PF.Magic

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

~ the eulogy ~

PF.Magic did not start out wanting to make animals. It started as a hardware company building a thing called The Edge, a Sega Genesis accessory that would put two players on opposite sides of a city into the same fighting game over a telephone line. AT&T was funding it. Sega was the partner. Then AT&T worked out what the box would cost to actually manufacture and pulled out, which left a San Francisco company holding roughly half its money and no product at all.

Rob Fulop had come off Night Trap, which spent 1993 being denounced in a US Senate hearing, and he wanted to build something at the opposite end of the register. He also had a research method nobody else was using: he talked to department store Santas, who told him the item children asked for above everything else, decade after decade, was a puppy. The studio already had the rendering trick from Ballz, a 1994 fighting game where every character was assembled out of spheres, because a sphere looks identical from every camera angle and costs almost nothing to store.

Dogz shipped in 1995 with that same math pointed at an animal. What made it work was not simulation. The dog on your desktop tracked the cursor and had opinions about being ignored, and if you were cruel to it the cruelty stuck. Catz followed, then Oddballz in 1996 for people who wanted something less domestic. By 1998 Dogz and Catz had passed 1.5 million copies between them and the company was selling plush toys under the Petz trademark, which is a rare direction of travel for a software house.

Fulop's own name for the sales model was the puppy dog close. You got five days with the animal for nothing, and then twenty dollars bought a lifetime supply of food. It worked because handing the thing back was the expensive part. That model needed a credit card and a billing address in a country where the company had a bank, and in 1996 neither of those was sitting in a Turkish apartment waiting for a twelve year old to use them. What made the crossing to a place like this was the software with its commerce stripped off, which is a version of the product PF.Magic never had to put a price on.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually sold ~

The breeding was the other half of the business. Adult Petz could produce Puppyz and Kittenz, and crossing two breedz produced a mixed one, which meant the population on a given machine kept generating things the catalog had never shipped. A game that manufactures its own content while you sleep does not need a sequel every year, though PF.Magic shipped them anyway.

Players went further than that. The file formats were legible enough that people reverse engineered them and started building their own breedz, toyz, clothes and playscenes, a practice the community called hexing after the editor most of them used. PF.Magic allowed it, Mindscape allowed it after them, and Ubisoft has allowed it since, which is why there are still Petz files being made in 2026 for a game whose developer stopped existing in the Clinton administration.

~ the day it died ~

The Learning Company closed its purchase of Mindscape on 27 march 1998 for 150 million dollars. Seven weeks later, on 14 may, it bought PF.Magic outright in exchange for 496,627 shares of common stock. That is the end of the company as a company. Babyz came out the following year with The Learning Company on the box and PF.Magic people inside the building doing the work, uncredited as a studio.

Then the corporate machinery kept moving without them. Mattel bought The Learning Company in may 1999, lost so much money on it that the chief executive was gone within a year, and paid Gores Technology Group to take the whole thing away in october 2000. Ubisoft picked up the entertainment catalog in 2001, which is how a French publisher ended up owning a virtual dog invented by a man who used to write Atari 2600 games.

~ the long tail ~

Under Ubisoft the Petz brand passed 22 million copies, most of them handheld titles bearing very little resemblance to the thing Adam Frank and Ben Resner designed. The three million the original Petz line eventually sold is the number that matters, because the first of them went out in 1995 to people who had to be convinced that a computer was somewhere you would keep a pet.

Andrew Stern, who wrote code and designed for PF.Magic, spent the next five years with Michael Mateas building Façade, an interactive story where you walk into an apartment and try to keep a married couple from tearing each other apart. It was free, it was academic, and it is still cited in every argument about whether software can hold a character. The line from a virtual puppy that remembers being mistreated to that is shorter than it looks.

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