Broderbund Software
Brøderbund Software created its first titles in 1980 and was, along with Sierra Online, one of the dominant publishers of the 1980s.
As the 1990s progressed, the company focused increasingly on edutainment software, eventually creating a new label, Red Orb Entertainment. It also published some non-game software, including The Print Shop.
Unfortunately, despite its focus on edutainment (or because of it, though The Last Express helped), Brøderbund was a money-losing company, and was bought by The Learning Company Inc. (actually a Canadian CD-ROM company which bought the original The Learning Company and changed its name to reflect that for $400 million, laid off most of its workforce, was bought by Mattel just a year later, and the whole thing (Mattel Interactive) was a big money-loser (The Learning Company, likewise, was losing money), they eventually sold that off.
Today, the only remnants of Brøderbund include a line of software sold by another company (and notably missing the "ø") and some of Ubisoft's products (which bought the entertainment division, selling sequels to Prince of Persia and Myst).
Games published by Brøderbund include:
- The Ancient Art of War
- Ancient Land of Ys (Western PC version)
- The Battle of Olympus (Western localization)
- Carmen Sandiego series
- Choplifter
- Deadly Towers (Western localization)
- Drol
- The Guardian Legend (Western localization)
- Karateka
- The Last Express
- Legacy of the Wizard (Western localization)
- Living Books
- Lode Runner
- Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
- Myst
- Prince of Persia
- Shufflepuck Cafe
- SimCity (before Maxis got on its feet as an independent company)
- Spelunker (originally published by MicroGraphicImage)
- Wibarm (Western PC version)