Young gamers who have traveled to a virtual Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego are difficult to hunt for their desktop computers can continue their adventures in face book, the most popular online social network.
Wednesday, Blue Fang Games LLC in Waltham and Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt reveals the version of Face book is one of the oldest computer games still on the market: the Oregon Trail. February 9, the two companies will release a classic game of geography in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Face book.
Through the joint venture, Houghton Mifflin will try to revive an aging pair of video game franchises, while Blue Fang striving to become a major player in the growing gaming market.
Blue Fang is not particularly well known, but it is a leading developer of Boston’s most successful video game. The company has introduced a family of personal computer game Zoo Tycoon, Microsoft Corp., and has sold 8 million copies since the first edition was published in 2001.
“We’re still royalty checks from Microsoft, Blue Fang says the president, Hank Howie.
The game’s popularity has waned, however, and the checks are “not as large as they once were,” he said.
Last year, Blue Fang laid off about two-thirds of its 75 employees and reinvented itself as a developer of simple online games. With backing from the German game publisher Gameforge AG, the company published Zoo Kingdom for Facebook.
As with the original Zoo Tycoon, players can design, build, and populate their own zoos, complete with exotic animals. But while the Facebook version is free to play, gamers can enhance the experience by purchasing unusual trees, buildings, or imaginary animals like unicorns.
The explosive success of Facebook game producers like Zynga Inc. tempted Blue Fang to enter the social gaming market. Zynga was founded in 2007, and its games like FarmVille and CityVille attract 298 million Facebook users every month, according to the industry research firm AppData.com.
Zynga is privately held, but Wed bush Securities, a Los Angeles firm that tracks the game industry, estimates the company grossed $500 million last year.
The opportunity is not lost on other Massachusetts game developers.
Quick Hit Inc. of Fox borough, which makes a popular Internet-based National Football League game, plans to release a Facebook version this month. “Facebook is the largest gaming platform in the world,” said founder Jeffrey Anderson. “It’s a big market opportunity.”
Anderson said most popular Facebook games are tailored to appeal to women, but his NFL game will attract male gamers.
Facebook games can be relatively simple to build; it took just 11 weeks to create Zoo Kingdom. While the game attracted 1.2 million users at its peak, it has since settled down to an average user base of about 300,000 gamers. About 1 or 2 percent make in-game purchases. Howie won’t say how much the company earns from Zoo Kingdom, but he said the game began turning a profit in October.
Blue Fang’s transformation caught the attention of Tony Bordon, president of the Learning Co., Houghton Mifflin’s educational software division. Learning Co. had a number of well-known game franchises in need of a reboot. Bordon was especially interested in reviving The Oregon Trail, developed for mainframe computers by a group of Minnesota schoolteachers in 1971. Later, the game migrated to succeeding generations of classroom PCs, where it became a favourite among schoolchildren. Players are cast as 19th-century pioneers trying to survive a journey from Missouri to Oregon, fending off hunger, disease, and accidents.
Bordon believed the game’s simple design and addictive game play were suited to Facebook. He interviewed several developers to choose one to create a new version, and settled on Blue Fang.
“They were a relatively small company that was able to communicate well with us and give us the time and attention we needed,” Bordon said. He was impressed with the company’s work on Zoo Kingdom.
Bordon has also decided to make Blue Fang Co. Learning to work in another way. Game series, if the world is Carmen Sandiego? was developed in 1980 to teach children about geography. It was a cunning master thief who was captured by visiting places around the world. Now, Blue Fang has delegated Carmen Sandiego Facebook.
Both games can be played free, but users can obtain additional tools such as virtual clothes and food, with a little something – usually no more than a few dollars. And unlike traditional versions of games, versions Facebook user leaves the team with their friends online to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles.
Blue Fang is also moving into mobile gaming. Lion Pride your game runs on the Apple iPhone and iPad, and works on an iPhone version of the board game Reversi.
“We still get feedback from users, you say, you are Zoo Tycoon 3,” Howie said although the decision to develop a successor to Microsoft, which owns the rights to the title. In the meantime, Blue Fang to prosper by making many new friends on Facebook.
