DreamCatcher Interactive

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

~ the eulogy ~

The received history of the adventure game is that it died around 1999, somewhere between Grim Fandango selling badly and the first-person shooter taking the whole shelf. The received history is wrong by about a decade, and DreamCatcher Interactive is most of the reason.

Richard Wah Kan founded it in Toronto in 1996. The first release was Jewels of the Oracle, and the drift into adventure games was not a strategy so much as a discovery: the company's own staff described finding out that customers were still hungry for the genre, mostly by publishing something like Beyond Time and watching who bought it. In 1999 it pushed out Nightlong alongside The Crystal Key, and The Crystal Key alone ended up accounting for 32 percent of the next year's sales. Dracula: Resurrection and Beyond Atlantis covered most of the remainder.

In March 2000 DreamCatcher was bought by the French publisher Cryo Interactive, which was itself four years from liquidation. When Cryo collapsed in late 2002 the arrangement reversed: DreamCatcher bought most of Cryo's assets and development teams out of the liquidation and stood them up again under the name DreamCatcher Europe, offices and internal studio included. By early 2003 a Canadian adventure-game specialist was the tenth largest game publisher in the United States.

~ the dossier ~

~ the label ~

In January 2002 DreamCatcher launched The Adventure Company as a brand to put its adventure releases under, and the first title out of it, The Cameron Files: Secret at Loch Ness, shipped before January was over. The label outlived the company in public memory, because across most of that decade it was what you looked for on a box when you wanted a game where you talked to people and picked up objects. It carried work from Kheops Studio and Microïds, and it ran a long series of Agatha Christie adaptations. A second label, Silverline Software, appeared around 2004 for utilities and for a run of horse games aimed at girls.

Her Interactive signed with DreamCatcher in November 2000 to publish Nancy Drew, which is how a generation of North American kids got their first adventure game without anybody describing it to them as one.

~ painkiller ~

The outlier in the catalog is a first-person shooter. Painkiller, developed in Warsaw by People Can Fly and published by DreamCatcher in 2004, was loud and extremely fast, and it sold on a scale the adventure titles never approached. It was signed into the Cyberathlete Professional League's 2005 World Tour as the tournament game, which put an adventure-game publisher's logo in front of the competitive shooter audience for a season.

Painkiller is also the only DreamCatcher release with a plausible route to a Turkish machine, because a shooter travels on word of mouth and a LAN and an adventure game travels on a retail shelf that never stocked it. People Can Fly went on to Bulletstorm and then into Epic's orbit. DreamCatcher did not go on to anything.

~ the day it died ~

JoWooD Entertainment announced the purchase of DreamCatcher on 3 November 2006, wanting a North American presence and the licenses that came with it. For five years the labels kept shipping, including JoWooD's own SpellForce games under the DreamCatcher name. Then JoWooD filed for insolvency on 7 January 2011, bankruptcy proceedings opened that April, and DreamCatcher filed too because there was no longer anything above it.

Nordic Games Holding took JoWooD and The Adventure Company on 16 August 2011 and announced on 17 November that it had all of DreamCatcher's assets as well. Everything became a publishing label operated out of Vienna. Nordic Games is now THQ Nordic, the DreamCatcher Interactive trademark is registered to THQ Nordic AB, and dreamcatchergames.com is still serving the site it was serving in 2007, down to Genesis Rising on the front page.

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