Catherine McHenry Hutchinson, former PR Director for Piranha Interactive Publishing, Inc., is a geek. Not quite 30, she’s old enough to know that the Apple IIe made Tandy look tawdry and that MUDs and MOOs predate suburban chat rooms. In them she deconstructed Blade Runner a la Foucault and imagined graphical interfaces for the net. Her nightmares arrived in the form of AOL 2.0 and her fantasies took the shape of T-1 video streaming. She now subscribes to Vanity Fair offline and raises championship Rottweilers. What did Piranha start as? What were its founders aiming for? Two brothers and three of their former colleagues created Piranha. After successfully launching and selling two private firms (Automap and Software Marketing Corp., the original makers of BodyWorks), they launched PIP as their answer to what a software publisher should be. Publish a quality product with great packaging. Treat your customers well. Give fair and consistent pricing to your retailers and distributors. Create mutually profitable partnerships with an eye for the long term. And, oh yeah, take it public. They structured PIP to avoid inside development costs and so they courted independent development groups. Third party developers might land more upfront money for their title with bigger publishers, but at Piranha they could count on boutique-style attention: their logos on the boxes and marketing material, access to important press mentions and interviews, joint credit for major industry awards and so on. How did you get involved with Piranha? I met Doug and Tim Brannan at a neighborhood bar in Phoenix around Christmas, 1997. Doug was buying Tim a celebratory margarita and I convinced him to upgrade the tequila to Anejo Silver. We talked. They invited me to visit their offices. By late January I joined the Piranha Fishbowl as their Regional Sales Manager. As the company grew, the partners encouraged me to take more responsibility and so in August of 1998 I took on PR duties. Piranha’s work divisions were fluid and the learning possibilities, endless. What kinds of games were in the works to be published? We were looking at a number of niche-gaming categories: a rodeo simulation, a driving game with a real life twist, an interactive adventure game/movie where the ending changed depending upon the gamer’s input, a more Grim Fandango-style adventure game, which used FMV with better-than-average character acting and this great cartoon strategy title. Fun stuff. Then, of course, there was the anticipation of RedShift 4. Has anything been left over to finish in terms of upcoming releases? Is there a possibility other developers will pick up where Piranha left off? Someone will pick up the RedShift series, I would expect. The better games will no doubt be published as well. But the software industry is shifting into a sort of film making model. While the LA basin is home to over 9,000 production houses, a handful of studios markets and distributes most of the major movies. That handful at the top decides the quality and types of films produced for most of the market. While the occasional independent project "breaks through" to nationwide distribution, the norm for all but a few is straight to video. Software doesn’t have even that outlet, unless you count shareware. Even budget software is typically slightly older versions of brand identity successes. Starting a publishing house from scratch, even for an established game developer, would be a Don Quixote proposition. What was in the works at Piranha when it closed shop? You mentioned at Macworld SF that you might be buying out some smaller companies. Did anything come of that? We saw the market changing and knew that to sustain growth we needed to expand our catalog. As a Nasdaq company we operated with certain advantages as well as specific constraints. Acquiring one or more small to mid-size publishers for their catalogs made sense. The advantages included using our stock as currency for the purchase. Was there ever major concern as to the company's well-being, or did this just happen all of a sudden? What were the first signs of trouble? When? What exactly happened? Merger/Acquisition activity requires, among other things, financial due diligence. All publicly traded companies must file an end of the year statement called a 10-K which must be verified by an independent auditor. We didn’t file ours on time. Without it, none of those deals could go forward. Complicating matters slightly was our trading price. Nasdaq doesn’t list companies who trade at less than 1.00/share and whose market valuation is less than one million dollars. Our share price traded at below 1.00 for 30 consecutive days and, eventually, lowered the market valuation below the 1MM bar. Nasdaq delisted PRAN somewhere in June. Piranha needed more than successful sales, it needed expansion capital. Again, like the film industry, a publisher is only as good as its last title. Naturally, the story is more complicated and messy than that outline conveys … but it isn’t my story to tell. Nota Bene: run a federal background check on your underwriter and maybe avoid big accounting firms if their local office hides money for convicted-felon politicians. What are the other employees up to now? Most of us fishies—non-officers--have moved on to positions outside of the software industry. One or three have stayed in the industry and maybe even specialized, ie., brokering international publishing deals for American developers. As for me, well, I haven’t decided. Looking back, what are the things you want Piranha to be remembered for? Answering that question would involve some hubris on my part. I didn’t build Piranha from the ground up like the others did. Doug Brannan used to say that the software industry was so insular that really it was "the same clowns, different circus." Piranha proved that the circus didn’t need to be man-eating tigers for an action game to compete with Interplay and GT, or for an astronomy program to catch praise from hard-core gaming mags. All opinions expressed are the personal views of Catherine McHenry Hutchinson and do not represent the company’s past or present positions, nor the views of its officers.