Purple Moon

» see purple-moon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Purple Moon built games for American girls between eight and fourteen. In 1997 I was thirteen, a boy in Turkey about a year away from my first modem, which puts me outside the target audience on every axis it had. This is not a grave I can claim any part of. It is here because the company is one of the few in games history that started from research instead of from a genre.

Brenda Laurel founded it in november 1996 in Mountain View, out of Interval Research, the lab Paul Allen was funding at the time. The four years before that were the actual work: interviews with girls about what they wanted out of a screen, run properly, before anybody drew a character. The finding that shaped everything was that the competitive loop the industry ran on, the score and the timer, was not the draw. What held attention was social navigation, which is a polite way of saying the politics of being twelve.

Two titles shipped in 1997. Rockett's New School put you inside a girl's first day at a new school and made you choose how she responded to people. Secret Paths in the Forest was slower and closer to a place you went to think. Laurel has said they outsold Madden for one quarter, which nobody at the time believed was possible for the category.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The website was the half that has aged into something recognizable. The site at purple-moon.com let registered players trade virtual items and keep up with the characters between releases, with parental consent required at signup, in 1997. Everything that later got called a virtual world for kids was doing a version of this a decade afterward with a subscription attached.

The retail channel was the problem. A CD-ROM aimed at girls in 1997 went into a store aisle organized around boys, next to boxes with dragons on them, and got shelved wherever a buyer thought it belonged. Purple Moon was doing category creation and shelf education simultaneously, on Allen's money, with a burn rate that assumed both would work quickly.

~ the day it died ~

Neither worked quickly enough. Losses ran to something near $30 million, and in february 1999 the board decided to stop. By Laurel's account there were about eighty people expecting to be paid that day. The reason she gives is not that the games failed. It is that Paul Allen had turned his attention to e-commerce, which in early 1999 was where the money in that building wanted to be.

Mattel announced its purchase of the characters and properties on 18 march 1999, out of the wreckage, for terms that returned nothing to Laurel or to anyone who had worked there. It kept the site up briefly. It made no further games. Mattel spent the late nineties buying most of what existed in this space and shipping almost none of it, and the following year its software division collapsed hard enough to take the chief executive with it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The games are the smaller loss. The research is the bigger one, because four years of structured interviews about what girls actually wanted from an interactive product became the asset of a toy company that had no use for it. Nobody funded that work again at that scale. The industry went back to guessing, and mostly went back to guessing pink.

There is a small population on the internet still trading disc images and running the Rockett titles under emulation, which is more afterlife than most 1997 CD-ROMs manage. The address itself gave up any pretense years ago. Type purple-moon.com today and you land in Mattel's Barbie store.

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