Voyager Company

The Voyager Company

Former type	Software Company
Successor(s)	The Criterion Collection
Founded	1984
Defunct	1997
Headquarters	, United States
Products	LaserDiscs, Interactive CD-ROM, The Criterion Collection

The Voyager Company was a pioneer in CD-ROM production in the 1980s and early 1990s, and published The Criterion Collection, a pioneering home video collection of classic and important contemporary films on Laserdisc. It was founded in 1984 by four partners: Jon Turell, Bill Becker, Aleen Stein and Robert Stein. The firm took its name from the Voyager space craft.

In 1994 the partnership was diluted by selling 20% of it to the von Holzbrinck Publishing Group, a German holding company. In 1997, the Holzbrinck Group withdrew with its 20%, the name of "Voyager" and half the CD-ROM rights - Robert Stein took half the other CD-ROM rights, and the Toolkit rights.

This left the Criterion Collection and three of the original partners: Aleen Stein (1/3), the Becker family (1/3), and the Turell family (1/3). See The Criterion Collection for further information.

List of Voyager Company Releases

Laserdiscs

• De Italia
• The Great Quake of '89 (in partnership with ABC News Interactive)
• The National Gallery of Art
• The Residents: Twenty Twisted Questions (Part 1/2)
• Louvre
• To New Horizons: Ephemeral Films 1931-1945
• The Vancouver Disc
• Vienna
• You Can't Get There From Here: Ephemeral Films 1945-1960
• The Voyager Videostack

CD-ROMS

• A Hard Day's Night (Demo)
• A World Alive (Demo)
• All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis By Morton Subotnick (Demo)
• Amanda Stories (Demo)
• American Poetry The Nineteenth Century (Demo)
• Amnesty Interactive (Demo)
• Baseball's Greatest Hits (Demo)
• The Beat Experience
• The CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony CD-ROM (Demo)
• The CD Companion To Mozart's Dissonant Quartet (Demo)
• The CD Companion to Dvorak The New World Symphony(Demo)
• The CD Companion to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" (Demo)
• Circus!: An Interactive Cartoon (Demo)
• Comic Book Confidential (Demo)
• The Complete Maus (Demo)
• Criterion Goes to the Movies (Demo)
• The Day After Trinity (Demo)
• Dazzleoids
• Ephemeral Films 1931-1960 (incorporating two previously-released titles, To New Horizons and You Can't Get There From Here) (Demo)
• First Emperor of China (Demo)
• First Person: "Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine" Donald Norman, three Norman books and a number of technical papers (Demo)
• First Person: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (Demo)
• First Person: The Society of Mind, starring Dr. Marvin Minsky (Demo)
• For All Mankind(Demo)
• If Monks Had Macs... (Demo)
• Invisible Universe, starring Dr. Fiorella Terenzi
• Last Chance to See
• Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel (Clip)
• Macbeth (Demo)
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:The CD-ROM (Cancelled)
• Our Secret Century: The Darker Side of the American Dream (12 discs, 2 unreleased, of films and collateral material from Prelinger Archives
• Painters Painting (Demo)
• People Weekly - 20 Amazing Years Of Pop Culture (Demo)
• Poetry in Motion (Demo)
• The Residents Freak Show (Demo)
• Rodney's Wonder Window
• Silly Noisy House
• So I've Heard: A Collector's Guide to Compact Discs
• Stephen Jay Gould On Evolution (Demo)
• Theatre of the Imagination: Radio Stories by Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre
• This Is Spinal Tap
• The Trout Quintet
• Understanding MacLuhan (Demo)
• The Voyager Audiostack

Expanded Books Series

• Jurassic Park - Crichton, Michael
• The Complete Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Adams, Douglas (EB2)
• The Complete Annotated Alice in Wonderland - Carroll, Lewis, Intro & notes by Gardner, Martin (EB1)
• Virtual Light - Gibson, William (EB52)
• Neuromancer / Count Zero / Mona Lisa Overdrive - Gibson, William (EB15)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals - Pirsig, Robert (EB8)
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - Glick, James
• Who Built America
• A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters - L'Engle, Madeleine
• The Complete Stories, Volume 1 - Asimov, Isaac
• The Criterion Collection

References

History

• Amy Virshup. "The Teachings of Bob Stein". http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.07/stein_pr.html. Retrieved 2009-02-16. 
• "Voyager Company CD-ROM products listed on Amazon". http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Voyager%20Company. Retrieved 2010-01-15.