Top 10 Reasons to Change Your Name:

10) Current name doesn’t match edgy new haircut

09) Sued by Maurice Sendak; Johnnie Cochran unavailable

08) Want to keep job after drinking half bottle of tequila at office party

07) Would like a few hours without telemarketers and spam

06) IT department messed up account, unable to fix it

05) It’s just like plastic surgery - but with words!

04) Entering witness protection program

03) New name contains 33% less fat

02) Expensive consultants said so

01) Love name, just not “in” love with name…

“Media” suggested a passive experience. “Interactive” is anything but.

Why yes, we changed our name.

If you’ve known Night Kitchen long, you probably know that we recently changed our name. You even might have received our whimsical Top 10 Reasons to Change Your Name postcard in the mail (featured left). Kidding aside, there is a good reason for our recent name change.

A little history…

You see, when we first started out in this burgeoning industry over 10 years ago, things looked very different. The Internet – the Web – was crude to say the least. The average residential connection was a 56k modem and everyone surfed (more like paddled) the Web using Netscape 4 or IE 3. Macromedia Flash was at version 2 and it didn’t even have a scripting language! For the most part, you were either a Web design company MacGyver-ing basic websites with HTML 2, or you were a multimedia company.

Why “Media” back then?

As our passion was (and still is) in creating immersive, interactive narrative experiences, we felt that we needed to go beyond HTML and animated GIFs. So we named ourselves Night Kitchen Media and joined up with content partners to create immersive educational CD-ROMs such as Explore Kilauea Volcano, The Amistad Incident and The Mystery Museum. These early projects laid wonderful groundwork for the interactive storytelling we do today.

Why “Interactive” now?

While we still integrate media such as audio, video and animation into our core solutions, our focus now is really on the user experience. The interaction. The term media now tends to be synonymous with video, and while video is often a major aspect of the experience, these days there is so much more. From our virtual character-driven educational narratives such as Abraham Lincoln’s Crossroads and Spectrum: Supporting Adults with Autism to our participatory storytelling collaborations such as The Art of Storytelling and The Franklin Remix, Night Kitchen is becoming more Interactive every day.