Imagineering

Imagineering Inc. is one of those studios you never heard of by name but almost certainly played their games. Based in Glen Rock, New Jersey, they were the in-house development studio for Absolute Entertainment from 1986 to 1992 — a short run that left a bigger mark than most people realize.

They walked out of Activision and built something better

Imagineering was born in 1986 when a group of Activision employees resigned after a dispute with new management. That kind of "screw it, we'll do it ourselves" origin story was pretty common in early gaming, and it almost always produced interesting results. These weren't people waiting around for permission — they had the skills and they went and built something.

The games you definitely played without knowing it

You might not know the Imagineering name but you know their work. A Boy and His Blob, Double Dragon, Jordan vs. Bird, Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Bart vs. the World — these are NES classics that defined a generation of gaming. They were doing licensed games before licensed games were cool, and doing them better than most. Their client list included Acclaim, Atari, Activision, and THQ which tells you everything about how much the industry trusted them to deliver. Bart vs the Space Mutants is one game that helped define mine and many others childhoods.

The talent running the show

David Crane, Alex Demeo, Dan and Garry Kitchen — the people behind Imagineering weren't nobodies. These were serious names in early gaming who knew exactly what they were doing.

How it ended

Absolute Entertainment absorbed Imagineering in 1992 and then went bankrupt in 1995. Short run, real impact. The kind of studio that doesn't get enough credit for shaping what early console gaming actually looked like.