Absolute Entertainment

Absolute Entertainment
Private
Industry Video game publishing
Genre Action, simulation/sports, strategy
Successor Skyworks Technologies
Founded 1986
Founder Garry Kitchen
Defunct 1995
Headquarters Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, United States
Products Console games, PC games

Absolute Entertainment was an American video game publishing company. Through its development house, Imagineering, Absolute Entertainment produced titles for the Amiga, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Sega Game Gear, Sega Mega Drive, Mega-CD, Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game consoles, as well as for the PC. It also released games for the Sega Master System in Europe.

After leaving his position as a video game developer and designer at Activision, Garry Kitchen founded the company in 1986 with his brother Dan Kitchen, along with David Crane, Alex Demeo, John Van Ryzin.[1] The company's headquarters was in Glen Rock, New Jersey, but later moved to another New Jersey borough, Upper Saddle River. While the company was based in New Jersey, David Crane worked out of his home on the West Coast. The company's name was chosen because it was alphabetically above Activision, implying that Absolute Entertainment was superior to Activision . It was the same strategy that Activision chose when the programmers left Atari.

At Absolute Entertainment, Kitchen continued developing games for the Atari 2600 and Atari 7800, as he had done at Activision. However, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had already displaced Atari's dominance of the video game console market. Kitchen swiftly shifted his focus to the NES, and produced several landmark titles for the platform, beginning with A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia in 1989, and Battle Tank in 1990. Absolute Entertainment published at least 30 titles before dwindling sales from diminishing product quality prompted Kitchen to shutter the company in 1995. Since Kitchen had already formed a new company with David Crane called Skyworks Technologies, some of the employees transitioned to the new company.

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