In March of 2015, HeR Interactive laid off half of their staff in order to cut costs.
HER INTERACTIVE FORUM SALEM PC
Add the fact that physical sales of PC games were no longer a viable source of revenue for the company, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. And with the company having to pay royalties to Simon & Schuster for each game (which the publisher does not promote), the commercial failures hit that much harder. Each game had been a critical and successful failure, with HeR Interactive admitting that the latter didn’t even make back its costs. HeR Interactive had previously tried making games for the Game Boy Advance ( Message in a Haunted Mansion) and Nintendo Wii ( The White Wolf of Icicle Creek), while also releasing a mobile port of 2004’s The Secret of Shadow Ranch. Although no representatives have given a clear statement on why they suddenly decided to head into this new direction, Minella has her own theories, believing that the company wanted to attract an audience of new, younger fans in hopes of making a successful pivot from PC to mobile. Minella herself was disappointed, telling Kotaku that she never realized what a fan base she had until she started reading the forums and seeing the reactions to her being let go.
As part of an initiative to revamp the company, HeR Interactive decided it was time to find a Seattle-based voice actress that sounded much younger. The last game Minella would lend her voice to was 2015’s Sea of Darkness. The fans, who call themselves the “Clue Crew,” were devastated, and numerous petitions were made. Not long after, Lani Minella was abruptly let go.
In 2014, Penny Milliken, a former Disney marketing director, became the new CEO of HeR Interactive. Her Downfall Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem (2019) Their successful formula of putting out two games a year with Lani Minella as Nancy would remain an unchanging constant throughout the franchise until 2015, when a change in CEO and staff would bring the games to a momentary halt. In 1999, HeR Interactive absorbed American Laser Games and changed their slogan to “For Girls Who Aren’t Afraid of a Mouse.” In 2001, the company changed the packaging from “For Adventurous Girls” to “For Adventure Seekers” as the franchise became popular among boys and girls alike. The game, and all games except for 2001’s Message in a Haunted Mansion, allowed the player to choose from three difficulty modes: Junior Detective, Senior Detective, and Master Detective. The game featured Nancy as an unseen player character (voiced by actress Lani Minella), an old-timey haunted house aesthetic, and a variety of “fatal errors” the player can make that result in the death of Nancy and the characters around her. The 1998 point-and-click mystery starred a college-aged Nancy Drew posing undercover as a local high school student in order to solve a murder. After the successful release of McKenzie & Co., a point-and-click adventure game for the PC that centered on a group of friends trying to find a prom date, HeR Interactive released Secrets Can Kill. In 1995, American Laser Games (then the leading laserdisc-based arcade game company in the industry) launched HeR Interactive with the intention of making video games for a female audience-despite the general belief that there was no market for such games. HeR Interactive Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill (1998) In 2019, the franchise was put on an unofficial hiatus, leaving fans to wonder when-or if-a new installment would finally surface.
HER INTERACTIVE FORUM SALEM SERIES
Although advertised as fun and educational games for young girls, the series bordered on horror with each installment having its own creepy, almost too-quiet score and the spectre of death looming over the player as any sudden wrong move could result in a “fatal error.” After the first installment was released in 1998, the award-winning series spawned over 30 games and amassed a dedicated fanbase. However, there’s a chance you’ve never heard of the point-and-click adventure game CD-ROM series that put the player in Nancy’s shoes, or the mid-2000s made-for-mobile and Nintendo Wii installments. As of 2021, the ongoing series, authored by a collective of ghostwriters under the name Carolyn Keene, has sold over 80 million copies, in addition to spawning six films and three television shows, cementing Nancy Drew as a cultural icon.
The strawberry blonde sleuth made her fiction debut in 1930, initially invented as a female counterpart to the crime-solving Hardy Boys. Even if you’ve never read the books or seen any of the screen adaptations, chances are you’ve heard the name Nancy Drew.
0 kommentar(er)
