GameTek

~ the obit ~

The company underneath GameTek was called I.J.E., founded in 1977 by Jerry Weiner and Irwin H. Schwartz, both out of Disneyland Records, to put children's entertainment into stores under the Kid Stuff brand. Schwartz reacquired it through a holding company in 1987, and GameTek was the trade name the software side got. Everything about the company follows from that origin. It was a distribution and rights business that happened to land in games.

What it held were the electronic publishing rights to the biggest game shows on American television. Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune were the valuable pair. Hollywood Squares and The Price Is Right sat behind them, and Password was in there too, a decade past its own peak. At first GameTek licensed these on to ShareData and collected. Then somebody worked out what the licensee was earning and the company decided to publish directly.

Wheel of Fortune came to the NES in 1988 and Jeopardy! followed that September. Both were developed by Rare, the Leicestershire studio that would spend the nineties making Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo and was at this point taking whatever contract work a Florida licensing company put in front of it. The games sold. For most of the next decade GameTek shipped versions of those two shows onto every machine that could run them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rights were the product ~

A licensing business has one structural problem: the license expires and you own nothing. GameTek spent the mid-nineties trying to fix this by becoming a developer. It set up Alternative Reality Technologies as an in-house division and folded its London and Miami studios into it. Imagexcel was bought outright and became GameTek Canada.

The project that was supposed to justify all of it was Robotech: Crystal Dreams for the Nintendo 64. It slipped, and was still slipping when the money ran out. The bankruptcy filing on 3 December 1997 cited development delays and disappointing sales, which is the polite two-part way of saying the new business had not replaced the old one.

~ the funny part ~

Rare, in 1988, was a small British studio taking work where it could get it. The same programmers who built a Wheel of Fortune cartridge for a company in North Miami Beach were seven years from Donkey Kong Country and nine from GoldenEye. There is a version of the eighties where the most consequential thing GameTek ever did was pay Rare's invoices for a while.

~ the format traveled ~

Wheel of Fortune did reach Turkey, just not through anything GameTek owned. It came as Çarkıfelek, a licensed local production that ran on Turkish television across the nineties and into the 2000s and was genuinely enormous here, the sort of show that decided what a family did on a weekday evening. The wheel and the letters arrived intact, in Turkish, with the vowels still costing you something to buy.

What GameTek held was the electronic publishing right in the American market, which is a narrow and specific thing, and the international format rights that carried the show into dozens of countries belonged to somebody else entirely. So the format crossed the world and the cartridge did not follow it anywhere. The show was unavoidable here when I was a kid, and I did not know until researching this page that a company in Florida had been living off the same two words for eleven years.

The end came in pieces. Take-Two Interactive bought the European assets in July 1997, before the filing. Philips had taken some publishing activity the year before. Padded Cell Studios went to Interplay, was renamed V.R.T.O. and folded in 1998 anyway. GameTek itself went out of business in July 1998.

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