Delaying the Ice Age: A Retrospect on the Development of Carnivores Ice Age (Part II)

This is part two of the Delaying the Ice Age: A Retrospect on the Development of Carnivores Ice Age, please read part one beforereading this article. In addition, I do apologize for taking almost a month to work on this article as I had finals and essays to work on. Anyways, now let’s focus on part two.

The largest influence on the delay of Carnivores Ice Age was the absorption of GT Interactive, the owner of WizardWorks at the time, by Infogrames Entertainment through a calculated and necessary takeover of GT Interactive's stocks and eventual ownership. Saurain Target does mention this in his review on Carnivores Ice Age although he had a larger focus on how Sunstorm Interactive took over the Carnivores franchise as it was owned by Infogrames, Inc., formerly GT Interactive, which caused Action Forms to lose the rights of Carnivores for some time till they possibly bought them back from Atari, Inc., formerly Infogrames, Inc., around 2009 sometime before or during the founding of Tatem Games. And if you have read in part 1 of the article, Action Forms was already working on Carnivores Ice Age prior to and during the merger of GT Interactive and Infogrames Entertainment. This article will be looking at how the actual release of Carnivores Ice Age would have been affected by the merger of the two companies alongside the renaming of GT Interactive to Infogrames Inc. (later down the line as Atari, Inc.) influenced WizardWorks and its shutdown in 2004. Of course, we need to see the origins of Infogrames Entertainment's takeover by looking at the conditions of GT Interactive.

A stylized logo of GT Interactive Software

GT Interactive: A Falling Spendthrift

1999, the year when Carnivores 2 was released but importantly, when GT Interactive would be taken over by Infogrames Entertainment. At the beginning of the year, GT Interactive already had a major financial problem after restructuring the company. The restructuring costed the company $90 million USD at the time and this was seen as a massive devastating blow to GT Interactive that this would force the then-current CEO Ron Chaimowitz to resign in February. And 1999 was not a friendly year for the company as throughout the duration, video game sales for GT Interactive was much lower than 1998. Of course, these issues weren't unique and isolated as this is the end results of GT Interactive’s years of being on the top of the video game world for some time. In fact, these financial issues were something the company had faced before.

For the past few years, GT Interactive was slowly declining despite buying a wide range of small game publishers and developers. One of the largest reasons is due to GT Interactive was a spendthrift company, often spending massive sums of money carelessly regarding if the buyout price was needed. When GT Interactive bought WizardWorks back in June of 1996, they bought out 2.4 million shares, with each stock valuing around $0.01 per share, which means the company spent $24,000 USD (roughly worth $45,538.97 USD in today’s currency due to inflation). Although this is a reasonable pricing as WizardWorks publish low value games and expansion packs of larger games, the company would later buy out FormGen, the publishers for Apogee Software whom will later be named to 3D Realms, for a grand total of $17 million USD in stocks just to solely buy the rights to Duke Nukem.

To further the issues of GT Interactive reckless purchases, this can be seen with the debt/equity ratio. The debt/equity ratio is a measure of the extent to which a company can cover its debt and this can be calculated by dividing a company's total debt by its total shareholders’ equity. In 1997 alone, GT Interactive had a high debt/equity ratio of 41%, compare this to the now-infamous Electronic Arts which only had a debt/equity ratio of just 8%. Going forward in time to the summer of 1999, GT Interactive hired Bear Stearns, a former global investment bank and trading and brokerage firm, to investigate and see what would the best route would be for the company, ideally either selling out the company or merging into another company. Luckily for the crumbling GT Interactive, Infogrames Entertainment was interested in buying out the stocks of as on November 16th, 1999,  they would purchase 70% of the stocks of GT Interactive for a gain total of for $135 million USD alongside assuming $10.5 million USD in debt. This deal would be completed on December 17th. 1999. 

WizardWorks Caught Between The Deal

Although Infogrames Entertainment would gain control of GT Interactive, a merger of a large gaming publishing company had several bumps and needed restructuring of the company. On May 10th, 2000, 9 days after the announcement of Duke Nukem Endangered Species, Infogrames Entertainment announced the renaming of GT Interactive to Infogrames, Inc. This would be completed by June of 2000 in addition to adding $30 million USD into the stocks, officially completing the merger of GT Interactive. In fact, Carnivores Ice Age is the only game of the Action Forms trilogy to have Infogrames, Inc. on the cover instead of GT Interactive. Of course, WizardWorks was still around at the time but the merger between Infogrames Entertainment and GT Interactive did play a major role in the delay of Carnivores Ice Age and the demise of the company.

The year 2000 was the busiest publishing year for WizardWorks as they had twice as many games to publish than the previous two years and the last 2 years of the company's publishing years. As mentioned earlier with the STOMPED interview, Karev mentioned about how they were having issues with WizardWorks due to the merger of GT Interactive and Infogrames Entertainment and this can be seen with how many games WizardWorks were publishing at the time. In 2000 alone, WizardWorks would publish 16 games compared this to the 8 games published in the previous year of 1999 and 10 games in the following year of 2001. Although WizardWorks had a busy year before, looking at the new games within 2000 can give us a better view on the issues that the company was dealing with at the time.

There are two games missing from this last as it goes onto the next page.

The last two years of publishing games.

And most likely seeing the issues of publishing so many games, Infogrames, Inc. slowed down the operation of WizardWorks or even saw the overflow of games into the publishing company and struggling to publish the games in the year. In 2001, they would only publish 10 games including Carnivores Ice Age at the beginning as possible backlogging from last year. 2001 would be the last year to have a regular number of games as the average games published were between 8 to 10 games a year for WizardWorks. In fact, WizardWorks would publish a single game in the year 2000, Season Ticket Baseball 2003. 

The missing WizardWorks logo on the front cover is foreshadowing...

In the last two years of the company, WizardWorks had publish zero games. Between these years, Infogrames Entertainment would renamed Infogrames, Inc. to become Atari, Inc. on May 8th, 2003 as Infogrames Entertainment itself would renamed themselves to Atari SA as they have gained the rights of the Atari brand from acquiring Hasbro Interactive, the the previous owners. Atari SA had renamed Infogrames Inc. to Atari Inc. as a way to showcase the acquisition of the rights of Atari brand further. Soon, on March 29th, 2004, Atari, Inc. closed down all operations of WizardWorks and folded outstanding projects were sent to the Atari, Inc. offices in Beverly, Massachusetts. Although in an interview with the corporate communications VP, Nancy Bushkin, stated the largest reasons for the shutdown was due to Atari’s interest in streamlining operations, there were other factors influencing the subsidiary and the owner company of Atari SA, as the company will face many financial problems down the road including bankruptcy in 2013.

You may not been perfect but you were pretty cool.

Conclusion

The delay of Carnivores Ice Age played a huge role in the Carnivores community's obsession on why the third game of the Action Forms trilogy felt so rushed and lackluster compared to the predecessors. It has been one of the greatest curiosity's within the Carnivores community up there with what did the Ancients looked like or even if Chasm: The Rift has any in-universe ties with the original Carnivores games. And this has lead to different kinds of speculations to justify why the third Carnivores game was so lackluster. A majority of fans believed the game was rushed to get to a Christmas deadline, some fans believe it was rushed so that Infogrames would get the Carnivores title and make Carnivores Cityscape through Sunstorm Interactive, and there were even some members believing that Carnivores Ice Age was never meant to be released for the public as it was the actual beta for Duke Nukem Endangered Species. But at the end day, a lot of these claims have something in common and that they have no evidence or grounding in reality, mainly based on the feelings of disappointment from the developers to give a satisfying finale of their beloved prehistoric hunting games.