Broderbund Software

USA · Founded 1980 · Closed 1998 · 1980 – 1998

Broderbund Software was among the most respected publishers of the Apple II and early personal computer era, producing Prince of Persia, Myst, the Carmen Sandiego series, and Print Shop — software with a quality and originality that made it a favourite of both educators and enthusiast gamers.

Broderbund was founded in 1980 by brothers Doug and Gary Carlston in Eugene, Oregon. Doug had been playing a text-based trade simulation game on a borrowed computer and, unable to find a publisher for it, decided to self-publish. Gary, a Harvard Law graduate practicing in Scandinavia, joined the venture. The name Broderbund — a rough rendering of "brotherhood" in a Scandinavian-Germanic hybrid — reflected the company's origins in Doug's Scandinavian gaming contacts, where he had acquired distribution rights to European software for the US market. The early catalogue mixed original development with US distribution of titles sourced from European and Japanese developers, giving Broderbund an unusually international perspective on what software could be. The company settled in San Rafael, California, and built its reputation on Apple II software of unusual quality and ambition. Bank Street Writer (1982) was one of the first word processors designed for educational use and became the standard writing tool in American classrooms through the mid-1980s. The Print Shop (1984) introduced desktop publishing concepts to home users before Aldus PageMaker existed, and its clip-art-and-banner printing capabilities made it one of the best-selling Apple II programs ever released. These productivity titles gave Broderbund revenue stability and educational market access that its gaming titles alone could not have provided. The Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? series, introduced in 1985, was designed by Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliott as an educational entertainment hybrid — a geography-based detective game in which players pursued a mysterious thief across world locations, learning geography, history, and cultural facts as part of the chase. It was bundled with a World Almanac and became standard in American elementary school classrooms through the late 1980s and 1990s. The franchise spawned sequels covering US geography, European history, time travel, and eventually a syndicated television game show. Carmen Sandiego became the most successful educational game franchise of its era and one of the most significant educational technology products ever developed. Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia (1989) was developed over five years on an Apple II using a rotoscoping technique Mechner derived from frame-by-frame tracing of his brother's movements on film — producing a protagonist whose animation was more fluid and physically plausible than any contemporary game character. Broderbund published the Apple II version and its subsequent ports, which appeared on every major platform of the early 1990s. The game's fluid animation, puzzle-platformer design, and tight time limit made it one of the most acclaimed action games of the personal computer era. Mechner developed the sequel, Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (1993), also for Broderbund. Myst (1993), co-published with Cyan, became the best-selling PC game in history at the time of its release and remained so until The Sims surpassed it in 2002. The point-and-click exploration game built around pre-rendered 3D imagery and puzzle-solving appealed to an adult audience that conventional action games had not reached, demonstrating that CD-ROM's storage capacity could be used to create immersive experiences rather than simply faster versions of existing game types. Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company in 1998, ending its independent existence.