Stagecast Creator

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

~ the goodbye ~

Stagecast Software announced its own end on its news page in September 2014, in the same column where it had been posting Mac compatibility updates for fifteen years. "We're sad to announce that Stagecast Software will be ceasing operations this year. We will stop selling Stagecast Creator on September 30, 2014, but continue to support it until December 1, 2014." The rest of the note is a short thank-you to the people who made games with it and to the investors who had funded the company.

Creator started at Apple as KidSim, a project by Allen Cypher and David Canfield Smith in the Advanced Technology Group, meant to let children build simulations without learning to type code. Kurt Schmucker took it over in 1994, renamed it Cocoa, added a Netscape plug-in and repositioned it as internet authoring for kids. It was announced in May 1996 and went out as three developer releases between October 1996 and June 1998.

The idea underneath it was programming by demonstration. A character sits on a playfield and you double-click it to open a rule editor, which shows you the situation the character is in right now. You drag the character one square to the right, close the editor, and the rule exists: standing on grass means move right. Start the simulation and it walks until it reaches a rock, where it stops, because nothing tells it what a rock means yet. You open the editor again and the new situation is already loaded. Children built arcade games this way at summer camps for sixteen years.

I was 14 in 1998, on a dial-up line at home in Turkey, and none of this was within reach. Creator was a boxed $49.95 product whose distribution was American school labs, camp catalogs and a Scholastic order form. The nearest it ever came to my part of the world was the Cyprus Ministry of Education approving it for fifth and sixth grade, and a Greek translation of the tutorial done at the University of Cyprus.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the name apple took back ~

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and began closing the departments that were not shipping products, the Advanced Technology Group among them. Larry Tesler left with the two researchers who had started the kids' project, taking the rights to the Cocoa system with them, and the three of them became Stagecast Software.

Apple then put the Cocoa name on something else entirely: the OpenStep-derived application framework that every Mac and iPhone developer has written against since. So the system had to be renamed a second time, by its own authors, because the company they had left wanted the word back.

~ in the classroom ~

Creator's real customers were grant-funded programs. SRI International and Girls Inc. of Alameda County built it into Build IT, an after-school curriculum for middle school girls paid for by the National Science Foundation, and ETR used it the same way in the Girl Game Company for Latina students. The Museum of Science in Boston gave it a Top Choice award in 2003 and installed it in an exhibit. The software itself was translated into Dutch, German, French and Brazilian Portuguese, and volunteers produced tutorials in Spanish and Hebrew.

The last thing the company did in public, in November 2013, was put its first nine tutorial lessons on the web for the Hour of Code, so that anybody with a Java-capable browser could try them. Nine months later it announced it was closing.

~ still running ~

Because Creator shipped as a Java application rather than a service, nothing switched off when the company did. It still installs and runs on current Windows, and in 2025 someone released Zimmy's Ghosts, a Pac-Man-style game built entirely in Creator and the most ambitious thing anyone has made with it.

stagecast.com answers today with 758 bytes on a black background: one painting of an eye, a signature image, and an offer of acrylic commissions at $450 from whoever holds the domain now. The last version of the real site carried a copyright line reading 1997 to 2014.

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