House of Tales Entertainment GmbH, trading as House of Tales, was a German

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large ...

based in

Bremen Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (german: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, ), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (''Freie Hansestadt Bremen''), a two-city-state consis ...

. The company was known for its point-and-click adventure games.

History

House of Tales was founded in 1998 by Tobias Schachte and Martin Ganteföhr, who had previously developed children's

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

s for the

ZDF ZDF (, short for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen; ; "Second German Television") is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all fe ...

. The company's first game, '' The Mystery of the Druids'', was published by

CDV Software CDV Software Entertainment AG (formerly CDV Software GmbH, stylized as cdv) was a German publisher of video games founded 1989 in Karlsruhe. On April 17, 2000, cdv became a Frankfurt stock market traded company. In the beginning of the 2000s, C ...

in 2001. The company initially lacked a corporate office and organized in a decentralized fashion online, a rarity at the time. In 2008, House of Tales was bought by DTP Entertainment, but initially remained an independent development studio under the new parent company. At the end of 2009, tensions arose between the House of Tales management and that of DTP regarding the future direction of the studio and the poor sales of '' 15 Days''. As a result, Schachte left the company in January 2010. Ganteföhr departed in March. Thereafter, House of Tales' company headquarters was moved by DTP from Bremen to

Hannover Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German States of Germany, state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the List of cities in Germany by population, 13th-largest city in Germa ...

, the location of

Cranberry Production Deck13 Interactive GmbH (formerly TriggerLab GmbH) is a German video game developer and publisher based in Frankfurt. The company was founded in July 2001 by the team behind Artex Software, a studio that primarily developed video games for RISC ...

, another DTP-owned development house. House of Tales was subsequently integrated into the Cranberry team, marking the end of the company. In December 2014, the Swedish publisher THQ Nordic acquired the rights to House of Tales' adventure games and made them available via digital distribution platforms.

Games

For all of its games, House of Tales used a proprietary development environment called Inca ("Interactive Narrator's Companion for Authoring"), which includes a graphical user interface for building the infrastructure of a game and an adventure-specific scripting language.

Awards

''The Moment of Silence'' was voted Adventure of the Year in 2004 by '' PC Games'' and the website Adventure-Treff. ''Overclocked'' received the Innovation Award at the 2007

Deutscher Computerspielpreis The Deutscher Computerspielpreis (DCP, German Video Game Awards) is a prize for the German games industry and has been awarded since 2009. The DCP is awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany, represented by the Ministry of State for Digitalisati ...

References

External links

Official site
{{House of Tales Video game development companies Video game companies established in 1998 Video game companies disestablished in 2010 Defunct video game companies of Germany Companies based in Bremen (city) German companies established in 1998 German companies disestablished in 2010

History

Games

Awards

See also

References

External links