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The History of RealiMation

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25th February 2007

Here I'm going to present the history of RealiMation - as seen by me - over the 7½ years I worked on the product. There were never many of us working on it at any one time, I think the most was while we were our own company during 2000, but during that time we achieved a lot. I certainly enjoyed working on RealiMation with a fine bunch of developers, designers and sales people over the years. There were times when it wasn't much fun, but they were thankfully few and far between.

The time-line I'm going to expand on is as follows:

  1. Prior to November 1997 - Datapath. This is before I joined the company, so I've had to rely on others to fill in the details of what happened.
  2. November 1997 to September 1999 - Datapath. My first two years on RealiMation.
  3. October 1999 to November 2000 - RealiMation. We (well Brett) bought out RealiMation from Datapath and went it alone for just over a year.
  4. December 2000 to August 2004 - Criterion. They did a "Victor Kiam" on us. They liked the product so much they blue the company (for those of you too young to remember the Remington ad campaign of the 1970's).
  5. August 2004 to April 2005 - Electronic Arts. Another case of a much larger company swallowing a smaller one, though here I always thought that there was an element of stopping the competition.
  6. April 2005 to February 2006 - Postscript. What happened to RealiMation after it was all over.

I showed an early version of this to Mike Pridmore who worked on RealiMation in it's early days and he was good enough to fill in a lot of the blanks and provide more information on what we did and when. This will be a continually evolving piece of work but may not get updated as often I would like, so please bear with me.

The “Wayback Machine” at http://webarchive.org has been an invaluable, if incomplete, source of old material.

In writing this I've been amazed at how much of what we did was started in the early days of the product and what seemed like new developments later on were really only refinements of what had gone before. It’s also quite stunning the amount of work we did. What could have we achieved if we’d been able to carry on, or had a couple more people working with us at crucial times?

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(mailto: realimation at forman dot free-online dot co dot uk)