Broderbund

Broderbund was founded in 1980 by brothers Doug and Gary Carlston, later joined by their sister Cathy. The company's name, a playful and fictionalized Scandinavian-sounding term, loosely translates to "band of brothers." Doug, a former lawyer who became a programmer, and Gary started by selling games from their apartment, eventually building one of the most diverse and tasteful publishers of the home-computer era, with a portfolio that included arcade action, educational, and productivity software.

Broderbund's catalog was remarkably varied. Choplifter and Lode Runner were influential arcade-action titles of the early 1980s. In 1989, the company published Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia, which introduced fluid rotoscoped animation and set a new standard for the platformer genre, launching a franchise that continues to this day. The company also made education engaging with Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, a geography game that became a cultural touchstone, spawning a television game show and a generation of fans. Print Shop, a program that allowed users to design banners, cards, and signs for dot-matrix printers, became one of the best-selling non-game software titles of its time.

Broderbund's greatest commercial success came in 1993 with the release of Myst, the surreal puzzle-adventure created by Cyan's Rand and Robyn Miller. Myst became the best-selling PC game of the decade, a key driver for CD-ROM adoption, and a defining title of the multimedia era.

Capitalizing on that success, Broderbund expanded into productivity and family software. However, the industry consolidation of the late 1990s affected the company. In 1998, Broderbund was acquired by its competitor The Learning Company in a major stock deal, after which its game operations were shut down—most of the staff was laid off and its popular franchises were dispersed. The Learning Company was later acquired by Mattel in a highly unsuccessful transaction.

Today, the Broderbund name remains only as a software label for productivity titles such as Print Shop under subsequent owners, a distant echo of its former scope. Nonetheless, its legacy is firmly established: it demonstrated that a game publisher could be both eclectic and curatorial, that education could be genuinely enjoyable, and that it had placed Prince of Persia, Carmen Sandiego, and Myst into the permanent canon of gaming.