Absolute Entertainment

~ the obit ~

Absolute Entertainment was founded in 1986 in Glen Rock, New Jersey by Garry Kitchen, his brother Dan Kitchen, Alex DeMeo and John Van Ryzin. All four had written games at Activision, the company that had invented the idea of the independent cartridge publisher and then spent the early eighties watching that idea nearly kill the industry. Kitchen was the one who had squeezed Donkey Kong onto the Atari 2600 in 1983, which by the standards of that hardware was closer to a magic trick than a port.

The same year, the founders set up a second company called Imagineering in the same town. Imagineering was the development shop and Absolute was the publisher, and for six years they ran as separate legal animals so that Imagineering could take contract work from publishers who would never have bought anything from a competitor. That client list ended up including Acclaim, Atari, Activision, Hi Tech Expressions, GameTek and THQ. Absolute absorbed Imagineering in 1992 and became a developer under its own name for the first time.

David Crane joined in 1988, which meant the two men most associated with Activision's first catalog were now in New Jersey making cartridges for the Nintendo licensing regime instead. Crane designed A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia in 1989, a game about feeding jellybeans to a creature that turned into a ladder or a hole depending on the flavor, and it is the one Absolute title people still bring up unprompted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the alphabet trick ~

The company name was a positioning decision before it was a name. Activision had been called Activision partly so it would appear ahead of Atari in an alphabetized list, back when a distributor's catalog and a retailer's order form were both sorted that way and being first meant being read first. Absolute did the same thing to Activision. It is a small piece of eighties retail cynicism preserved in a corporate charter.

The strategy underneath it was less clever. Absolute's business was licensed content: The Simpsons, Home Alone, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, the titles a publisher orders because the character on the box does the selling. Imagineering built The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants for Acclaim in 1991, and it moved on the strength of a cartoon rather than on anything Imagineering put in the code. In a business like that the developer's name is the least valuable thing in the transaction.

~ the license business ~

Absolute did put its own names on a few boxes. Garry Kitchen's Super Battletank shipped for the SNES in 1992 with the author credited on the cover in the Activision style, a Gulf War tank simulator released while the actual war was still fresh enough to be a selling point. It sold well enough to get a sequel. But the run of company-owned properties was short, and the revenue kept coming from work done on someone else's character for someone else's release schedule.

That model had one requirement, which was that cartridges keep selling at cartridge prices. By 1994 the Saturn and the PlayStation were coming, the licensed sixteen-bit shelf was saturated with product from every publisher who had noticed the same opportunity, and the margin on a Home Alone tie-in had collapsed. In the third quarter of 1995 Absolute suspended operations and laid off most of the staff. The Chapter 7 filing followed the same year.

~ the second company ~

Kitchen and Crane had already started Skyworks Technologies before the collapse finished, and a number of Absolute people walked across to it. Skyworks did not make cartridges. It made browser games for candy companies, and its two best-known clients were Life Savers and Nabisco, which is how Candystand and NabiscoWorld got built by the men who wrote Pitfall and Donkey Kong 2600. Both of those sites have graves on this site already. I never owned an Absolute cartridge and there was no plausible way for me to own one in Turkey in 1992, where a licensed American SNES box at an American price was not a thing that arrived. The second company's work needed a browser and nothing else, and a browser is the one thing everybody eventually had.

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