Mindcraft Software

Mindcraft Software, Inc. was an American game developer founded in 1989 in Torrance, California, by Ali Atabek alongside his wife Ugur Atabek and partner Jim Thomas. Ali had already cut his teeth in game design with Rings of Zilfin for SSI, and when the time came to launch his own project—The Magic Candle—he and his team decided to build a studio from the ground up to do it justice.

From the late ’80s through the mid-’90s, Mindcraft carved out a niche for itself in the world of role-playing and strategy games. The Magic Candle series was its flagship. Sequels followed—The Magic Candle II: The Four and Forty and The Magic Candle III—each expanding the world while sometimes wrestling with the limitations of the era’s interfaces and pacing. Mindcraft didn’t confine itself to RPGs. Titles like Rules of Engagement, Siege, and Walls of Rome offered strategy fans a mix of tactical depth and large-scale battles. Ambush at Sorinor tried to merge strategy with real-time skirmishes, earning both praise for its concepts and criticism for its sometimes erratic AI. Meanwhile, Bloodstone: An Epic Dwarven Tale and Tegel’s Mercenaries broadened their thematic range, bringing different settings and playstyles into the fold.

Although the company’s heyday was relatively short—lasting until the mid-1990s—it left behind a legacy tied to the golden age of DOS gaming.