Daydream Software
Their first game was "Safecracker", a point and click adventure game published by DreamCatcher Interactive. The game had a tumultuous production, starting when GT Interactive bought initial publisher Warner Interactive Europe. Daydream Software went public in late 1996. The company's goal was to increase its economic and decision-making freedom, and to secure the ability to select a publisher at the end of each game's development rather than at the beginning. President Jans Phersson-Broburg argued that self-financing Daydream's future games with money from Swedish investors, instead of obtaining "funding linked to specific projects" from publishers, would offer the developer more stability, flexibility and room for growth. For Daydream's public launch, roughly 20 million kr worth of shares, or 45.5% of the company, were offered to investors in Sweden. The initial public offering was a success, and Daydream opened on the Stockholm Stock Exchange's Stockholm Börsinformation (SBI) list in January 1997. Daydream was eventually able to buy back the rights to "Safecracker".
Night Trap
Rob Fulop, developer of "Demon Attack" (1982) and other Atari games, began working with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell at his company Axlon shortly after the video game crash of 1983. James Riley was also working with Bushnell at the time on a series of interactive retail advertising campaigns. Riley received a call from Fulop, his neighbor, who explained that an engineer presented an interesting device to another one of Bushnell's employees, Tom Zito. The system used VHS technology to create movie-like gaming experiences and allowed four video tracks to be played simultaneously. The team dubbed this system "NEMO" (Never Ever Mention Outside).
Zito wanted to put together some demos to present the technology to Hasbro. Riley wanted to create an environment the player could move freely about, leading to the idea of surveillance cameras. Fulop and Riley were inspired by the play "Tamara" (1981) which ran parallel stories running in 13 different rooms. The audience would need to decide for themselves which stories they wanted to follow. Fulop and Riley watched the play three times over the course of a weekend in 1985. Fulop and Riley liked the design model and thought it would make a good basis for an interactive media experience. A prototype game titled "Scene of the Crime" was produced to demonstrate the new technology to Hasbro and test the surveillance camera gameplay. It was a short five-minute demo where the player follows suspicious characters around a house to find who stole a stash of money. The player switches between cameras to observe the characters and eavesdrop on their conversations; all the characters have a plot to steal the money. At the end of the game, the player must guess who stole the money. In December 1986, the team flew to Hasbro headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and pitched the technology to Hasbro CEO Stephen Hassenfeld and a boardroom of 22 executives who liked the system and gave funding to support further development for the technology and games.