Davidson & Associates

~ the obit ~

Math Blaster was the kind of software that lived on a cart of beige machines at the back of an american elementary school, wheeled in for forty minutes on a thursday. i was in a turkish primary school in the late eighties and there was no cart. The whole Blaster catalog reached me later and sideways, as a name in credits and acquisition histories rather than anything i ever sat in front of.

Bob and Jan Davidson started the company in 1982 in Torrance, California. Jan had been a teacher, and Math Blaster came out of wanting drill software a classroom would actually tolerate for a whole period. That turned out to be a much better business than it sounds. By february 1994 the company was doing forty million dollars a year, it had 327 employees by 1995, and over 800 by 1998.

On 18 february 1994 Davidson spent 6.75 million dollars on a small studio called Chaos Studios, which had been Silicon & Synapse and would shortly rename itself Blizzard Entertainment. Two years later, on 9 march 1996, it bought Condor, which became Blizzard North. So for a stretch of the mid nineties the parent company of the people making Warcraft and Diablo was a firm whose main product line taught long division.

Then it got expensive. On 21 february 1996 CUC International agreed to buy Davidson & Associates and Sierra On-Line together for about 1.8 billion dollars. The deal closed in july. The Davidsons resigned from operations on 21 january 1997, which is usually the tell.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the blaster money ~

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans shipped in november 1994, nine months after the purchase. Warcraft II followed in december 1995 and Diablo landed at the very end of 1996. All of it under a publisher whose identity in the trade press was educational software for nine year olds.

It is the most consequential thing Davidson ever did and it was not remotely the point of the company. Nobody in Torrance was buying an action-game studio to change gaming. They had cash from arithmetic drills and a small developer looked like a reasonable place to put it.

~ the fraud upstairs ~

CUC merged with HFS at the end of 1997 to form Cendant, and on 15 april 1998 Cendant announced it had found accounting irregularities on the old CUC side. Two CUC finance people admitted the numbers had been adjusted to hit targets. Roughly 300 million dollars of income turned out to have been invented across three years. It became one of the defining american accounting scandals of the decade and the stock went off a cliff.

A company in that position sells whatever is not core. In november 1998 Cendant agreed to hand its entire consumer software division to Havas of Paris for 800 million dollars in cash plus up to 200 million more in contingent payments through 1999. The package was Sierra, Davidson, Knowledge Adventure and Blizzard, sold as one lot to raise money for a hole somebody else had dug.

~ what replaced it ~

The brand itself did not survive long enough to be part of that sale in any meaningful way. In october 1998 Davidson was merged into Knowledge Adventure, which CUC had bought in january 1997. By december the company website was redirecting. By the end of 1999 the name had stopped appearing on boxes entirely.

Math Blaster kept going as a product line under Knowledge Adventure, which renamed itself JumpStart Games in october 2012 and was still shipping Blaster titles decades after the people whose name was on the door had walked away. Blizzard passed from Havas to Vivendi and ended up inside Activision Blizzard, worth more on its own than the 1.8 billion that had bought the whole family. Bob and Jan Davidson took the money and went into education philanthropy, which is at least a consistent ending.

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