Put together on a shoestring 11 years ago, Voyager is the multimedia company that put CD-ROMs on the map. Early titles like the company’s annotated version of the Beatles’ 1964 movie “A Hard Day’s Night” on CD-ROM set the bar for a new kind of software. Small and iconoclastic, it consistently fights the trends in the industry it created, barely squeaking out a profit. Yet it manages, year after year, to produce highbrow titles that live up to the company’s motto: Bring Your Brain.
Voyager is personified by 49-year-old Bob Stein, a contrarian self-described Maoist who is the company’s uncompromising cofounder. Under Stein’s guidance, the company has published CD-ROMs on everything from baseball to archeology to Shakespeare. He refuses to produce mindless twitch games like “Dark Forces.” “I’ve been in a lot of meetings internally where somebody says, ‘Why don’t we just make a hit?’” Stein says. “We certainly don’t set out not to make hits. Our commitment is to making things that we like, that we’re proud to publish.”
Voyager’s journey to its present SoHo loft was anything but direct. An early member of Students for a Democratic Society, Stein spent more than a decade working as a political activist. Stein worked briefly at Atari, the now defunct videogame manufacturer. In the early 1980s, he and his wife, Aleen, started Criterion, a company for putting films on laser disc. They survived on credit cards until they founded Voyager in 1984 as a joint venture with Janus Films, a distributor of foreign and classic films. The laser-disc business was the mainstay, but the Steins had already seen the bigger potential of multimedia.
In 1989, using Apple Computer’s multimedia HyperCard software, Voyager put out its first CD-ROM, on Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Ever since, Stein’s insistence on quality has been legendary in the multimedia industry. He is unapologetically committed to producing intellectually stimulating, occasionally provocative titles. Last summer, when Abu-Jamal was fighting for a stay of execution, Voyager rushed a CD-ROM into print to lobby for the cause. Voyager’s most controversial title to date is “Who Built America?”, a candid history published in 1998. It includes accounts of gay cowhands and Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child.
Decisions at Voyager are made by an editorial board, but Stein remains the guiding force. Last year the company made a big concession to commercialism with a People magazine CD-ROM, a 20-year retrospective of the magazine. Stein defends the choice, calling People “an ironic cultural property.” The company’s top-selling title is “A Hard Day’s Night,” with sales of about 100,000. That pales next to “Myst,” “Doom” and “Dark Forces,” each of which has sold more than a million copies.
Two years ago the company moved to New York from California. The Steins have since divorced, and Aleen recently started her own multimedia company in Manhattan called Organa. Stein says he moved to be closer to the publishing world, after which Voyager is modeled. Stein likens his business to the old Random House, where a few big hits paid for quality titles that made little or no money. Indeed, authors and artists don’t sign up with Voyager to make big money. Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prizewinning artist, received a small advance in Interactive action: Bob Stein of Voyager hopes he can keep publishing smart CD-ROMs 1994 for “The Complete Maus,” based on his books about his father’s survival of Auschwitz. Spiegelman says he has no idea how the CD-ROM is selling and doesn’t particularly care. It was the technology that interested him. “If I had to live off CD-ROM royalties, I’d be out on the streets with a squeegee,” he says. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has made one CD-ROM with Voyager and says she would love to do more.
Last year, von Holtzbrinck, a German publishing group, paid $6.75 million for an 18 percent stake-providing a badly needed infusion of cash. That money notwithstanding, Stein runs a lean outfit. His own salary is $75,000. And where a film studio’s interactive division will routinely spend more than $1 million to produce an action-packed movie knockoff, Voyager spends an average of $150,000 to produce a disc.
With thousands of new CD-ROM titles fighting for space in stores, distribution is perhaps the biggest problem for Voyager and other small multimedia companies. Although mass merchants like Best Buy and Wal-Mart carry CD-ROMs, they offer limited shelf space, and they won’t tolerate titles that sell fewer than three or four copies a month. That gives megacompanies like Microsoft a big advantage.
Voyager has found a partial solution in bookstores, which are a better match for the more literary market Stein has in mind. Chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, as well as a few independent bookstores, carry Voyager titles. The company’s most promising outlet may be the Internet, where the shelf space is virtually infinite. Voyager sells CD-ROMs and laser discs via its Web page (http://www.voyagerco.com), with promising early results.
Voyager’s most conspicuous nod to the realities of the marketplace is its move to convert its titles from Macintosh to PC format. By the end of the year, two thirds of the company’s 64 titles will be out for PCs, which dominate the computer market. Still, Voyager’s job will get harder before it gets easier. Nearly every large publishing house now has an interactive division, making it more difficult for independents to license material. And as CD-ROM prices continue to drop (the average price has fallen rapidly in the past year to under $50), margins are getting squeezed.
How much longer Voyager can survive is unclear. “The major up is that we’re still here,” says Jonathan Turell, another Voyager cofounder. “That says something about us.” If the rest of the multimedia industry is out to prove that no one goes broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, perhaps Voyager is proving the obverse: attach a high estimation to the intelligence of your audience and maybe, just maybe, you can scrape by.
