Living Books is a series of interactive read-along adventures aimed at children aged 3–9. Created by Mark Schlichting, the series was mostly developed by Living Books for CD-ROM and published by Broderbund for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Two decades after the original release, the series was re-released by Wanderful Interactive Storybook for iOS and Android.
The series began in 1992 as a Broderbund division that started with an adaptation of Mercer Mayer's Just Grandma and Me. In 1994, the Living Books division was spun-off into its own children's multimedia company, jointly owned by Broderbund and Random House. The company continued to publish titles based on popular franchises such as Arthur, Dr. Seuss, and Berenstain Bears.
The next few years saw a saturated market begin to squeeze Living Books company's profits; in 1997 Broderbund agreed to purchase Random House's 50% stake in Living Books and proceeded to dissolve the company. Broderbund was acquired by The Learning Company, Mattel Interactive, and The Gores Group over the following years, and the series was eventually passed to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which currently holds the rights. The series was kept dormant for many years until former developers of the series acquired the license to publish updated and enhanced versions of the titles under the Wanderful Interactive Storybook series in 2010.
The series has received acclaim and numerous awards.
History
Conception
Inspiration and pitch
The initial motivation behind the series came from a childhood fantasy of Mark Schlichting's to enter into the picture book world of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!; to visit the houses of Whoville and interact with the "weird and fantastical instruments and contraptions". As a boy he was enamoured by the fantasy worlds of children's picture books through Dr. Seuss and the magic of animation through Disney. Further inspiration came out of his concern as a father to video gaming boys. By 1986 Schlichting had "Nintendo guilt", observing how his sons were engaged with Nintendo titles for hours, working cooperatively and diligently, but unable to focus on their homework. Their focus was on level mastery, but they couldn't find any titles both educational and fun enough to hold their interest. Schlichting wanted this same level of cognitive involvement with something more substantive, matching the attention-grabbing play aspects of popular games with meaningful content. He devised a concept of "highly interactive animated picture books for children" that would "delight and engage kids but that also had real learning content as well", which would evolve into Living Books.
After receiving a degree in fine arts and working as a book publishing art director, he retrained in traditional animation. Schlichting entered the children's software industry in 1987, and was contracted as a freelance animator and digital illustrator at Broderbund Software for early floppy disk PC games including games within the Carmen Sandiego franchise such as Europe and U.S.A. By 1988, Schlichting's work at Broderbund led to him securing a full-time position at the company. Schlichting later admitted that he accepted the job offer to be able to sell his concept to Broderbund, believing that the best way to talk Broderbund into spending $1,000,000 on a product for a market that didn't exist was from within the company. After three months, Broderbund permitted him to create a small prototype in-house, and as source material he used a book he had illustrated called I'm Mine. The "deceptively simple" premise saw Schlichting take the children's story, computerize the artwork, and offer kids the choice of having the computer read the story to them or "play" inside the pages of the book. The title 'Living Books' was chosen to represent that everything in the environment is alive and for the player to experiment with.
