Stormfront Studios

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

~ the obit ~

The thing Stormfront is remembered for happened on America Online in March 1991, which is a network I never touched. AOL did not operate in Turkey and the way you got online here in the nineties was a local ISP and a modem, so the whole walled-garden era of American consumer internet is something I have read about rather than dialed into. That matters for this grave because the studio's most important product only existed inside that garden, billed by the hour, and then vanished with it.

Don Daglow founded the company on 28 December 1988 as Beyond Software. He had already been in the industry a long time by then, having written baseball simulations on a PDP-10 in the early seventies and run game development at Mattel and at Broderbund. The company was renamed Stormfront Studios in 1993 after trademark trouble with the original name. It sat in San Rafael, California, and it stayed independent for its entire life, which by 2008 made it unusual.

Over twenty years it shipped around fourteen million games and generated more than five hundred million dollars at retail. It never owned a franchise of its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the aol years ~

SSI had the Dungeons & Dragons license and a working engine from the Gold Box games. Beyond Software took that engine and pointed it at a server, and what shipped in March 1991 was Neverwinter Nights, the first role-playing game played with other people over a network that drew you a picture instead of describing the room in text. It ran on AOL until 1997 and is written up on this site in its own grave.

The other 1991 product was Tony La Russa's Ultimate Baseball, which turned into a franchise that ran for years and quietly paid a lot of the bills. Daglow's baseball sims go back two decades before that, to a mainframe at college, and the sports line kept shipping into the 2000s.

~ the licensing decade ~

From the late nineties onward the studio's business was adapting somebody else's property on somebody else's schedule. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002 was the high point, built on the film license rather than the books, and it won an award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. The Return of the King followed in 2003 and Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone in 2004.

Then the licenses got worse. Eragon in 2006 and The Spiderwick Chronicles in 2008 were the kind of film tie-ins that get greenlit because a release date exists rather than because anybody wanted to make them. By 2007 Stormfront had over fifty developers split across two teams and nothing of its own in the pipeline behind them.

~ the day the work ran out ~

Sierra Entertainment was where most of Stormfront's later work came from, and Sierra by then was a Vivendi asset being prepared for the merger that produced Activision Blizzard. Vivendi wound the label down. The pipeline of contracts stopped, and there was no owned franchise underneath to fall back on.

On 31 March 2008 the remaining 33 employees were told the company was closing. Daglow put it down to adverse business conditions, which is accurate and says nothing. A few months later, in a timing coincidence nobody enjoyed, the 2008 Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards recognized Neverwinter Nights for its part in building the multiplayer online game. EverQuest and World of Warcraft were honored in the same category. The company that made the earliest of the three had been closed for most of that year.

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