Red Orb Entertainment

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

~ the obit ~

Broderbund launched Red Orb Entertainment on 21 May 1997 out of Novato, California, with one job. The parent company's name meant Carmen Sandiego and The Print Shop to anyone who had walked past a school computer lab, and that reputation was worth a great deal in the education channel and almost nothing on a games shelf. A separate label let the same building sell to two rooms that did not want to hear about each other.

It paid off once, immediately and enormously. Riven: The Sequel to Myst arrived in October 1997 on five discs, into a market that had spent four years waiting for it, and it sold in the millions. Nothing else on the roster came close. Warlords III and The Journeyman Project 3 were respectable catalog work. A repackaged Myst: Masterpiece Edition did what repackages do, and the remainder was the kind of release that exists to fill a quarter.

The collapse came from above rather than from anything the label did. The Learning Company bought Broderbund in 1998 and fired about 42 percent of the staff that year. Mattel bought The Learning Company in 1999 and lost enough money on it to cost its own CEO the job, then handed the entire division to a private acquirer in September 2000 for effectively nothing. That chain has its own grave here under Broderbund. By the end of it Red Orb was a publishing imprint supported by Mindscape, sitting three owners deep inside something being sold off in pieces.

Riven reached Turkey. The label did not, and there was no reason it should have. Nobody in Ankara in 1998 went looking for a Red Orb game; they went looking for Riven, and five discs of it moved through the copy stalls the same way everything else did that decade.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ six letters, reversed ~

Take the first six letters of Broderbund, reverse them, and you get Red Orb. The design work that followed was serious enough, a deep red sphere with a black swoosh cutting across it and the wordmark set underneath in slab capitals, and it looked like a label with money behind it. The origin is a word read right to left.

~ what shipped unfinished ~

Prince of Persia 3D came out on 31 August 1999, the first attempt to move a series that had been sitting still since 1993 into three dimensions. It went out before the bug-fixing pass was done, because by that point the company needed revenue more than it needed a finished product. Reviews were poor, sales followed, and the series went quiet again for four more years.

~ where the franchises went ~

Ubisoft acquired all of Mattel Interactive's entertainment holdings in March 2001. Riverdeep took most of the remainder, including the Broderbund name. There was no separate company to rescue, because a label is a line on a box, and the line changes when the catalog does.

What Ubisoft got for its money was Prince of Persia. In 2003 it put Jordan Mechner back on the series and shipped The Sands of Time, which restarted a franchise that is still running twenty years later. The label that fumbled the jump to 3D had already been dissolved by the company that paid for the repair.

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