Creative Wonders

» see creativewonders.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Creative Wonders began in 1994 as EA Kids, a division inside Electronic Arts aimed at the one part of the CD-ROM market that was actually making money. Parents would buy a disc if the character printed across its front was one their child already loved. The division was renamed, and in 1995 ABC came in alongside EA as an equal owner. That arrangement only makes sense in that specific decade, when a television network could look at a software house and see a distribution channel for its own brand.

The first thing the partnership produced was the ABC World Reference Series, a set of CD-ROM atlases and encyclopedias built on EA's 3D Atlas. That title had been made in London by The Multimedia Corporation, a BBC company, so the finished product was a British production carrying an American network's logo and sold by a California games publisher. You can read the whole structure of the mid-nineties multimedia business off that box art.

Everything else in the catalog was a licensed character. Sesame Street arrived first in 1994, then Madeline and Schoolhouse Rock! in 1995, then The Baby-Sitters Club in 1997. Three more licenses opened in the final year alone, among them Arthur and Dr. Seuss. The Sesame Street line was the deepest of them, running the whole length of the company's life, from Numbers and Letters in 1994 through to Baby and Me in 1999.

In 1998 The Learning Company bought all of the equity in Creative Wonders LLC from ABC, by then a Disney subsidiary, and from Electronic Arts. Mattel agreed to buy The Learning Company that December and closed the deal on 13 May 1999, at which point the whole operation became Mattel Interactive. Creative Wonders was dissolved during 1999 and its titles went into the pile. Mattel sold the pile on to Gores Technology Group the following year at a famous loss.

~ the record ~

~ abc and electronic arts ~

The company logo is the clearest artifact it left. Underneath the wordmark sit two owner marks side by side at the same point size, the ABC circle and the Electronic Arts name, with neither one subordinate to the other. Joint ventures usually bury that arrangement in a footer. This one printed it on the front of every box, because the whole proposition was that a parent could trust the network and the publisher at once.

The proposition assumed an American household. It wanted a CD-ROM drive and a child who already watched ABC on Saturday mornings, and the network doing the reassuring on the front of that box did not broadcast anywhere I could see it. I was eleven the year the ABC World Reference Series shipped.

~ cid 208 ~

The dissolution date is a corporate fact. A brand going quiet is a different event with a different date, and here the website went on without the company behind it. The capture from 29 April 1999 still describes Creative Wonders as "the top-rated family software publisher" and still lists the products, but the meta keywords on that same page had already been updated to include The Learning Company and Mindscape beside Electronic Arts. The acquisition had reached the one field on the page nobody ever looks at.

That same description and that same keyword list were still going out on 19 October 2000, well past the dissolution of the firm whose name was on them. Somebody was keeping the storefront lit.

Then on 26 February 2001 the domain stopped answering for itself and returned a redirect to learningco.com/Category.asp?CID=208. Five years of licensing deals and two corporate parents, resolved to a query string on somebody else's catalog page.

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