For Nancy Drew Games Publisher, Success is No Mystery

Her Interactive Inc., of Bellevue, has grown from the little sister of an '80s arcade game company into a global force in video games for girls.

Now it's moving forward with the upcoming launch, tentatively targeted for Dec. 1, of a new mystery game product for iPad, iPod and iPhone.

Megan Gaiser, Her Interactive's President and CEO, says the company hopes the product will score it another win on top of the recent successful launch of its newest PC game, Shadow at the Water's Edge, which has earned a five-star rating on Amazon.com.

Gaiser says that the company pioneered video games geared to the female youth audience in 1995, about the same time that it split off from the now-defunct Albequerque, N.M.-based American Laser Games and moved to Bellevue.

In 1997, Her Interactive hit on a formula of success with its license of the broadly known Nancy Drew character that has defined the company. Gaiser says that the games originally were marketed to girls between the ages of 10 and 15. 

The series has carried it through the recession and several years of dropping prices in the video game market.

"We're the mystery makers," Gaiser says.

She said growing to maturity in Bellevue, one of the "hearts of the gaming industry," has been beneficial to Her Interactive.

"You have a variety of gaming companies here and a community that has formed as the result of that," Gaiser says.

The company shuns pink and fluffy packaging that the industry insisted would be necessary to attract the attention of girls. Instead, it has branded its products as smart and high-quality, and focused on creating accurate depictions of the locales and history surrounding each mystery story. The New York Times once referred to the series as the "Un-Barbie of computer games," Gaiser says.

For example, in the newest release, Shadow at the Water's Edge, the player—who is always personified in the game as Nancy Drew herself—travels to Japan, where she is immersed not only in the mystery but in Japanese culture, both past and present.

So far, Her Interactive has published  23 Nancy Drew mystery games, each inspired by a book in the original series that was written by various women authors under the pen name Carolyn Keene over the last 80 years, and has won the Parents Choice award for its titles at least 22 times, Gaiser says.

Aside from kudos and awards for its content, the privately-held company is solid in the numbers game, too, Gaiser says. It has had nine years of year-over-year revenue growth, seven consecutive profitable years, and average revenue increases of 34 percent year-over-year.

Her Interactive releases two new games each year, developed collaboratively by the 32-member staff and tested throughout development by an advisory board of girls and women to ensure that the puzzles aren't too hard and that each piece of each game is engaging to the target audience.

That audience now includes not only the teens, but also their mothers and grandmothers, Gaiser says.

The character of Nancy Drew has for generations represented the pinnacle of a positive female role model, Gaiser says, noting that each of the three current female Supreme Court Justices cited not their own mothers, but Nancy Drew as their childhood inspirations.

About 10 percent of the games audience are boys, and the company did publish a Hardy Boys game in 2009, but the company remains focused on its niche of providing an excellent product for a female audience, Gaiser says.

"Fifty-one percent of us are female, and a lot of the earliest computer programmers are girls," she says.

The company now sees potential for social media games based on the sleuth, and has an "Ambassad-Her" program in which women bloggers help spread the word about the franchise on social media outlets.

Though the company has no immediate plans to hire staff, it is growing and has an office that it can expand  in, up to about 50 employees overall, Gaiser says.

"Our goal in the future is to do another series," but is moving forward cautiously as the economy begins to recover, Gaiser says. "The gaming industry was affected more than anyone anticipated.  The good news is that there are a lot of opportunities as a result of changes in the marketplace."

 NancyDrew mystery games are available at retail outlets, Amazon, and at Her Interactive.