In 1996, Corel created a Full motion video game called Mode. The company held the naming rights to the home arena for the NHL's Ottawa Senators from February 1996 until January 2006 as the 'Corel Centre', a venue currently known as the Canadian Tire Centre. This mainly consisted of Microsoft Works office applications, but a variant called Works Suite also bundled the Microsoft Word software.
Corel was in a difficult position as Microsoft pushed pre-loaded copies of its software onto new computers. In 1996, it acquired Novell WordPerfect and started competing with the thought of being ' Pepsi to Microsoft's Coke' as Microsoft Word was the top-used word processing software at the time. The company had great success early in the high-tech boom of the 1990s and early 2000s with the product CorelDRAW, and became, for a time, the biggest software company in Canada. Mitel needed writing and creative design programs to enhance the company product line. Corel was founded by Michael Cowpland in 1985 as a research laboratory.
