DreamForge Intertainment

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

~ the obit ~

The name on a PC game box in the 1990s was the publisher's. The studio that built the thing was a line of small type somewhere on the back, and for about a decade DreamForge was that line on a lot of boxes.

It began in 1990 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, founded by Thomas Holmes and Christopher Straka with James Namestka, under the name Event Horizon Software. The name lasted until they discovered that a maker of pornographic software was using it too, at which point the company became DreamForge Intertainment, spelled exactly like that on purpose.

What it made was other people's worlds. DarkSpyre and Dusk of the Gods first, then a long run of licensed role-playing games for SSI, including Menzoberranzan and both of the Ravenloft titles. Anvil of Dawn arrived in 1995 for New World Computing and was named role-playing game of the year by Computer Gaming World. After that came War Wind and its sequel, a 101 Dalmatians tie-in, a TNN fishing game, and Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War. The spread tells you what the business model was, which was whatever a publisher currently held a license for.

In 1998 the only way to learn who had made a game was a magazine that chose to tell you, and plenty of them did not bother. Sanitarium circulated widely enough that people who had finished it twice would not have recognized the word DreamForge.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sanitarium ~

Published by ASC Games in 1998, Sanitarium is an isometric adventure that opens with a man waking up in an asylum with his head bandaged and no memory, and then moves him through a sequence of places that have nothing in common except that each one is wrong in a different way, from a town where all the children are deformed to a carnival of sideshow performers. It reviewed well, it has had a steady second life through re-releases, and in 2024 the Digital Antiquarian wrote the long piece about it that nothing else in the catalog has ever received.

ASC Games did not last long after publishing it. A Werewolf: The Apocalypse game that DreamForge had been building for ASC for years was cancelled along with the publisher.

~ myst ~

Mattel came to own Myst by way of The Learning Company, which had owned Broderbund, and in 1999 Mattel contracted DreamForge to build the fourth game in the series. The work ran from about June 1999 to June 2001. It ended because the franchise changed hands: the Myst rights went to Ubisoft, Ubisoft built its own sequel internally and shipped Myst IV: Revelation in 2004, and two years of DreamForge's version went into a drawer. A prototype of it circulates in descriptions under the title Adventure Beyond the D'ni Ultraworld and has never surfaced.

~ the closing date nobody agrees on ~

Wikipedia and the ScummVM wiki both give the year and no more. Giant Bomb gives 10 September 2001 and attributes the closure to failing to find a publisher after being dropped by Ubisoft. That date should be treated carefully: the German site Gameswelt was still reporting two new DreamForge role-playing games for the Xbox, Kehl and Legend of the Sun, on 3 October 2001, three weeks after the studio was supposedly already shut. Neither game was ever made by anyone.

A studio that only ever worked on contract has no catalog of its own to sell on the day the contracts stop arriving.

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