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".
Role-playing video game
Computer-driven role-playing games had their start in Western markets, with games generally geared to be played on home computers. By 1985, series like "Wizardry" and "Ultima" represented the state of role-playing games. In Japan, home computers had yet to take as great a hold as they had in the West due to their cost; there was little market for Western-developed games and there were a few Japanese-developed games for personal computers during this time such as "The Black Onyx" (1984) which followed the "Wizardy"/"Ultima" format. With the release of the low-cost Famicom console (the Nintendo Entertainment System as named in Japan), a new opportunity arose to bring role-playing games to Japan. "Dragon Quest" (1986) was the first such attempt to recreate a role-playing game for a console, and requires several simplifications to fit within the more limited memory and capabilities of the Famicom compared to computers; players in "Dragon Quest" controlled only a single character, the amount of control over this character limited due to the simplicity of the Famicom controller, and a less-realistic art style was chosen to better visualize the characters within a tile-based graphics system. "Dragon Quest" was highly successful in Japan, leading to further entries in the series and other titles such as "Final Fantasy" that followed the same simplifications made in RPGs for "Dragon Quest".