Biography | Tero Virtala — Ubisoft Bought the Trials Studio on This Vallila Block

The sale was announced from Helsinki on 2 November 2011.

French publisher Ubisoft had bought RedLynx, the studio behind the physics motorcycle series Trials.

Tero Virtala was the chief executive.

He was not a founder.

Brothers Atte and Antti Ilvessuo had registered the company on 17 August 2000, first as Punainen Ilves Laboratoriot, then as RedLynx from 2004.

Virtala had run it since November 2002.

By the time of the deal the studio sat in Vallila, on Kumpulantie, a 1969 office block later converted for tenants.

Ubisoft still lists Kumpulantie 3 as the Helsinki address of Ubisoft RedLynx.

The price was never disclosed.

What was public was the catalogue.

Trials HD had become one of Xbox Live Arcade's durable sellers, with more than a million copies on that service alone and multi-million sales across the series.

RedLynx had also shipped DrawRace on iOS and earlier Nokia N-Gage work such as Pathway to Glory.

Virtala's argument for selling was distribution, not escape.

A wider audience, he told the trade press, would get the games, and the brands would be worth more inside Ubisoft's digital channels.

Yves Guillemot, Ubisoft's chief executive, pointed the other way: asynchronous online play and physics systems that could travel across platforms.

The acquisition was Ubisoft's second of 2011, after Owlient.

Virtala stayed.

He remained managing director through Trials Evolution and Trials Fusion, then left in April 2015 after more than twelve years.

The building on Kumpulantie is still a workplace, not a museum.

The street is mixed office and housing in inner-north Helsinki, a few kilometres from the cathedral and a short walk from Pasila.

Nothing on the façade announces that a motorcycle game once paid for the floors.

The fact is in the filings and the press releases: this is where a Finnish digital studio chose a parent, and where Virtala practiced the multi-project habit he later took to Espoo.

Photo: Paju, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Kumpulantie 9, Vallila, same street as the RedLynx studio block.