It all started back in 2002 and we were mainly developing educational and entertainment CD-ROMs. We used Macromedia Director, coding in its Lingo programming language. How things have changed! It wasn’t long until we moved to building for the web, initially with multimedia platforms like Shockwave and Flash. Eventually we moved to developing full-on brochure and ecommerce websites.
The early years
It had actually started a few years before. Our founders, Paul and Andy, had both been lead programmers at Europress Software. Here they worked on many educational software titles together, the most notable of these being The Clangers Activity Centre. Europress has been through several changes of ownership before finally closing down in June 2002. This was when Melted Media was born and ironically the first projects and many over the next few years would be for Koch Media. This was the German company that bought the rights to use the Europress brand name.
Our continued releases under the Europress brand also got us noticed by other software publishers. We were commissioned by Focus Multimedia to develop several educational titles including CD-ROMS for the Sitting Ducks and Big Cook Little Cook brands. Over the next five years we would develop the best part of 20 educational titles.
Of these, our biggest success was a title called Art Attack Digital. This was a flexible and creative PC CD-ROM designed for use by children or all ages and abilities. Packed full of creative tools, the program allowed you to perform wacky special effects on digital photographs and imported images. If we had to describe it, we’d call it a Photoshop for kids! Amazingly, this got to No. 1 on the Amazon.co.uk Hot 100 Software chart in the run up to Christmas 2004.
From multimedia to websites and everything in between
As web technology advanced, it would see us commissioned to develop online games. In many instances this meant working in collaboration with other digital agencies. This gave us the opportunity to work on projects for well-known brands like Toyota and Carlsberg and ultimately got us into developing our own games to promote the business. Many of the games we built required some form of database integration, so it wasn’t long before we’d taught ourselves some web scripting languages. Initially we used VBScript (using Classic ASP) before moving on to PHP. We soon learnt was much more powerful and adopted as our go to web language of choice.
The debut release from the Melted Games team – a joint venture between Melted Media and Studio Budgie – was a 3D Shockwave racing and combat game. The player fought their way through 28 stages across 7 brutal leagues of vehicular carnage. Believe it or not, the Autofrag Sumo game was No.1 in the Channel4.com 4GAMES CHART from October 2004 to October 2007!
Our newly acquired proficiency in PHP opened up the door to take on full website projects. This is where most of our focus has been over the last 13 years. From taking on website builds for small local businesses to completely bespoke ecommerce development and integration for an online retailer with over £10 million in sales a year, we’ve been involved in projects of all sizes and complexity.
All of this has given us a vast amount of experience to draw on. We love to use this to help small businesses with their first website and have fine-tuned the process to be as pain free as possible. This is why we love WordPress for developing websites.