Saturday, March 10, 2018

Gaming Ads: Infogrames and Information Global Services (IGS)

Bruno Bonnell and Christope Sapet founded Infogrames Entertainment S.A. in France in 1983. From what I can tell, it published around a dozen games in Europe during the '80s while some of its games started appearing in the U.S. in the early '90s. Infogrames has gone by a few names in North America as it acquired and renamed various companies that published its games. You might remember its aardvark logo that has five colored stripes on it. Along with the Infogrames name, sometimes a game box might say I-Motion on it which is also Infogrames. In the late '90s/early '00s is when Infogrames started expanding quickly in North America.

I have mentioned Infogrames previously in the Atari, GT Interactive, and Hasbro Interactive posts due to the acquisitions. GT Interactive was renamed to Infogrames, Inc. in 1999 and Hasbro Interactive became Infogrames Interactive, Inc. in 2001. It acquired the Atari name from Hasbro and used that as a publishing brand before eventually renaming all of the Infogrames branches to Atari. Even the original Infogrames Entertainment S.A. was changed to Atari S.A. in 2009. Although it went through financial difficulties, including filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company is still in business and that is the Atari we have today. For a while it focused on mobile releases and the old Atari properties which it still does but of late it's been pushing new RollerCoaster Tycoon games for PC.

Despite being around since 1983, at this time I only have four ads for Infogrames which is why I'm including a second publisher in this post. Infogrames has published a lot of games but many of its own ads didn't appear until the 2000s when it released quite a few games for the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, and of course, I primarily stick to the '90s and earlier for ads. We'll see more Infogrames much later when I put together some Dreamcast features.

Information Global Services, or IGS, was the North American publishing division of Japan-based Information Global Service (note that the word "service" is singular for the parent company). It released games from 1990-93 for a few platforms, though at least half of its games are for the TurboGrafx-16.

Infogrames albums: Facebook - Google Photos
Information Global Services albums: Facebook - Google Photos


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