Saturday, December 21, 2019

Gaming Ads: Universal Interactive Studios

Universal Interactive Studios was founded in 1994 by MCA (Music Corporation of America). Not surprisingly its first game, Jurassic Park Interactive (3DO), was based on a Universal property. While it published other games based on movies and TV shows, such as Xena, The Mummy, and Woody Woodpecker, it was also involved in the creation of two original properties that were a big part of the PlayStation console: Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.

The publisher hired Naughty Dog to develop three games, the first of those games was Crash Bandicoot. Although the early games in the series were published by Sony Computer Entertainment, Crash was always owned by Universal Interactive which would eventually take the series multi-platform. In 1996 Universal published a game called Disruptor that was developed by Insomniac Games. Disruptor wasn't a big hit but Universal continued to work with Insomniac and its next game was Spyro the Dragon. Like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon was published by Sony but the property rights always belonged to Universal.

Following a merger in 2000, Universal Interactive Studios became a division of Vivendi and "Studios" was dropped from its name. I've mentioned Vivendi a number of times on the blog and rather than detail all of that, I'll abbreviate and repeat what I said in a previous post. In 2007 Vivendi merged with Activision to form Activision Blizzard, and thus Activision now owns Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon.

Universal Interactive Studios albums: Facebook - Google Photos



No comments:

Post a Comment