Imagic

Imagic was co-founded in 1981 by former Atari programmer Rob Fulop (author of Night Driver and Missile Command) along with Bob Goldberger and Brian Dougherty from Mattel and Bill Grubb, Bob Smith, Mark Bradley and Denis Koble from Atari. The company was a third-party maker of games for the Atari 2600 and other early video game consoles in the early 1980s, with some of its best-selling titles including Atlantis, Demon Attack, Cosmic Ark and billiards game Trick Shot. Thanks to these games, Imagic was considered one of the best Atari 2600 developers, and by the end of the 2600's life, Imagic had the third largest collection of original game cartridges for the system, only behind Atari and Activision. Imagic ran a fan club for their games, known as the Numb Thumb Club, which published a quarterly newsletter.

Imagic used an easily recognisable and distinctive style of cartridge housing (which included the company name embossed in the plastic), offered patches to players who sent in proof of a high score, and were renowned in the Atari community for featuring a high standard of audiovisual design in their games. They were sued by Atari over Demon Attack due to its resemblance to Phoenix, which Atari had the exclusive home-version rights to. The case was settled out of court, and Demon Attack went on to be ported to more consoles and home computers than any other game of its time.

Imagic also released games for the Magnavox Odyssey 2 and Mattel Intellivision, with their two Odyssey 2 games (ports of Demon Attack and Atlantis), the only third party releases for that system in America. Unusually for a video game publisher of this time, Imagic's Intellivision library relied more on original games (Dracula, Beauty and the Beast, Truckin', Microsurgeon and Ice Trek) than Atari ports. Even so, their ports were still generally more advanced than their Atari counterparts, both graphically and in terms of gameplay.

Although Imagic grew quickly in its early years, it was irreparably damaged by the video game crash of 1983. It released 24 titles before going out of business by 1986, and the rights to their most popular titles have been owned by Activision since the late 1980s, and they have been re-released on several occasions.

In addition, several prototypes of unreleased Imagic games have been discovered in recent years, such as Cubicolor, a two-player puzzle game loosely based on a combination of a Rubik's Cube and 'fifteen puzzle', that was completed but never officially released before Imagic's demise.