Humongous Entertainment

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

~ the eulogy ~

I missed Humongous Entertainment cleanly. By 1996, the year Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside came out, i was twelve, on a 33.6k modem at home in ankara, and the floppies that were circulating in my middle-school cohort were warez copies of Doom and Command and Conquer. Putt-Putt was for a younger demographic than mine, in an english-language market that did not localize into turkish, on a CD-ROM distribution model that depended on north american and western european retail shelves. None of that pipeline reached my age cohort in turkey in any visible way.

The studio itself was founded in march 1992 in woodinville, washington by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day. Gilbert had built the SCUMM engine at lucasarts for Maniac Mansion and the early Monkey Island games. Day was a games producer at the same shop. The pitch for the new studio was that the SCUMM engine, with the click-anywhere adventure-game grammar that adult players already knew, could be repurposed for kids age three to eight. The first title was Putt-Putt Joins the Parade in october 1992.

What followed over the next decade was the most recognizable kids-adventure catalog in the english-language CD-ROM market. Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, Spy Fox, Putt-Putt sequels, Backyard Sports, Junior Field Trips. Combined the catalog passed fifteen million units sold and collected over four hundred industry awards. The studio also spun out an adult-games subsidiary called Cavedog Entertainment that shipped Total Annihilation in 1997 before collapsing in 2000.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

The Humongous house format was a SCUMM-style point-and-click adventure where every clickable hotspot returned a short voice-acted gag instead of a "you can't do that" error message. The "click everything" reward loop was the entire pedagogy. Kids learned to read by clicking through screens that talked back, and the games had multiple solution paths so the next playthrough did not feel identical. The "Junior Adventures" line covered the click-everything ethos. "Junior Field Trips" covered explicitly educational subject matter. The Backyard Sports line was the late-90s pivot into kids' sports games with cartoon player rosters that included junior versions of real mlb and nba players.

Gilbert was on record at the time that he did not consider Humongous an edutainment studio. The framing he preferred was that the games were comedies with reading-level vocabulary, not lessons with games wrapped around them. That distinction matters to how the catalog ages. Twenty-five years later the games hold up as comedies. They do not hold up as lessons because there are not really any lessons inside them. The Humongous catalog was nicer to its audience than its competitors were.

~ the postmortem ~

The ownership trail is the story of how the studio died. GT Interactive bought Humongous for seventy-six million dollars in july 1996, then was itself acquired by Infogrames in november 1999 and renamed Infogrames Inc. The Infogrames era cut staff and reduced the Junior Adventures output. Infogrames Inc rebranded as Atari Inc in 2003 using the licensed Atari name. In june 2005 Atari Inc announced that Humongous was non-core and laid off the development team in bothell. On august 22, 2005 the empty shell of the studio was transferred from Atari Inc back up to parent Infogrames Entertainment SA in france for $10.3 million in shares, with the IP and the trademarks included.

After the august 2005 transfer no new Humongous games were developed. The brand and the Junior Adventures properties were eventually sold to Tommo Inc in 2013 following Atari's bankruptcy filings. Tommo started licensing the back catalog out for re-releases on steam, gog, switch and playstation in the years after.

~ the long tail ~

Pajama Sam and Putt-Putt have a steady youtube nostalgia footprint that grew through the late 2010s and into the 2020s. The let's-play format suits the catalog well because the games are short and voice-acted from end to end. There is a small re-release business running through tommo's licensing deals. Night Dive Studios handled the remasters for steam and gog. The 2024 switch and ps4 collections were the most recent ones at the time of writing.

From a turkish-cohort vantage point the catalog is something i encountered for the first time through screenshots and let's-play clips in the late 2010s, two decades after the games were current. The reading-level voice work that was the whole product premise does not translate, which means even now the games are still effectively english-language artifacts that did not cross over. The cultural memory belongs almost entirely to the english-speaking children of the late 90s who became the adult youtube audience that keeps the back catalog moving.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »