Fact sheet

Here are some unsorted Sphinx facts and tidbits that key people from the community found after interviewing many of the original developers. We may expand on some of them in the future and properly source them, if we get permission, but getting the information saved somewhere is still important.

• Most of the original artists met in a 3D animation course taught by Víctor Garrido at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Master of infography). Garrido created a group of talented students to create a character animation group out of nothing.
  • They did an animation study of the contemporary Disney films, and Garrido managed to capture the plasticity of 2D animation in 3D, something that was difficult at the time.
  • The original Anibyte team was made up of Víctor Garrido, Ximo Catalá, Julián Romero, Jose Luis García Cámara, Ana Amat, Germán Porto and Víctor Ferrández, among others.
  • They started the Luna project, which was very ambitious for the time and that opened the doors for foreign American and English companies. Contacts were initiated with Eurocom and work began from Valencia for 40 Winks.
  • At the end of that project there was an offer to work in the UK in the Eurocom offices.
  • Some commented about Anibyte being some kind of offshoot or split from another animation/commercial-focused company from Valencia named 3de3.
• The people at the head of Eurocom saw the work that Victor Garrido and the Anibyte artists had done for a CGI demo and got in contact with them to work on 40 Winks. Anibyte did all the cutscene work on that.
• The people from Anibyte were brought from Valencia afterwards to work at the Derby studio and began to concept out an idea together.
• They liked Egypt thematically and as the base setting because of the rich history.
• The title changes were made trying to find something seemingly easy to trademark. Given that «Sphinx» is very vague and common.
• The original conceptual 3D models were NURBs, then low poly models were crafted from scratch around those, no automated tools (like retopo helpers) were used.
• Eurocom owned the franchise rights from the start.
• The game seemingly did not sell very well during the Christmas release and it was hard to market for, given the mix of genres and setting. It did reportedly break even, eventually, as it had long legs. The GameCube version did not perform as well as expected, and it was not a popular genre for the Xbox so it ended up depending on stronger PS2 sales.
• Some developer mentioned that after the game went gold, the time frame for concepts for a sequel didn't last long. Maybe a couple of weeks. It was supposed to be a much darker version than the original, taking inspiration from Dante's Inferno.
• Found a nice breakdown of the THQ business and sales in 2003, the whole thing is pretty interesting, you can see PC goes into a secondary section, but grows to the point of surpassing GameCube: http://getfilings.com/o0001104659-04-016791.html

  For certain internally developed concepts, we contract with independent software developers to conceptualize and develop games under our supervision and may own the intellectual property. We pay the independent developer a development fee in advance. Once we have recouped the expenses of the development fee, the independent developers generally receive a contingent compensation based on a percentage of net sales. We also contract with independent software developers to conceptualize and develop properties, under our supervision, based upon either original concepts created by the developer or licenses we acquire. For these products, we generally pay either a development fee or royalty compensation based upon actual sales. The royalty compensation is based upon a percentage of net sales, ranging from 4% to 20%. We typically pay our independent developers installments of the development fee (and, in the case of royalty compensation, advances against future royalty payments) based either on specific development milestones or on agreed-upon payment schedules. The intellectual property is owned by either the developer or the licensor

  So if the game broke even Eurocom may not have gotten much money at all from that 4-20%. I think. That probably explains the lack of sequel.
• After asking, nobody has given a reason for the cancellation so far.
• Some mentioned that the team moved to work on a bunch of secret preproduction projects, one of them for Sony, suspected to be concepts for some earlier incarnation of Uncharted, due to the jungle Pre-Columbian era aesthetics. That was also cancelled or passed to other team and they began to work on Batman Begins, using the references given by the studio doing the movie and then making up the rest, no more information is known about this so far. Much of the same team would eventually work on Disney's G-Force.
• There was an Xbox 360 version that never got released. They seemingly never finished the native Xbox 360 version. There was a debug build to exist at one time at THQ. It was the same game; upressed a little.
• A long-time artist was surprised to find that the PC and Switch re-releases were not based on some unreleased version they reportedly worked on while at Eurocom together with (at least) another art person. No time-frame was provided and it was only mentioned obliquely.
• Ximo Català, Jose Luis García Cámara and others from the original game reunited for some Unity-based mobile game that used the Sphinx 3D assets and themes, there are some portfolio images with the Unity and Android logos showcasing Luxor.
  • This was made for EightPixelsSquare, a Derby mobile game studio that was based on the same Eurocom House premises and that retained some of the existing developers.
• There are videos, probably from the same project, of some kind of infinite runner starring the Mummy and Bas-Ket. For unknown reasons it never materialized.
• THQ Nordic bought the Sphinx franchise rights from EightPixelsSquare in 2016.
• EightPixelsSquare was later acquired by Miniclip in 2020. As of 2024, Steve Duckworth (the Sphinx music composer) still works there, among other ex-Eurocom staff.