Games - EduWare

	Games - EduWare

EduWare Services, Inc. was an early educational and entertainment software publisher, known for its groundbreaking adventure games, role-playing games, and flight simulators for the Apple II family of computers.

EduWare's most well-known games were written by developer David Mullich, who continues to work in the computer game industry as a game producer. Many of his early games are hard to pigeonhole into any one category, which may have contributed to their failure to achieve sales comparable to their reviews.

Capitalizing on the publicity the games generated, EduWare created a brand identity known as "Interactive Fantasies" under which the company's innovative line of entertainment software was published. The most famous (or notorious) of these was Prisoner 2, an update that added graphics to their earlier game The Prisoner. The game was Mullich's homage to the Patrick McGoohan 1967 TV series The Prisoner, which had recently been rebroadcast in the United States. The game was EduWare's most critically acclaimed title, and was ported to the Atari and IBM PC computers. Despite this, like most of EduWare's output, the game proved too outside the mainstream to be considered a true hit.

EduWare was acquired by Management Sciences America in 1984. In the following year, EduWare's offices were shut down and its product line was published by MSA's Peachtree Software accounting division. With EduWare's games being marketed as "educational products" and its packaging revised to be nearly indistinguishable from Peachtree's accounting products, sales dwindled to nothing.

Mullich and a few other remaining EduWare employees acquired two of the simulation games in development, Wilderness: A Survival Adventure and Tranquility Base, and went on to form their own game company, Electric Transit.

List of Titles

Space I (1978)
Space II (1979)
Windfall: An Oil Crisis Simulation (1980)
Terrorist (1980)
Network (1980)
Prisoner (1981)
Empire I: World Builders (1981)
Prisoner 2 (1982)
Empire II: Interstellar Sharks (1982)
Rendezvous: A Space Shuttle Flight Simulation (1982)
Empire III: Armageddon (1984)
Tranquility Base (1984)

Trivia

EduWare may be most noted for what it failed to publish rather than what it did publish: Ken Williams
originally shopped the first graphical adventure, Mystery House to Eduware in 1980. Unhappy with how the negotiations were proceeding, he formed On-line Systems
to publish the game. On-line Systems became Sierra On-line and Sierra became extremely successful, based largely on their reputation in the graphic adventure genre.
Besides Mullich, another notable EduWare alumni include former Apple Computer
evangelist Guy Kawasaki
, who was Director of Marketing at the company, and NASA official Wesley Huntress, who developed Rendezvous: A Spaceflight Simulator.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for EduWare ]

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