Brøderbund Software
The Eugene, Oregon company two brothers built on a strategy game and business software, and the four buyers who carried its name after it stopped being theirs.
Brøderbund Software was founded in 1980 by Doug Carlston, a Harvard-trained lawyer, and his brother Gary Carlston, to sell a strategy game Doug had written, Galactic Empire, along with its sequels Galactic Trader and Galactic Revolution. Doug served as president and Gary as chief executive. Their sister Cathy Carlston joined the following year and eventually ran the company's education-market planning, later co-devising the classroom event described in Carmen Sandiego in the classroom. The name itself is a small joke: Galactic Empire featured a band of merchants called the “Broederbond,” borrowed from the real (and controversial) Afrikaner society of that name, and the Carlstons respelled it to mark the company as a family operation while putting distance between the two.
Beyond the Carmen Sandiego line
Brøderbund's catalogue ran well past detective work: The Print Shop (1984) was the company's single biggest earner, and its action and puzzle lines included Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka and Prince of Persia, with Myst and The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis among its later publishing credits. At the company's IPO on NASDAQ (ticker BROD) in November 1991, Print Shop accounted for about 33% of revenue and the Carmen Sandiego line about 26%; the stock went on to peak at $72.50 a share in September 1995. Brøderbund also acquired the mapping-software maker PC Globe in July 1992.
Four owners in a decade
The Learning Company acquired Brøderbund on August 31, 1998, in an all-stock deal (0.80 TLC shares per Brøderbund share, roughly 16.8 million shares issued, valued near $420 million); the same year, TLC cut about 500 Brøderbund jobs, some 42% of its workforce. In 1999, Mattel bought the combined company for $3.6 billion — a deal Mattel would spend years unwinding. Gores Technology Group bought the software operations back from Mattel in September 2000, and Riverdeep acquired the Brøderbund name and back catalogue in 2001. Riverdeep bought the textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin in 2006, then folded in Harcourt's education and trade divisions in 2007 to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) — the entity that held the Brøderbund and Carmen Sandiego trademarks for the next decade and a half. For where those trademarks sit today, see Who owns Carmen Sandiego now.