Cyberlore Studios

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

~ the last words ~

Six people started Cyberlore in Northampton, Massachusetts in October 1992. Two of them, Lester Humphreys and Ken Grey, had come off SSI's Dark Queen of Krynn, and SSI gave the new studio its first job: Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse, built in fourteen months and shipped in 1994. Entomorph followed in 1995. The company grew to 28 people by 1998 and about 30 by 2000, which was a mid-size American studio at the time.

For most of the 1990s the work was other companies' franchises. Cyberlore built Beyond the Dark Portal, the expansion to Warcraft II, for Blizzard in 1996. It built The Price of Loyalty, the expansion to Heroes of Might and Magic II, for New World Computing in 1997. Accolade got Deadlock II out of them in 1998, and Microsoft's MechWarrior 4 got two add-on packs in 2001 and 2002. Work-for-hire studios of that era mostly vanished without a single title anyone remembers as theirs.

Cyberlore got one. Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim shipped on 21 March 2000 through Hasbro Interactive under the MicroProse label and sold over half a million copies. Jim DuBois, a senior designer, had the idea. Nobody has quite copied it since.

~ the record ~

~ you could not give the hero orders ~

Majesty's trick was refusing the thing every other strategy game is built on. You did not command units. You built a kingdom and taxed it, and the heroes who lived in it went off to do whatever their class felt like doing, warriors picking fights while rogues went looking for anything unguarded. The only lever you had on them was money. Put a reward flag on a rat-infested sewer and whoever felt like earning it would show up, and sometimes nobody did and the sewer stayed infested while your tax base burned.

It reviewed around 76 percent and kept selling on word of mouth long enough to earn a Mac port that December and a Gold edition in January 2002. No Turkish publisher stood behind a game like this, so it arrived the way most PC strategy did, as a foreign box on a shelf months or years after the English-language press had finished with it. The internet cafes I knew between 2002 and 2005 ran Counter-Strike on every screen and nothing that took forty hours.

~ Hip Interactive goes down ~

The last Cyberlore game was Playboy: The Mansion, out on 25 January 2005 for PC and consoles through Arush and Groove Games, scoring around 60 on Metacritic. The studio was simultaneously trying to get a sequel called Majesty Legends financed, and could not find anyone to pay for it.

Then the Toronto publisher Hip Interactive collapsed. Game Industry News reported on 16 September 2005 that Cyberlore was cutting the entertainment side back because of the financial pressure from that bankruptcy plus the loss of new business prospects, and that the Majesty rights were for sale. The president, Seth Spaulding, put the studio's own record in the obituary: "We bucked the industry trends for thirteen years as we transitioned from developing DOS games to Windows games." Two thirds of the staff were laid off. The company said it was helping them find work.

~ what the website still says ~

Paradox Interactive bought the Majesty intellectual property in July 2007 and announced it had over half a million copies of sales history behind it. Majesty 2 arrived in 2009 made by other people. A small core of Cyberlore stayed on under the name Minerva, selling game-based training software for sales and customer service staff, and nearly the only record that this happened is one line in a 2006 retrospective interview.

Visit cyberlore.com in 2026 and it answers. The page is titled Cyberlore Retail and lists the games with little thumbnails in a table, the copyright notices still reading 2000 and 2001, every link underneath a dead store. Somewhere around 2007 somebody stopped updating it and nobody since has turned the server off.

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