American video game developer (1992-2006)
Humongous Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Bothell, Washington. Founded in 1992, the company is best known for developing multiple edutainment franchises, most prominently Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam and Spy Fox, which, combined, sold over 15 million copies and earned more than 400 awards of excellence.[1]
Humongous Entertainment was acquired by GT Interactive (later renamed Infogrames, Inc., then Atari, Inc.) in July 1996. By October 2000, sales of Humongous games had surpassed 16 million copies.[2] GT sold the Humongous business to its parent company, Infogrames (later renamed Atari SA), in August 2005 and laid off the studio's employees. Infogrames held the assets under a new subsidiary, Humongous, Inc., until its bankruptcy in 2013, in which the assets were sold to Tommo. Tommo re-released some of its games into digital distribution channels in conjunction with Night Dive Studios.
History
Formation (1992–1996)
Humongous Entertainment was formed by Shelley Day and Ron Gilbert in March 1992,[3] then based in Woodinville, Washington.[4] The name Humongous Entertainment was suggested by Gilbert's ex-LucasArts colleague, Tim Schafer.[5] 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 cross over with ones in another (except for Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear's Activity Pack, where Putt-Putt and Fatty Bear combined their Fun Packs) 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.[6]
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.[7]
Acquisitions, decline, dissolution (1996–2006)
On July 11, 1996, Humongous Entertainment was purchased by GT Interactive for US$76 million.[8] In November 1997, Humongous Entertainment signed a five-year worldwide deal with Nickelodeon to develop games based on the Nick Jr. series, Blue's Clues, making it the first and only time that Humongous has developed games based on a licensed character as opposed to its original characters.[9] The same year, Humongous released their first "Backyard Sports" title, Backyard Baseball. Backyard Sports would go on to become the company's longest-running series. In November 1999, GT Interactive was acquired by Infogrames and renamed to 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.[10] 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.[11] In May 2003, after Infogrames, Inc. purchased Hasbro Interactive—which owned the rights to the Atari brand—the company was renamed Atari, Inc.
On August 22, 2005, facing financial struggles, Atari, Inc. sold the Humongous Entertainment business to Infogrames for shares worth US$10.3 million. As part of the deal, the assets were transferred to a new Infogrames subsidiary (Humongous, Inc.), while the employees of Humongous Entertainment were laid off. Infogrames expected to sell Humongous, Inc. further. On the same day, Atari, Inc. signed an agreement with Homongous, Inc. to exclusively distribute the company's games in North America through March 2006, which was later extended through March 2007.[12][13]
Post-closure asset handling (2006–present)
In April 2008, Infogrames would purchase and merge with Atari, Inc.[14][15] Following this merger, Infogrames Entertainment's company name was changed to Atari SA, who would go on to publish numerous more Backyard Sports titles.[16] In March 2008, Majesco Entertainment announced that they would publish Wii ports of three Humongous titles.[17] Mistic Software developed ports of the first installments of each Junior Adventure series, except Putt-Putt, taking advantage of the Wii Remote's point-and-click functionality.[1] However, their availability was greatly limited by a legal conflict concerning their development.[18] Beginning in November 2011, in collaboration with Nimbus Games, Atari began releasing Android and iOS ports of several Humongous Entertainment Junior Adventure titles.[19] These releases continued into 2012.[20] In 2013, Atari SA filed bankruptcy for Atari, Inc., Atari Interactive, and Humongous. As part of the resolution proceedings, the Humongous brand and most game assets were sold to Tommo on July 19, 2013. The Backyard Sports series was acquired by The Evergreen Group,[21] and MoonBase Commander by Rebellion Developments.[22]
Beginning in 2014, the relaunched Humongous brand under Tommo began re-releasing the original Junior Adventure and Junior Arcade titles for Windows and Mac; ports for most of these titles were also released for mobile devices.[23] In early 2022, Humongous released Nintendo Switch ports of several of the Junior Adventure titles, followed by ports of these titles for the PlayStation 4 later that year.[24][25][26] A digital compilation of these releases, titled "Humongous Classic Collection" was released in December 2022 for both systems, while a Nintendo Switch exclusive physical compilation was released in 2023.[27][28][29]
