Muse Software

~ the obit ~

Muse Software was incorporated on 1 August 1978 by Ed Zaron in Baltimore, Maryland, under the full name Micro Users Software Exchange. Its first employee was Silas Warner, a man roughly six foot eight and around three hundred and twenty pounds, who had been writing software at Commercial Credit and who would end up being the reason anybody remembers the company at all.

The early catalog was not games alone. Zaron wrote Super-Text, a word processor that sold steadily into the Apple II business market and kept the lights on. Warner wrote The Voice, a program that let an Apple II play back recorded human speech through hardware that had no business doing it, and then spent the next two years finding out what a game could do with that.

At its peak in 1983 Muse was doing over two million dollars a year with around forty people. Two years later it was down to six employees and filed for Chapter 7. The corporate charter was formally found in forfeiture on 7 October 1987, but the company had stopped being a company well before that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the store on charles street ~

For four years Muse ran a retail shop on the corner of Charles Street and Mulberry Street called the Muse Software and Computer Center, with the store downstairs and the developers upstairs. It closed in 1982. That arrangement is a fossil of a specific moment: a software company that had to sell you the computer first, because the installed base it was writing for was small enough that recruiting new owners was part of the job.

~ the voice and the castle ~

Castle Wolfenstein came out in 1981. Warner built it with Dale Gray and George Varndell, and it put you in a Nazi castle with a pistol and a stack of locked doors. The guards shouted at you in tinny digitized German through the same speech code Warner had written for The Voice. You could take a uniform off a corpse and walk past a checkpoint. Getting caught was normally fatal and the castle layout changed between games, so there was no route to memorize.

Nobody had built that before. It is stealth as a game verb, years ahead of the word existing, on a machine with a one-bit speaker. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein followed in 1984, with a knife in place of the pistol and a bomb to plant under Hitler. Space Taxi arrived the same year on the Commodore 64 with the sampled cry of "hey taxi" that anyone who owned that machine can still hear on request.

~ five thousand dollars ~

When Muse liquidated, a court trustee sold the assets to pay creditors. The copyrights and trademarks went to a jobber named Jerry Herskowitz, trading as Variety Discounters, which is the least glamorous possible destination for a piece of gaming history. The Wolfenstein trademark then sat there and lapsed.

In 1991 id Software wanted the name for a first-person shooter John Carmack was building, and Jay Wilbur was given the job of finding out who owned it. He had to work the greater Baltimore area to locate the rights-holder, and id paid five thousand dollars. Wolfenstein 3D shipped on 5 May 1992 and turned into one of the foundational products of the entire medium. Muse had been dead for seven years and got nothing, and the version of the name that eventually reached Turkey was id's shareware disk rather than Silas Warner's Apple II game, which arrived here as a piece of trivia attached to somebody else's franchise.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »