Purble Place: the mystery behind gen Z’s favourite forgotten video game

An entire generation nurses fond nostalgic memories of the gaudy kids' game that came packed in with Windows Vista. But who actually made it?

If you had a PC in the 2010s, you probably owned a copy of Purble Place. The gaudy kids' game came with every copy of Windows Vista and 7. It was a simple, three-title package: Purble Pairs was a basic tile memory game; Purble Shop had the player design a mystery character using logic and deduction; and the last game of Comfy Cakes had kids playing line cook for the Purble Chef while juggling orders on a conveyor belt. And for many online teens, the legacy of these games easily equals that of Minesweeper and Solitaire, the more venerable pack-in games of PCs past.

Yet nobody knows who made it. Curious players noted a simple credit to Oberon Games in the game's help menu, but that's all. Despite being installed on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide, the actual creators of the game have lived in obscurity for two decades.