Humongous Entertainment

Humongous Entertainment was formed by Shelley Day and Ron Gilbert in 1992, then based in Woodinville, Washington.[3] The name Humongous Entertainment was suggested by Gilbert's ex-LucasArts colleague, Tim Schafer.[4] It became known for creating four point-and-click adventure game series intended for young children, branded collectively as "Junior Adventures", with the four series being the Putt-Putt series, the Freddi Fish series, the Pajama Sam series and the Spy Fox series. Despite all four series being developed and released in parallel, characters from one series do not formally cross over with ones in another and instead appear as cameos or Easter eggs in any of the three other series. The company became the third largest children's educational-software company.[5]

In 1995, Gilbert and Day established a company division, Cavedog Entertainment, in Seattle, set to develop games of alternative genres, and released Total Annihilation, a real-time strategy (RTS) game, in 1997. This was followed by two expansion packs in 1998, as well as a variation called Total Annihilation: Kingdoms plus an expansion pack in 1999.[6]

On July 11, 1996, Humongous Entertainment was purchased by GT Interactive for US$76 million.[7] In November 1999, GT Interactive was acquired by Infogrames and renamed it Infogrames, Inc. In 2000, Humongous Entertainment released a One-Stop Fun Shop activity center game for each Junior Adventure series, with the exception of Spy Fox.[8]

In 2000, the co-founders tried to buy Humongous Entertainment back from Infogrames, Inc., using external funding, but the day of the planned purchase was the day of the dot-com collapse, wherefore the funding was pulled. The founders soon left Humongous, alongside many other key employees, and formed a new studio, Hulabee Entertainment, in 2001. In June 2001, Infogrames, Inc. laid off 82 personnel, over 40% of staff from Humongous Entertainment.[9] In May 2003, after Infogrames, Inc. purchased Hasbro Interactive—which owned the rights to the Atari brand—the company was renamed Atari, Inc. In August 2005, facing financial struggles, Atari, Inc. sold Humongous Entertainment to majority stock holder Infogrames for US$10.3 million, under the condition that all titles developed by Humongous Entertainment are released through March 31, 2006.[10] No further game was completed by Humongous Entertainment in the given time, and the company was dissolved the day after. Infogrames then transitioned all assets and brands to a newly established company, Humongous, Inc., not bound to any agreement from Atari, Inc., which would go on to publish several titles under the Humongous name until 2009, mainly with Majesco Entertainment. By that time, Majesco had released ports of the first installments of each Junior Adventure series, except Putt-Putt, to the Wii, taking advantage of the Wii Remote's point-and-click functionality,[1] but their availability was greatly limited by a legal conflict concerning their development.[11]

Finding itself in a difficult financial situation, Infogrames (then renamed Atari, SA), filed bankruptcy for three of its American subsidiaries, Atari, Inc., Atari Interactive and Humongous, Inc. in 2013. As part of the resolution proceedings, the Humongous brand and most game assets were transferred to Tommo on July 19, 2013. Furthermore, the Backyard Sports series was acquired by The Evergreen Group,[12] and MoonBase Commander by Rebellion Developments.[13] Using the trademark, Tommo re-launched the Humongous.com website in January 2014, and, together with Night Dive Studios, went on to re-release several Humongous Entertainment titles under the Humongous Entertainment label into digital distribution channels Steam, between April 2014 and August 2015.