Conception and In the Interest of Ratings (1997–98) In the late 1980 while brothers Renan and Roy Gluzman was at the age of 13 and 11, they began their computer gaming career by creating games and animations on Macromedia Mac Director software. After Renan left the Israeli army and while his brother Roy was still a member, they set up a small graphics business in
Pardes Hanna (פרדס חנה), where they did routine projects for commission. In 1997, one of their projects reached the desk of the CEO of video game distributor Hed Artzi Multimedia (הד ארצי מולטימדיה), the multimedia arm of Israeli record label
Hed Arzi Music, who liked the illustration style of the duo and suggested they create a Hebrew-language computer game. He gave them
NIS 10,000 in return for 50% of the future profits from the sales. The game contained intertextuality, inside jokes, irony, and cynicism. Glutzman recalls that Guillotine was not particularly well managed, lacked business planning and didn't have a financial focus, and instead consisted of a naive team who wanted to simply make something "fun and cool". At the time of the game's release, Ronan published his phone number to allow stuck players to phone in for help. and would ultimately sell or over 7000 copies. They achieved this without reducing the original selling price.
Haaretz asserts that many thousands more probably illegally pirated it. The game originally had text and voice-work in Hebrew, though a few years later it was made available in both English and Russian, Due to the title's low minimum requirements, it was able to be played on computers with weaker processing power. While not officially a
Piposh title,
In the Interest of Ratings has a link to the series; within
Piposh, the main character – a flawed actor – claims to have played Egoz in the previous game.
Rest of the series (2000–04) Roy left the series during production of the second game, believing that in addition to piracy, the distribution networks weren't as efficient at bringing video games to stores as other products like Israeli music. After leaving, Roy moved away from sensationalist nature of the entertainment and gaming industry, and instead focused in personal creative projects. By 2003 he was living on 30 shekels a day. Each time the developers made a game, they did it independently and without external funding. By this point the developers had grown tired of their distributor and sought to use Indogram, which represented fewer games and could therefore invest more time into each. Guillotine had aimed to translate their first
Piposh game to break it into the international market, but the text and dubbing translations became an astronomical task due to the original game having a badly-constructed programming interface. The foreign adaption of the first game is known worldwide by its English title. and also created a comic book which was published by Hed Artzi, released under the title "Piposh and Other Vegetables" (פיפוש ושאר ירקות) which could be purchased from the official Guillotine site. They also lectured to youth at an animation and comics festival at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. A spin-off television series named
Batheshet Moav (בטשת מואב) – ten episodes in length and about five minutes per episode – first aired on the Beep channel in either 2001 A previous concept for the show – where viewers could interact by choosing which of two outcomes they wanted to watch – was offered to Fox Kids. A fourth game (excluding the spin-off) was to be released but this was eventually cancelled. The developers sold an "I'm Pipposi Proud" game package, which included 5 game discs including the first three titles, plus a demo of
Piposh 3D and a disc with rare files and documents.
Aftermath (2005–17) The last title developed by Guillotine was the network-strategy nonsense game
Vajimon, which saw players fight against each other over the internet using a variety of vegetables. Renan Gluzman left the industry soon after due to the financial and mental burden the series had given him, The program was started by Dr. Diana Silverman Keller who discovered while writing her thesis that there was no formal education in the field of game creation in the country. She noted that "despite the success of Israeli high-tech, the Israelis do not excel at developing games". Keller contacted Renan, who at the time was known as the "spiritual father of the Israeli gaming community", and he soon became a central figure in the program. On May 7, 2008, on Israel's 60th
Independence Day, all Guillotine games were re-released free to download on the Internet. By this time, it was impossible to get the games anymore, as there were no orderly backups. As part of the campaign, the brothers aimed to print special nostalgic shirts, as this was a common fan request. The official website of the project wrote that while the developers were unable to reach the quality level of the official games, they hoped to emulate it as much as possible. The producer/director was Ben Werchizer, the artist/designer was Daniel Avdo, the music and dubbing producer was Itay Jeroffi, and the writer was Shahar Kraus; Video game archivist and founder of the
Movement for Preservation of Games in Israel Raphael Ben-Ari got in touch with the series' creators and detailed the story behind its development process and in a documentary film. The documentary was uploaded to YouTube on Ben-Ari's
Oldschool account. Ben-Ari believes the work boosted the
Piposh community in Israel and introduced the series to many new people. During this time,
Piposh was surrounded by a loyal fanbase who held onto the franchise even while no games were in active development. Writing a game quote in one of the Piposh Facebook groups would be met with relevant written responses and memes, and links to legally download the games. Over the years, the large community of fans who love and reminisce over the series "ran Facebook groups, organized events and constantly asked for a new game". A new installment, simply titled
Piposh, was released in April 2021. == Critical reception ==