Purple Moon


 * Deep friendships.  Love of nature.  The confidence to be cool.  The courage to dream.  It's what girls are all about.  And it's what girls share when they discover Purple Moon Adventures.  Which is why Purple Moon is just for girls.

- Company Ethos Statement

Purple Moon (aka Purple Moon Media) was a software developer and publisher based in Mountain View, California that existed from 1996 to February 1999. It is the focus of the wiki you are reading right now.

Interval
In 1992, former Atari and Activision employee Brenda Laurel met David Liddle, former head developer of the Xerox Star and co-founder of the then fledgling Interval Research Corporation, a think-tank subsidiary of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Inc. Vulcan Inc.]  with Paul Allen. At the time, Laurel had written several books on marrying technology with humanist principles. Liddle was a fan of her work and she his. They found that they were both were curious as to why no one had made successful games marketed towards girls. The two began a marketing research project that explored the play habits of girls ages 7 to 12; the the age when most girls tend to lose interest in computers and other forms of technology, and their interests. This project was slated to go on for 18 months.

Independent Era
Purple Moon was established as a company in 1996 with Laurel as its Vice President of Design and Nancy Deyo as its CEO. Purple Moon's first two games, Rockett's New School and Secret Paths in the Forest, were released during the week of September 14th, 1997.

In the summer of 1998, children's television network Nickelodeon approached the company with an offer to collaborate on "TV and online projects". The board of investors at Vulcan rejected the offer, citing Nickelodeon's low valuation of the company and the fact that Purple Moon would be paying for most of it. It is unknown what specific projects, if any, were pitched by the network.

Despite their success, Purple Moon went into debt trying to keep up with competitor Mattel and, due to Interval's policy of secrecy, could not properly research or anticipate any competition. In Fall 1998, presumably as a result of an audit of Interval by Vulcan, Deyo was ordered to sell Purple Moon. Despite Mattel showing interest and proposing a deal to buy some of the company's assets, Interval's board of investors voted to place Purple Moon in Chapter 7 bankruptcy in February 1999. A month later, Mattel bought the company's properties and characters in a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy fire sale as part of a quick deal with Deyo. According to Laurel, neither she nor any of the company's workers made any money from the deal.

Mattel Era
In Fall 1999, Mattel released two Purple Moon titles, Secret Paths to Your Dreams and Rockett's Camp Adventures. Both were a radical departure in terms of style and gameplay to Purple Moon's previous titles. Camp Adventures' visual novel elements are simplified and deemphasized in favor of minigames while Dreams is an interactive dream diary with almost no puzzle elements. At least two more Rockett games, Rockett's Sleepover and Rockett's Carnival, were planned and had reached the programming stage before being cancelled by Mattel sometime in 2000. The book series was cancelled sometime around Spring 2000. The Purple Moon Place website stopped recieving updates at the beginning of 2001.

At the time of this writing, Mattel has not produced any new material for Purple Moon's properties since 2000 and does not ackhnowledge them on their websites. It is unknown if they still own the copyrights.