Interactive fiction (IF) is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations. These works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. In common usage, the term refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game where the entire interface can be "text-only", however, graphical text adventure games, where the text is accompanied by graphics still fall under the text adventure category if the main way to interact with the game is by typing text. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as "Puzzle-free", that focuses on narrative, and "text adventures" that focus on puzzles.
Square Co., Ltd., also known under its international brand name SquareSoft, was a Japanese video game developer and publisher. It was founded in 1986 by Masafumi Miyamoto, who spun off part of his father's electronics company Den-Yu-Sha. Among its early employees were designers Hironobu Sakaguchi, Hiromichi Tanaka, Akitoshi Kawazu, Koichi Ishii, artist Kazuko Shibuya, programmer Nasir Gebelli, and composer Nobuo Uematsu. Initially focusing on action games, the team saw popular success with the role-playing video game Final Fantasy in 1987, which would lead to the franchise of the same name being one of its flagship franchises. Later notable staff included directors Yoshinori Kitase and Takashi Tokita, designer and writer Yasumi Matsuno, artists Tetsuya Nomura and Yusuke Naora, and composers Yoko Shimomura and Masashi Hamauzu.
MicroProse is an American video game publisher and developer founded by Bill Stealey, Sid Meier, and Andy Hollis in 1982. It developed and published numerous games, including starting the Civilization and X-COM series. Most of their internally developed titles were vehicle simulation and strategy games.
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is a 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by CyberFlix and published in the United States and United Kingdom by GTE Entertainment and Europress respectively, for Windows and Macintosh. It takes place in a virtual representation of the RMS Titanic, following a British spy who has been sent back in time to the night Titanic sank and must complete a previously failed mission to prevent World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II from occurring. The gameplay involves exploring the ship and solving puzzles. There are multiple outcomes and endings to the game depending on the player's interactions with characters and use of items.
Cryo Interactive Entertainment was a French video game development and publishing company founded in 1990, but existing unofficially since 1989 as a developer group under the name Cryo. The company gained recognition for its adventure games, such as the commercially successful titles Dune, Dragon Lore and Atlantis: The Lost Tales, along with the racing series MegaRace.
On2 Technologies, formerly known as The Duck Corporation, was a small publicly traded company, founded in New York City in 1992 and headquartered in Clifton Park, New York, that designed video codec technology. It created a series of video codecs called TrueMotion.
DreamCatcher Interactive Inc. was a Canadian video game publisher founded in 1996 by Richard Wah Kan. It was best known for its adventure games. In 2006, the company became a subsidiary of JoWooD Entertainment. In 2011, the company went into administration along with its parent JoWooD and all assets were purchased by Nordic Games Holding. The DreamCatcher Interactive brand is currently being used as a publishing label for THQ Nordic.
Kow Otani is a Japanese composer. He is best known for creating the soundtracks for the Heisei Gamera trilogy, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, and Shadow of the Colossus.
Jump Raven was the second game released by Cyberflix, in 1994. The game's technology is similar to that of Lunicus, released by Cyberflix one year prior, but this time employs a more detailed storyline and environment. In an opening sequence of the game, we see future New York City, which has fallen into horrible disrepair in the aftermath of global warming and rising sea levels and a bankrupt federal government. The premise of the story is that gangsters, neo-nazis, and various other thugs have acquired large stores of weapons from the government, and have ransacked New York's store of cryogenically-frozen DNA of endangered species. The player's job as a bounty hunter is to retrieve them.
The Game Factory was a Danish video game publisher operating in Europe and North America. The Game Factory was founded in 2004 and fully owned by K.E. Mathiasen A/S, with headquarters just outside Aarhus, Denmark. Its titles were distributed either by the company's own sales force in Scandinavia, their parent company K.E. Media or from their two fully owned subsidiaries in Santa Monica, California and London, England.
Lunicus is a 1993 video game developed by Cyberflix and published by Paramount Interactive. It shares many traits in both graphical style and gameplay with some of Cyberflix's other games, like Jump Raven. It was rated as 1993 CD-ROM game of the year in the magazine MacWorld.
Timelapse is a 1996 graphic adventure game developed and published by GTE Entertainment. Inspired by the game Myst, it tasks the player with the rescue of an archaeologist trapped in another dimension. The player navigates a series of time portals to locations such as ancient Egypt, Maya and the prehistoric Puebloan civilization, while solving puzzles and searching for clues to the archaeologist's whereabouts.
Strawberry Shortcake: The Sweet Dreams Movie is a 2006 American animated family fantasy adventure musical film produced by DIC Entertainment Corporation and released theatrically in select cities on October 7, 2006, by Kidtoon Films. It was the first feature-length film to feature the eponymous American Greetings property, and stars the voices of Sarah Heinke, Rachel Ware, Nils Haaland, and Bridget Robbins. The film also includes the first appearance of the villain, the Peculiar Pie Man, since Nelvana's Strawberry Shortcake specials from more than twenty years earlier.
World Series of Video Games (WSVG) was an international professional electronic sports competition. It held its first season in 2006, with competitions in six different games and six events held around the world including the finals of the event. The total prize purse of the season was US$750,000 which includes the $240,000 prize purse that was winnable at the finals. The WSVG was operated by Games Media Properties, an American gaming company founded in 2002 with the BYOC Lan section subcontracted out to Lanwar Inc.
CSI is a media franchise of American television series created by Anthony E. Zuiker. The first three CSI series follow the work of forensic scientists as they unveil the circumstances behind mysterious deaths, while the fourth series, CSI: Cyber, emphasizes behavioral psychology and how it can be applied to cyber forensics.
Pie in the Sky is a 2.5D and 3D first-person shooter engine most popular in the mid-to-late 1990s by Pie in the Sky Software, also known as Power 3D and the 3D Game Creation or 3D Game Creation System engine. The engine was used in two games by the company as well as many other independent games and amateur projects after it was turned into a commercial game creator, largely because it minimized the amount of computer programming knowledge needed to make 3D games in its editing tools, making it suitable even for beginners with no game-design experience.
Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren is an action-adventure video game developed by Cyberflix and released by THQ for Windows and Mac OS in 1998.
William "Bill" Appleton is an American entrepreneur and technologist best known as the programmer of the first rich media authoring tool World Builder, the multimedia programming language SuperCard, a best-selling CD-ROM Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, the DreamFactory REST API platform, and Snapshot Org Management for Salesforce.
DreamFactory is an American software developer based in Las Vegas. It develops both commercial and open-source software that provides self-hosted integration and API generation services to multiple applications in cloud-based or on-premise environments.
Skull Cracker is a 1996 supernatural beat 'em up video game developed by American studio CyberFlix and published by GTE Entertainment on Macintosh and Windows. It is sometimes considered a spiritual successor to the 1991 title Creepy Castle, which the game's head of technology William Appleton had previously written for Reactor Inc. Skull Cracker was conceptually designed by Ben Calica.
