The story
The company was founded in the late 1980s by Robert Grebe, who had originally created a system to train police officers under the company name ICAT (Institute for Combat Arms and Tactics) and later adapted the technology for arcade games. Its first hit game was Mad Dog McCree, a light gun shooter set in the American Old West. By mid-1995, they were recognized as the leading company in the medium of laserdisc-based arcade games.
American Laser Games lasted until the mid-to-late 1990s, by which time it had begun making "games for girls" for the PC under the moniker HeR Interactive, beginning with McKenzie & Co. In response to a major slump in the arcade industry, American Laser Games ended its direct manufacturing of coin-op machines in November 1995, and turned its focus to developing games for the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. This failed to revive the company's fortunes, and revenues in 1996 were roughly half of the $16 million it generated in 1995.
At the end of 1996, ALG laid off a third of its staff, Jan Claesson replaced Grebe as president, and the company began focusing primarily on the HeR Interactive line, cancelling all the games in their mainstream line except for Shining Sword. The company eventually closed its doors and was bought out by HeR Interactive, which had been spun off before ALG closing and is still making games as of 2024. In 2000, the development and publishing rights to all of the games that were produced by American Laser Games were purchased by Digital Leisure, Inc from HeR Interactive. Many of these games were then re-released for the PC and in DVD TV game format.
From Wikipedia’s article on American Laser Games, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4