The story
Founded by Garry Kitchen in 1986, in Upper Saddle River.1
After leaving his position as a video game developer and designer at Activision, Garry Kitchen founded the company in 1986 with his brother Dan Kitchen, along with Alex DeMeo and John Van Ryzin. The company's headquarters was in Glen Rock, New Jersey, but later moved to another New Jersey borough, Upper Saddle River. The company had a distribution deal with Activision, later Mediagenic to distribute its titles. In 1988, after his brief stint at Hasbro, David Crane had joined the company. While the company was based in New Jersey, David Crane worked out of his home on the West Coast. The company's name was chosen because it was alphabetically above Activision, implying that Absolute Entertainment was superior to Activision. It was the same strategy that Activision chose when the programmers left Atari.
At Absolute Entertainment, Kitchen continued developing games for the Atari 2600 and Atari 7800, as he had done at Activision. However, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) had already displaced Atari's dominance of the video game console market. Kitchen swiftly shifted his focus to the NES, and produced several games for the platform, beginning with A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia in 1989, and Battle Tank in 1990. The company expanded and grew rapidly, to work for the SNES, starting with its first published title, Super Battletank: War in the Gulf.
Absolute Entertainment absorbed its studio Imagineering in 1992 to become itself a video game developer for the first time. In 1993, the company had acquired the assets of video game developer Extreme Entertainment Group from Micronet. Also that year, the company launched a West Coast satellite studio, led by Howard Phillips, formerly of Nintendo of America, LucasArts and THQ. In 1995, the company launched its division, Absolute Electronics, led by Garry Kitchen.
In the third quarter of 1995, Absolute Entertainment went bankrupt and suspended operations and laid off most of its staff. Since Kitchen had already formed a new company with David Crane called Skyworks Technologies, some of the employees transitioned to the new company.
From Wikipedia’s article on Absolute Entertainment, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6