GTE Interactive Media

» see im.gte.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1990 the telephone company GTE set up a division called GTE ImagiTrek, under Richard E. Robinson, inside a subsidiary called GTE Vantage. It was renamed GTE Interactive Media in 1994 and published under the brand GTE Entertainment, out of Carlsbad, California. Its remit covered interactive television alongside games for arcade machines and home consoles, and the reason a phone company wanted any of that was stated plainly years later by a GTE vice president: the division was seen as a complementary adjunct to GTE's plans to develop broadband video services networks.

In other words, GTE was going to build the pipes and needed something to put in them. This was the standard corporate theory of the mid-1990s and almost nobody who believed it came out ahead.

The output was better than the theory deserved. The division made the holographic arcade cabinet Time Traveler for Sega in 1991. In January 1995 it announced a partnership with Nintendo covering arcade games and online networking, and previewed FX Fighter at CES in Las Vegas that same month. It published Dust: A Tale of the Wired West and Skull Cracker, both from Cyberflix, along with Sea Legends from Ocean Software.

Then in the autumn of 1996 it shipped the two discs it is actually remembered for: Timelapse on 16 October, and on 12 November, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Eight weeks later GTE announced it was closing the whole division.

~ the record ~

~ what the phone company wanted ~

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the thing that did it, which is a strange epitaph for a games studio. Deregulation reshaped what American telephone companies had to worry about overnight, and GTE's attention went to the network business where its money actually was. The parent decided to stop making its own content and instead feed its pipes with the rapidly expanding supply of third-party material, which by 1996 was an entirely sound read of the market.

The CD-ROM business was having its own bad year. The format had been sold to publishers as the future of entertainment and had produced a glut of expensive, slow-selling discs. GTE Interactive Media had been laying off steadily through 1996 from a peak of around 120 people.

~ the last four months ~

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is the reason anyone looks this company up. Cyberflix built it and GTE published it, and it stands as one of the more fondly remembered adventure games of the era, a walk around a ship you already know is going to sink. It shipped on 12 November 1996, and the division that put its name on the box was given its closing date eight weeks later. The publisher was always the invisible part of a CD-ROM anyway. People remember Cyberflix, who made it, and the ship. Almost nobody carries around the name of the telephone subsidiary that paid for the box. That is a publisher's usual destiny, and it arrived unusually fast here, because GTE Entertainment stopped existing while the game was still on shelves.

~ the shutdown memo ~

Having failed to find a buyer or a partner, GTE announced in early January 1997 that it would lay off 85 employees and cease operations on 14 March. A skeleton staff stayed on past that date to handle technical support and the remaining shutdown work through 30 June. PC Gamer Online carried the news on 6 January; CD Mag ran it the next day under the headline "GTE: RIP."

Dick Nordman, finance director for GTE's New Ventures group in Irving, Texas, gave the Los Angeles Times the clearest statement of what had happened. "In the beginning, the idea was that we wanted to get into the content business," he said. "Now, with everything else going on in the telecommunications industry, we felt our energies would be better spent in the telco arena." Seven years and one Titanic game later, the phone company went back to being a phone company.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »