Every wonder what happened to Decipher? We sure did. Thanks to Daniel Perez, we now know. Apparently, Rick Eddlemen, the brother-in-law of Decipher’s founder Warren Holland and VP of finance, spent nine of his years at the company embezzling over $1.5MM from the company, forcing the company to lay of 90 employees. Eddleman is currently charged with 12 counts of embezzlement (which could result in up to 12 years in prison) with a separate civil suit from Decipher for $8.9MM in damages.

For those who aren’t familiar with Decipher, they had the full Star Trek license (which resulted in an average RPG and a really great CCG), the Lord of the Rings license (which also resulted in an average RPG and a great CCG) and the Star Wars CCG license (before WotC took it over – many people considered the Decipher version significantly better). They even launched an online version of the LotR CCG that was quite cool. They tried many different things over the years that never really went anywhere (the .hack and Mega Man CCGs) and even created a new property with Michael Stackpole that really could have been cool (the “Wars” CCG). For most of the 1990’s, they were considered to be a step behind Wizards, but in the early 2000’s they really seemed to start falling apart, discontinuing a number of great games.

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Cognisafe has released new software that is supposed to analyze cheating patterns in online games such as Poker and Chess. The company has also done some preliminary work with EA, and believes it’s software is highky flexible and can be easily adapted to other games.

I asked the CEO, Shmulik, if it could tell the difference between two people sharing information verbally or using IM (i.e. outside the game itself), and he indicated that it could. Naturally, he wouldn’t go into the ugly details. And, of course, the longer the behavior occurs, the easier it is to nail it.

Other anti-cheating technology exists for online games, but they are mostly concerned with MMOG’s (Punkbuster) and/or need to be integrated into the server software (Warden).

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