Our Story

ScreenSaver.com is owned, operated, and otherwise "Published" by Rhode Island Soft Systems, Inc. ("RISS").

Founded in 1988, in Woonsocket, RI by Eric G. Robichaud, RISS is a cutting edge software engineering company focused on delighting and entertaining customers with the highest quality consumer software products and screen savers. The company is a market-leader in developing both free screen saver and retail screensaver products, as well as games and utilities.

The company has made a name for itself by focusing on quality, speed of development, and overall product superiority. The in-house Engineering and Art departments are second to none. With their proprietary technological assets, these teams combine to develop some of the most popular and highest quality consumer software products and services. Besides directly selling its consumer software, the company also creates custom screensavers and game products for other companies to use as advertising / promotional premiums. Examples of custom promotional screen saver clients: Folger's Coffee, Panasonic, Bacardi, American Express, and Harley-Davidson, just to name a few.

In the days before the advent of the World Wide Web, RISS developed scores of successful boxed, retail screen saver products such as the "Terminator 2", "I Love Lucy", "Babylon 5", "Star Trek: DS9", and "Twilight Zone" products, just to name a few.

The company set Internet records for most/fastest downloads of a single product in 1996 when it released the Duke Nukem 3D Screensaver and Entertainment Pak. It then broke its own records with the subsequent release of "Hey, Macaroni!", the most popular screen saver on the internet for several years. The company then continued to break its own records in succession with releases such as "Liverdance" and "Clinton Blues," just to name a few.

In 1997 the company launched ScreenSaver.com, a web site devoted to screen savers. At the time there were many download sites where screen savers could be found, but they were all focused on having the largest quantity of files, not the best quality. ScreenSaver.com set out to differentiate itself by highlighting only the very best quality screensavers, regardless of who developed/published them (i.e. the site does not contain only RISS' products). Our goal was to create a site where a web surfer could be assured that any product that was downloaded would be of a substantially high quality, and that he/she would not be wasting his/her time. We aimed to eliminate what we termed "downloader's remorse."

This strategy was well received. Within a year, ScreenSaver.com was the dominant, most popular screensaver-centric web site on the Internet. This dominance continues to this day, as the site is continually expanded and improved.

Along the way, RISS has acquired several new media development shops including Mediaweave.com and ImageMakers.com, which have been rolled into a new media design division called "Mediaweave." This design talent develops interactive media solutions (custom screensavers, interactive CD-ROM presentations, games, sophisticated web sites, etc.) and contributes additional resources to pushing the envelope for the company's own retail screen saver development. Mediaweave has redesigned the ScreenSaver.com web site as you now see it. Visit www.mediaweave.com for details.