Founded 1986 · Westlake Village, California, USA · Founders: Bob Jacob,Phyllis Jacob · First game: Defender of the Crown (1986)
Cinemaware sold computer games as movies you could play — swashbucklers, gangster pictures, 1950s creature features — and built them for the Amiga, the one home machine that could make the pitch look true.
Bob Jacob was a film buff, and Cinemaware was his theory of what computer games were for. Founded with his wife Phyllis in January 1986, initially under the name Master Designer Software, the company set out to make games that borrowed the genres, pacing and visual ambition of Hollywood pictures, prioritising spectacle, strong graphics and ease of play over depth of simulation. Its first release, Defender of the Crown in 1986, was a medieval strategy game built around jousts, sieges and swordfights that looked unlike anything else on a home computer, and it launched first on the Commodore Amiga. That choice was the company's method: its games generally debuted on the most graphically powerful home computers of the era — the Amiga, Apple IIGS and Atari ST — before being scaled down for everything else. The catalogue that followed ran through the film genres one at a time: The King of Chicago (1987) was a gangster picture, Rocket Ranger (1988) a Saturday-morning serial, It Came from the Desert (1989) a 1950s giant-ant B-movie, and Wings (1990) a First World War flying drama, alongside a TV Sports line covering football, basketball, baseball, boxing and hockey. Cinemaware went bankrupt in 1991, hit by falling sales in an economic downturn and by piracy on the Amiga so pervasive that the company threatened more than once to stop publishing for it. The name was bought in 1999 and revived in 2000 to remaster the old catalogue.
"Interactive movie" later came to mean full-motion video on CD-ROM, and it mostly meant disappointment. Cinemaware got there first with floppy disks and pixel art, and its version worked better because it never tried to be a film. It took the grammar of cinema — the establishing shot, the close-up, the cut to the villain, a score that swelled at the right moment — and wrapped it around short, legible pieces of play: a joust, a sword duel, a dogfight, a fistfight in a speakeasy.
The weakness was the same thing seen from the other side. The individual scenes were often thin as games. What Cinemaware sold was presentation, and presentation depended on the Amiga's graphics and sound. When the ports arrived on weaker machines, what remained was a simple game with the spectacle removed.
Cinemaware's identity was tied to the Amiga more closely than almost any American publisher's, and that bond was both its making and part of its undoing. The machine gave its games a showcase no rival computer could match. It also had one of the most active software piracy scenes of the era, and the company repeatedly threatened to stop publishing Amiga games because of how easily they were copied. Combined with falling sales during the economic downturn at the turn of the decade, it was enough to push Cinemaware into bankruptcy in 1991.