ChessBase: History of the Company, Its Products and US Distribution

Origins on the Atari ST

ChessBase is a German software company based in Hamburg. Its own account gives 19 May 1986 as the birthday. The founders chose that date because the actual start of the business was unclear, and they did not use the date of the official filing with the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce. The two founders were Frederic Friedel, a journalist, and Matthias Wüllenweber, who was then a physics student and who had programmed a chess database on the Atari ST.

The link to Garry Kasparov is central to the origin story. In an interview in 2020 Friedel recalled that Kasparov, then world champion, had visited him in Hamburg after a magazine assignment for Der Spiegel, and that a magazine story about their plans to build a game database followed. Friedel’s assistant Wüllenweber showed an early version of the program to Kasparov in Basel, after Kasparov’s game against Tony Miles during a match. Friedel quotes Kasparov as calling it the most important development in chess study since Gutenberg, and says that Kasparov signed ten pages of letter paper in support of the project and promoted the product for about ten years without being paid. Kasparov’s enthusiasm, as the Chess.com account describes it, was about the practical gain: a computer could pull up an opponent’s games and save preparation time.

What the company sells

The core product is the database program that carries the company’s name. It stores games in a proprietary format called CBH and converts to and from PGN, the open text format. Around it grew a family of products.

• Fritz, a playing program first sold in November 1991 (marketed as Knightstalker in the United States). Its third version won the World Computer Chess Championship in Hong Kong in 1995, and Deep Fritz later drew an eight-game match against Vladimir Kramnik in 2002 and won a six-game match against him in Bonn in 2006.
• ChessBase Magazine, published six times a year on DVD with video interviews, opening articles and annotated games; one issue listed in the shop carries over six hours of video.
• Fritz Trainer, a line of video training courses, which play inside the free ChessBase Reader in the Chess Media format introduced in 2003. A separate article explains ChessBase Reader and Fritz Trainer.
• Playchess, the company’s online playing server.

The company shop, operated by ChessBase GmbH in Hamburg, lists these products together with books. A 2018 article about the shop’s redesign mentions ChessBase 14, Fritz 21, a ChessBase for Mac subscription at 9.95 euros a month or 99.95 euros a year, and magazine issues, with prices in euros.

Distribution outside Germany

ChessBase does not sell everything from a single storefront in every country. The Wikipedia article states that ChessBaseUSA markets the products in the United States, that Viva Media, a division of Encore, Inc., sells some of the most popular programs as licensee, and that ChessBase India markets the products in India and surrounding countries. The 2018 shop article, by contrast, gives no US-specific prices, shipping or tax terms, so a buyer in the United States should read the terms of the storefront actually used.

Why the company matters to the game

ChessBase appears often in chess writing because it supplied tools for storing and replaying games, a need Kasparov spotted at the very start, and because its Fritz engine took part in matches against world champions, among them Kramnik in 2002 and 2006 and Kasparov in 2003. Where the history of the game meets the history of its software, the computer chess hub is the place to continue. Earlier episodes appear in the chess history section, including the profile of David Levy.

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