Humongous Entertainment was an American development studio that focused on children's computer games. Their five biggest franchises were Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Pajama Sam, SPY Fox, and Backyard Sports, although they had plenty of other small franchises such as Big Thinkers!, Buzzy the Knowledge Bug, and Fatty Bear.
Humongous was founded in Woodinville, Washington, by Ron Gilbert of LucasArts fame and Shelley Day in March 1992. The studio's first game was what would start off the Putt-Putt series: Putt-Putt Joins the Parade. Soon after a while, the company continued what became the "Junior Adventure" series with Freddi Fish, and Pajama Sam joining the lineup, alongside the one-off Fatty Bear, and the Buzzy the Knowledge Bug series. By 1995, Humongous expanded to mainstream titles with the formation of the Cavedog Entertainment brand, and released Total Annihilation.
In July 1996, GT Interactive Software purchased Humongous Entertainment. Dispite the purchase, GT kept Humongous and Cavedog independent from their own operations, and within this time the company continued to grow. Through to the late-90's, another addition to the Junior Adventure series: SPY Fox was created, alongside two new series: Big Thinkers! and Backyard Sports. By 1997, the company also began to create their only Licensed Games, based on Nickelodeon's Blue's Clues. Cavedog went on to produce Total Annihilation: Kingdoms before being closed by GT Interactive in February 2000.
Around this time, GT Interactive was fully purchased by Infogrames, ending Humongous' independence by becoming solely a subsidiary with the newly-renamed Infogrames, Inc. publishing Humongous' games from then on. Junior Adventure titles became more dominant after Infogrames saw the Backyard Sports franchise to be the the only reason Humongous made a profit at this point. The founders soon left the studio after Infogrames constantly rejected their ideas for titles, and even tried to purchase back the studio which failed at the last minute due to the purchase being the day of the dot-com bubble bursting. The only original title produced by this point was MoonBase Commander, released in 2002, and sold so poorly that Infogrames soon began to give up on the studio.
After their rebrand to Atari in 2003. Humongous published the last two titles in the Junior Adventure series - Pajama Sam: Life Is Rough When You Lose Your Stuff, and Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise. The Backyard Sports continued on with more yearly installments, becoming Atari's equivalent to the EA Sports and 2K brands. Soon, things would go far and worse.
In 2005, Atari, Inc. (GT Interactive) sold Humongous to Infogrames Entertainment SA (the holding company) on the verge that Humongous would develop a game before March 2006 or they would be completely shuttered (by this point, the Backyard Sports series was developed by other developers). This never occured, and Humongous Entertainment was shuttered on that month as planned.
Immediately after the closure, Infogrames formed Humongous, Inc. as an IP/holding company for Humongous' properties. The Backyard Sports series continued for several more years, while three of the Junior Adventure games were ported to the Wii with Majesco as publisher (under license from Infogrames/Atari), but they were soon pulled after the porters used ScummVM (a virtual machine made to run old Scumm-based games) without giving any credit to the developers whatsoever, so this had ended. In 2011, Atari began to release several Humongous titles on IOS, ported by Nimbus Games.
In 2013, Atari, Inc., Atari Interactive, Inc. and Humongous, Inc. all filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in order to split away from the profit-lossing Atari SA (the former Infogrames Entertainment). During the company's bankruptcy sale that year, several companies purchased several assets: Moonbase Commander was bought by Rebellion, Backyard Sports was bought by Epic Gear LLC, Total Annihilation was bought by Wargaming, while Humongous, Inc. itself, alongside the Junior Adventure series and the trademark, was purchased by Tommo, Inc.note , alongside several other titles that Atari owned.
In January 2014, Tommo relaunched the Humongous brand, and as of April 17, 2014, Tommo started rolling their old point-and-click games out onto Steam with the help of Nightdive Studios, most famous for re-introducing PC games like System Shock 2 and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. A list of the games currently available can be found here.
Many of their IOS ports were re-released, and were also released on Android as well.
The fanbase is still strong, however, and continue to remember the games from their childhood.
Notably, most of their Adventure Games change the locations of the respective Plot Coupons each playthrough.
All demo download links are listed on their pages, since finding them is a bit of a Guide Dang It!.
Series by Humongous:
- Backyard Sports
- Big Thinkers!
- Blue's Clues (many of the licensed games)
- Bobo and Fletcher Go Deep Into The Congo (vaporware)
- Buzzy the Knowledge Bug
- Conjure! (vaporware)
- Fatty Bear
- Freddi Fish
- Future Dog: Dog of the Future (vaporware)
- Moonbase Commander
- Pajama Sam
- Putt-Putt
- SPY Fox
Series by Humongous's sub-division Cavedog Entertainment:
- Amen: The Awakening (vaporware)
- Butter (vaporware; working title)
- Elysium (vaporware)
- Glider Wars (vaporware)
- Good & Evil (vaporware)
- Great White Hunter (vaporware)
- Total Annihilation
Tropes in Humongous games in general:
- Adored by the Network: Infogrames Europe had a strange fondness for four of the games (Putt-Putt Enters the Race, Spy Fox 2, Freddi Fish 4, and Pajama Sam 3). Whenever they were ready to lead foreign dubs of Humongous games, these four were usually the first in line to get dubbed, like in Italy and the UK.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- In some of the games (notably the Freddi Fish series), if you fool around long enough, a character will give a hint.
- Most of the Junior Arcades had a "Junior Helper." which usually let you turn on unlimited lives and give you some other advantage.
- April Fools' Day: For April 1, 1999, Humongous's sub-division Cavedog Entertainment temporarily became Frozen Yak Entertainment.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Many of their game demos will have the characters directly address the player to either explain the objective of the demo, or inform them that this is just a small sample of the adventure, and they can purchase the full game to see the rest of it.
- Company Cross References: They were extremely fond of these. Every game featured at least half a dozen cameos or references to their other works, often in the form of click points that would cause a character from one of their other series to appear briefly. Putt Putt Saves the Zoo has a humorous acknowledgement of such, with a billboard that reads "Shameless Humongous Entertainment self-promotion to be placed HERE."
- Compilation Re-release: LOTS of them.
- Conspicuously Light Patch: Often in the games, items to be picked up would stand out from the rest of the scenery.
- Creative Closing Credits: Humongous was quite fond of these. Usually they had objects flying up or going across the screen, and clicking on them gave you different reactions. Other things included photo albums, a room with many click points, screens that show many random events, and much more.
- Creator In-Joke: Their headquarters was located in Woodinville, Washington, so you're going to expect a lot of jokes referencing said city and Seattle.
- Credits Gag: Virtually all games since Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo feature at least one "joke credit" (the aforementioned game has "If you lived in Cartown, you'd be home now," and Pajama Sam 1 has "No animals were injured or cheese eaten in the making of this game. ... Mmm, cheese.")
- Debug Room: Featured in all of the post-Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo games.
- Development Hell: In 2019, Humongous fan "Curator" attempted a Kickstarter project for remastered soundtracks of Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo, Spy Fox 2: Some Assembly Required, Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat, From Your Head To your Feet, and Freddi Fish in the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds, complete with support of the original composers. Despite being a success, reaching $15k in its first-and-only week, the project's completion is currently in limbo due to a cease-and-desist from Tommo for using Humongous's modern promo art without consent. Curator is presently fighting this, as the company had helped with his prior Kickstarter project, remastered CD soundtracks of Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo, (which was cancelled due to lack of funds, but eventually got a digital release in 2020) without question.
- Dueling Dubs: Russia had at least 6 different companies translating the games into Russian, three being bootleggers (Fargus Multimedia, 7Wolf, and Vector) and three being official (Akella, Russobit, and Boolat). Fargus Multimedia actually managed to dub more games than the three official dubbers did combined.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The earliest games had DOS graphics and MIDI music, and animated using sprites instead of hand drawn cartoon artwork. Then there's minor details, like the 3D cursors in Freddi Fish 1 being longer and thinner than the later ones (changed in the 1998 re-release), and being unable to skip movement phases. The early HE games also had a Windows 3.1 pause menu, a quit button instead of a menu button, and no lip-sync.
- The End: Most of the games from their early years ended on this.
- Executive Meddling: This was averted during their independent and GT Interactive eras, but after they went under Infogrames' ownership, this happened in spades. According to some of the former workers, they were very resistant to any new intellectual properties, including one case mentioned below. They also were responsible for a lot of the reasons MoonBase Commander failed, showing a complete lack of interest in it and going so far as not giving it an E3 press release. Ron Gilbert held such a disdain for them that he attempted buying his company back from Infogrames, but the Internet bubble popped the day the purchase was supposed to happen; understandably, he and many other key members, including Dave Grossman and Shelley Day, left after realizing things weren't going to get any better. He was right.
- Atari, Inc. transferred over ownership in the studio to Infogrames itself in 2005, on the verge that the studio would develop a video game before March 2006 or face closure. This occurred in the end, and led to Infogrames founding Humongous, Inc. in order to control the company's IPs.
- Feelies: Included with just about every game at the time, though they have become more and more rare.
- Game Mod: By editing the games' config files, you may find additional scenes and extra jokes.
- The five games that use the YAGA enginenote are especially easy to mod, since the files can easily be extracted with 7-Zip.
- Hey, It's That Sound!: Humongous recycled a lot of sound effects in their games, many of which originated from sound effect libraries.
- I Am Not Shazam: Apparently in the early years, the company was sometimes mistakenly called "Junior Adventures" due to it being a prominent logo on the first set of game boxes without the company's real name being front-and-center; "Junior Adventures" was actually the name of the product lineup rather than the company, but it was a genuine problem when vendors would try to look up a company called "Junior Adventures" to order games and would find nothing. While the lineup name was retained beginning in 1996, for a brief period of time it was given a 10-Minute Retirement in 1994 with the lineup name (and its rocket logo) completely pushed away. When the name was used again in 1996, a much lesser deal was made of it.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: Humongous generally tried to avoid this, since they kept repackaging and re-releasing a lot of the games and putting them back on the store shelves. Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo alone was repackaged so many times that it's become remarkably easy to find.
- Almost their entire library (except for the Blue's Clues games, plus the One-Stop Fun Shops) is available on Steam.
- Kids' Meal Toy: In 2001, Dairy Queen ran a Junior Adventures toy lineup that encompassed all four of the major adventure franchises, including a Freddi Fish doodle pad and a Spy Fox propeller toy.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Partially averted. Usually the characters will give an excuse for taking anything not nailed down by saying something like "This doesn't belong here, so I'd better find the place it should go." At the base of it, though, the heroes are still snatching anything that looks important. Lampshaded by some of the original dev team, who will often use "borrow" jokingly as a nicer-sounding substitute for "stealing."
- Mad Libs Dialogue: You could say it was abused in Humongous games. The Backyard Sports were especially bad at this.
- Pop Up Video Games: One of the company's signatures. The games always include a variety of "click points" on every screen that cause small animations to play. The majority of these are superfluous to the game's progression, but they do give younger players something to do and see.
- Replay Value: Most of the Junior Adventure games have incentive to play them multiple times, such changing what items the player needs to collect between playthroughs, or placing them in different locations, leading to different scenarios.
- Same Language Dub: Several of the games were released in the UK with tweaked scripts and re-recorded dialogue using British voice actors.
- Saved from Development Hell: Ports of several Humongous games for the Nintendo Switch were teased on the official Twitter account in 2019. While there were a few years of radio silence, most of the games were either ported to, or are currently in the process of being ported to the Switch as of 2022.
- Stock Sound Effects: The games make extensive use of Hanna-Barbera's sound library, along with the Hollywood Edge's "Cartoon Trax" library (known for containing numerous classic Disney cartoon sounds).
- Technology Marches On: Quite a few examples.
- On the old section for demo downloads on the site, it once said "Warning: These files are HUGE! (5 to 24 MB)". Nowadays, these sizes are rather small.
- When the games were first released, 640 x 480 was considered high resolution and the games fell under Genius Programming. In hindsight, that doesn't say much due to how far they pushed the SCUMM engine to its limits.
- Vanity Plate: Went through several iterations throughout the years, but the most well-known example is the drum roll crash followed by cartoonish gibberish with a still image of the company's logo on screen, followed by the Vanity Plate of whatever product line it was a part of (Junior Adventures, Junior Sports, Junior Arcades...).
- What Could Have Been:
- There exists conceptual designs for 3D models of the Junior Adventure characters as well as a 3D background for a Freddi Fish game that never saw the light of day, meaning the games were about to head into the 3D direction before the Atari buyout.
- A character named "Miss Hap" was planned to have a game, entitled Aliens Ate My Cookies, but the executives did not have faith in
a female protagonist and chose to shelve the project. Given that the Freddi Fish series Humongous made previously had a female protagonist, this was an odd decision. - Another name for the company's subdivision Cavedog Entertainment was Frozen Yak Entertainment. They flipped a coin.
- The company originally didn't expect to make children's adventure games long term. Putt-Putt Joins the Parade was merely an attempt to get their foot in the door, and their expectation was that they wanted to make games for all different kinds of age groups. The game ended up being enough of a Sleeper Hit that they chose to continue along that path after all, although they did end up making more adult-oriented games later on in the cases of Total Annihilation (via their subdivision Cavedog) and Moonbase Commander.
