specialized in graphic adventure games. Pendulo first achieved mainstream prominence in Spain via Hollywood Monsters (1997), which met with critical and commercial success in the country but was never released beyond Southern Europe.
The company broke into the international market with its third game, Runaway: A Road Adventure (2001), whose hit status in Europe contributed to the reenergization of the adventure game genre. It also saved Pendulo from bankruptcy, following the closure of its publisher Dinamic Multimedia. Thereafter, Pendulo created two sequels to Runaway; the series collectively had sold more than 1.5 million units worldwide by 2010. After the release of Yesterday in 2012, Pendulo entered another period of financial uncertainty, but in 2014 signed a deal with Microids that led to the creation of Yesterday Origins, Blacksad: Under the Skin and other titles.
As of 2019, Pendulo Studios was Spain's longest-running active game development company. The company has been cited as a major force in Spanish game development, particularly in the adventure genre. In 2017, the Spanish publication HobbyConsolas declared Pendulo "synonymous with graphic adventures in Spain" and one of the country's most significant developers.
History
Early years: 1993–1997
Pendulo Studios was established in Madrid during September 1993 by Ramón Hernáez, Rafael Latiegui, Felipe Gómez Pinilla and Miguel Angel Ramos. The founders had been students together in college, and they formed for the purpose of creating a graphic adventure game. While Spanish developers like Aventuras AD had released successful interactive fiction games in the 1980s, including those with graphics, a fully graphic adventure game had never been made in Spain.
The result was Igor: Objective Uikokahonia in 1994, a game developed in dire economic circumstances by Pendulo's four founders, assisted by two contractors. While Spain's game industry had thrived in the golden age of Spanish software, the 16-bit era had heralded a market collapse for game development in the country. Pendulo later noted that "there was practically no national production and the prospects were not too encouraging" when Igor began, and Latiegui recalled a moment when the team nearly abandoned the project because of low financial projections by publishers. The team's funds were limited—Gerard Masnou of GameLive PC reported that Igor was made on a budget under 400,000 pesetas—and working conditions were poor. Pendulo was located for a time in the corner of a warehouse in Madrid's Arganda del Rey municipality. According to Latiegui, Igors development was "absolutely amateurish", and he noted that the team was self-taught throughout production. In retrospect, Pinilla summarized Pendulo's situation during Igor as a serious challenge. Nevertheless, Latiegui later called the game successful enough to inspire Pendulo to pursue game development as a profession.
Ramos ultimately left Pendulo after Igors completion, but Latiegui, Ramón Hernáez and Felipe Gómez Pinilla chose to continue the company alone. Pendulo's second game was Hollywood Monsters. The team found it to be a significantly greater challenge than Igor had been, and its budget was tight. It required a long production cycle of around two and a half years. Including the voice cast, roughly 40 people contributed to Hollywood Monsters, most of them outside contractors. Hernáez said that managing the large number of contributors was the "most important change" to Pendulo's development process since Igor. Pinilla told Game 40 that development would have gone faster with more contributors, but that it was "impossible to have more people." Spain's game development industry remained weak during production: Francisco Delgado of Micromanía cited Hollywood Monsters as one of the few Spanish-made games under development in 1997. To obtain a theme song for Hollywood Monsters, publisher Dinamic Multimedia hired the band La Unión to record an original track.