 |
 |
|
|
| When working on the (coming soon) list of Techtite's "TOP 50 Video Game Classics," one thing was clear; Imagic made quite a few of them. Demon Attack. Swords & Serpents. Microsurgeon. Cosmic Ark. Even games that didn't make the list, were classics of their own. To them, a re-run of "Gilligan's Island" was suddenly Tropical Trouble. Talk about popular games to everyone; when Activision made Atari 2600 classic game collections for Windows 95, one or two of the games were Imagic's! Too bad that the company got its start ca. 1982, when the video game "fad" allegedly ended. Because of this, a great game company had to face its first years during the worst years in gaming; the video game crash of the early '80s. |
|
Above: Numb Thumb News Vol. 1, the very first issue, dated 1982. |
While still around, Imagic made its mark with a bang. They
even had their own club, "The Numb Thumb Club." A mere
2-dollar entry fee got you a subscription to their newsletter,
a club card, and a poster of your favorite game. The newsletter
was magazine-quality,  years before similar magazine
newsletters were distributed. Even better; the Membership
card was made of heavy plastic, like a credit card. Trying
to compete with Activision's club
patches, Numb Thumb offered a free jacket to
anyone who could beat their staff's best scores in 6 games. I
don't know if anyone ever received such a free jacket; by the
time I got such scores, the company was disbanded, and my letter
was returned-to-sender. |
| It would have been intriguing to see what this company would have made in later years, had it survived. Their final games (most sold in very limited supply) showed impressive risk-taking. These days, among Simpsons and South Park, such games would be considered no big deal. In the days of Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake, however, they were highly controversial. In Dracula, you had to bite enough victims before dawn (an optional player 2 was a zombie who'd help thwart the keystone cops on your tail). Safecrackers involved, well, cracking safes. To save face, background stories were toned down (in Safecrackers, you were an undercover FBI agent; as for Dracula, he was less like Bram Stoker's, and more like George Hamilton's "Love at First Bite" performance). These games were also a quantum leap less violent than modern games, to say the least. Either way, they were also quite FUN. |
 I
admit that all is not lost exactly, since many of Imagic's
game designers went on to other companies. One designer behind
Microsurgeon, for example, helped make Defender
of the Crown; another 50-best-classic-games
entry. Another went to work for an admirable PC games company
called Accolade. So maybe I went out on a limb a little bit,
with a special page devoted to games sold under the "Imagic"
label. However, when looking at third-party game companies of
yesteryear, I can think of few which cranked out so much
fun, only to be closed down. Atari lasted for several more years,
and Activision is still around to this very day. Not so for Imagic,
which was gone practically as soon as it started; how unfair!
From the shiny chrome boxes (and cartridge labels), to the catchy
game tunes and unique game ideas...Imagic is one game company
I miss a lot. |
|
|
