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| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Video game publishing |
| Genre | Action, sports, strategy |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Founder | Garry Kitchen |
| Defunct | 1995 |
| Fate | Bankruptcy |
| Successor | Skyworks Technologies |
| Headquarters | Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, United States |
| Products | Video games |
Absolute Entertainment was an American video game publishing company. Through its development house, Imagineering, Absolute Entertainment produced titles for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Game Gear, Genesis/Mega Drive, Sega CD, Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super NES video game consoles, as well as for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC compatibles.
After leaving his position as a video game developer and designer at Activision, Garry Kitchen founded the company in 1986 with his brother Dan Kitchen, along with Alex DeMeo and John Van Ryzin. The company's headquarters was in Glen Rock, New Jersey, but later moved to another New Jersey borough, Upper Saddle River. In 1988, after his brief stint at Hasbro, David Crane had joined the company. While the company was based in New Jersey, David Crane worked out of his home on the West Coast. The company's name was chosen because it was alphabetically above Activision, implying that Absolute Entertainment was superior to Activision. It was the same strategy that Activision chose when the programmers left Atari.
At Absolute Entertainment, Kitchen continued developing games for the Atari 2600 and Atari 7800, as he had done at Activision. However, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had already displaced Atari's dominance of the video game console market. Kitchen swiftly shifted his focus to the NES, and produced several games for the platform, beginning with A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia in 1989, and Battle Tank in 1990.
Absolute Entertainment absorbed its studio Imagineering in 1992 to become itself a video game developer for the first time.
In the third quarter of 1995, Absolute Entertainment went bankrupt and suspended operations and laid off most of its staff. Since Kitchen had already formed a new company with David Crane called Skyworks Technologies, some of the employees transitioned to the new company.
References
- Absolute Entertainment at the Videogame Music Preservation Foundation Wiki
- Atarian Issue #2.
- "David Crane Joins Design Staff of Absolute Entertainment". Computer Entertainer. January 1989. p. 11.
- Bieniek, Chris (1994). "Article 10: David Crane Interview". Chris Bieniek. Archived from the original on April 15, 2012. Retrieved May 10, 2023.
- "Absolutely Grim". GamePro. No. 89. IDG. February 1996. p. 17.
- Companies based in Bergen County, New Jersey
- Video game companies established in 1986
- Video game companies disestablished in 1995
- Defunct companies based in New Jersey
- Video game publishers
- Defunct video game companies of the United States
- 1986 establishments in New Jersey
- Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1995