GameTek

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The most popular GameTek logo.

GameTek was an American video game publisher that existed from 1988 to 1998. GameTek was created by I.J.E.. Around 1987, I.J.E. bought the video game publishing rights to a variety of brands and re-licensed them to the video game company ShareData who develop and publish the games while giving I.J.E. a cut on the profits. Seeing that ShareData was making a decent amount of money with the brands, I.J.E. created their own publishing company, GameTek, and hired third-party developers (including ShareData) to make their games for them so they could capitalize on them more. The majority of GameTek's games are TV game show and board game conversions, but they would occasionally use their existing infrastructure to publish unrelated games.

Since they relied on third-party developers, probably awarding contracts to the lowest bidder, most of GameTek's games were poorly constructed and used out-of-date technology. They were still selling CGA-only DOS games as late as 1990.

After seeing dwindling sales in 1996, GameTek turned over much of their publishing business to Philips, then filed for bankruptcy in December 1997, selling most of its assets to Take-Two Interactive. It was officially shut down in July 1998.

Personal

Having very little interest in game show and board game adaptions, I never bought any GameTek games growing up, but I did occasionally play them while at a friend's house. I remember playing the awful CGA DOS port of Wheel of Fortune in the 1980s and referring to the hostess as "Vanna Red" due to the limited color palette. I briefly played Jeopardy!, equally painful to look at, and occasionally played their games on the NES or SNES. Knowing how easy many of these games are to beat, I played through several of them just to increase my total of beaten games, though I didn't enjoy any of them.

Games

There aren't any games which GameTek worked on that are important to me, but here are the least obnoxious. For all games published by GameTek see the category.

Logos

Links

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