Imagic

~ the eulogy ~

Imagic opened on 1 june 1981 in Los Gatos, California, built almost entirely out of people who had recently stopped working for Atari or Mattel. Bill Grubb had run sales and marketing at Atari. Dennis Koble had written games there. Jim Goldberger came from Mattel marketing and Brian Dougherty from Mattel engineering, and Rob Fulop, Bob Smith and Gary Kato came along as the people who would actually make the things.

The premise was the one Activision had proved a year earlier: the console maker does not have to be the only company allowed to put a cartridge in its slot. Imagic went at that harder than anyone. Demon Attack shipped in april 1982 and Atlantis and Cosmic Ark followed in july, and all three were built by people who understood the 2600 well enough to make it do things Atari's own catalog had stopped attempting.

Atari's response to Demon Attack was a lawsuit. It held home rights to the arcade game Phoenix and argued that Imagic had made it again without asking, particularly in the Intellivision version with its final mothership. The two settled out of court and the game stayed on shelves, which tells you roughly how strong the claim was and roughly how much Atari wanted the fight to go away.

This one closed before I could read. What makes it worth writing anyway is what happened to that word later: in Turkish, atari stopped being a brand and became the ordinary noun for the machine and for the act of playing on it. The cartridges that circulated here came as unlicensed multicarts with dozens of games and no publisher's name anywhere on them. Imagic's entire business was being a name on a cartridge, and the name did not survive the trip.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

By late 1982 Imagic was projecting more than 75 million dollars of sales for its first full fiscal year, which for a company eighteen months old, in a business that had not existed a decade earlier, was the kind of number that gets you an investment bank on the phone.

The packaging is remembered nearly as well as the games. Silver foil boxes with a house style hard enough to make a third party publisher look like a platform holder. Fulop and Koble were getting arcade quality out of hardware with 128 bytes of RAM, and the marketing existed to make sure nobody mistook that for a hobby project.

~ two days in december ~

Imagic filed for an initial public offering in november 1982. The stock was scheduled to go out on 10 december.

On 8 december, Warner Communications announced that Atari's christmas was going to be far worse than the market had been told. Warner's own stock fell by roughly a third in a day, and every company in the room was repriced against it. Imagic withdrew its offering the day before it was to trade.

The window did not reopen. That is the part people underestimate about the 1983 crash: it was not only that consumers stopped buying cartridges, it was that the capital markets closed on the entire category in a single afternoon, and the companies that had planned to be financed by strangers found out that they were going to have to be financed by their own inventory instead.

~ how it actually ended ~

Then came the buyback. Imagic took returns on unsold stock from retailers, which was expensive and probably unavoidable in a market where every shelf in America was drowning in cartridges. In september 1983 it laid off 40 of its 170 people, and by october it had stopped publishing its own games entirely and was selling design services to whoever still wanted them. The board replaced Bill Grubb with Bruce Davis in november.

That is a fifteen month journey from a projected 75 million dollar year to a contract shop. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1985 and was liquidated through 1986, with the fixed assets sold to cover debts.

~ what got buried with it ~

Activision picked up the rights to the popular titles late in the decade and has reissued Demon Attack and Atlantis in compilation after compilation ever since, usually with no explanation of who made them. Bruce Davis, the man brought in to manage Imagic's ending, went on to run Activision itself for four years.

Brian Dougherty left and founded Berkeley Softworks, which built GEOS, a windowed operating system that ran on a Commodore 64 in 64 kilobytes and did things that should not have fit. That is the actual Imagic inheritance. Not the catalog, which Activision owns, but the specific habit of looking at obviously insufficient hardware and refusing to accept the limit as an argument.

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