Anyone who's seen 2000's Meet the Parents knows that it is absolutely rife with innuendo, especially with the protagonist's name, but it doesn't go anywhere beyond that (the sequels do have actual significant sexual content).

It inspired me to look for other films that have many sexual references but no sexual content, but there are few that aren't just standup shows or documentaries. The closest are films with a lot of profanity in general (not just sexual) such as Once (2007) or Steve Jobs (2015).

"Total analysts shocked: zero. Total nonsensical comments by Bonnell: one." That was the subheading to IGN's article about French video game publisher Infogrames having a net loss of $20.7 million for the second half of 2000.

That was actually Infogrames's biggest year ever, peaking at 50 euros on the Paris exchange. Just six years later, it would be trading at a measly 0.86 euros. It was a culmination of a sad half-decade of not keeping up with industry trends and feuding with game developers.

Beginnings and Acquisitions

Infogrames was founded by Bruno Bonnell, the chairman and CEO, and Christophe Sapet in 1983. It had an original hit franchise in Alone in the Dark, but it largely grew through acquisitions, such as those of Ocean Software and Accolade. They also aimed to buy Eidos but failed.

Two purchases ended up being the main drivers of Infogrames's growth around the time of the new millennium. The first was GT Interactive in December of 1999. Though GT owned several successful studios including Humongous Entertainment (Pajama Sam, Backyard Sports) and Reflections Interactive (Driver), their biggest successes came from distributing the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem, and Mortal Kombat. That was the big mistake Infogrames made in the acquisition: they now published many heavy hitters, but those rights could be yanked at any moment by the IP owners (though in a rare moment of clarity, Infogrames passed on the then-stagnating Duke Nukem Forever in 2000).

The second was Hasbro Interactive one year later, in December of 2000. This purchase allowed Infogrames to make their own games with Hasbro licenses, along with buying the rights to MicroProse (Civilization, RollerCoaster Tycoon) and the name and original arcade catalog of Atari. (Hasbro Interactive had a storied history that I won't get into because it's mostly irrelevant to this column, but the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth had a great case study about it in 2004.)

Strategy

While other publishers focused on promoting the latest and greatest titles for full price, the bulk of Infogrames's promotion went into letting people know that its older titles were available for very cheap. This was a huge success on PC in the waning days of the "family computer" era, to the point that they became the biggest PC publisher of the early 2000s, ahead of the likes of EA and Vivendi Universal. Jewel case versions of the likes of Driver and the 1997 Frogger became giant sellers.

But that wasn't all. PC games aimed at kids and families were included with General Mills cereal boxes in the United States and Canada for years, and at least 80% of them were in the Infogrames catalog. A lot of kids at the time didn't realize they had a full mass-market game, not just something exclusively made for the cereal promotion.

The problem was that even though the strategy worked well for PC, it did not work well for consoles, and PC games were greatly declining in popularity while console games were reaching new heights. Their big PC publisher competitors had a reason to benefit on consoles; Microsoft came out with its own Xbox, some of EA's biggest franchises such as Madden and Need for Speed were huge on consoles in spite of disappointing on PC, and Vivendi Universal was part of a huge entertainment conglomerate that could turn its library into hit games with no outward licensing fees. Infogrames had no such cushion. Even then, they seemed to actively spurn consoles, with IGN claiming they had exactly one PS2 game in development in 2001.

By the end of the sixth generation of video games (PS2/GameCube/Xbox), while Infogrames had a lot of big brands on the PC, on console they only had 3. One was the Western distribution rights to Dragon Ball games (the franchise also gave the company their only big hits on the Game Boy Advance). Another was Test Drive, a franchise that sold well in spite of not standing out from its competition much at all. The third...

Enter the Matrix...and Atari

The last of Infogrames's big acquisitions was that of Shiny Entertainment in 2002, and they published Shiny's Enter the Matrix game the next year, the only time Infogrames really tried to make an AAA game for consoles. It sold better than any non-Dragon Ball title they published in the first half of the 2000s and in fiscal year 2004 it made up 20% of their revenue. But it had such a gigantic development and marketing budget (estimated to be $100 million) that its success felt muted, not helped by mediocre reviews and the backlash that year to The Matrix in general.

You didn't see the name "Infogrames" on the cover of Enter the Matrix, or other games published by them starting from 2003. Instead, you saw a very familiar name that had not been in the spotlight for a while...Atari, which they had bought in the Hasbro Interactive purchase and had success with selling PC arcade compilations. The Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles would soon start production and be minor successes. But the changed name didn't mark a comeback for the Atari brand. Instead, the now-Atari's decisions became just another in the line of bad decisions that had plagued the name for decades.

Feuds and Turmoil

While they were already known for heavily messing with their internal studios, nothing compared to the period from 2004 to 2006, when Atari and Bonnell seemed to anger just about everyone they were associated with. Shiny founder Dave Perry quit after their cheapskate philosophy forced him to "tear the heart out of" an original game idea of his; the studio was promptly sold. Reflections founder Martin Edmondson was fired, with the studio also being sold shortly afterwards. Humongous was planned to be sold as well, but instead Atari just fired everyone. And while Chris Sawyer was no longer working on RollerCoaster Tycoon, his lawsuit against Atari for unpaid royalties on the first two games led him to quit the game industry for years.

Meanwhile, the video game rights to Hasbro's properties were given back to Hasbro for much less than they had bought Hasbro Interactive for. They did sign a new contract for Dungeons & Dragons Online, Atari's attempt to capitalize on the MMO boom, but Atari refused to actually promote that game and the rights were lost again.

Aftermath

Atari would eventually sell off most of its IPs, except for the original Atari Corporation properties and RollerCoaster Tycoon, to other companies, mainly those who sit on IPs doing nothing much new with them. Atari itself would have several weird phases including one where they focused on hotels and crypto. Currently they seem to be a studio that focuses on remakes and re-releases, having acquired both Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse, both titans in that realm; they also recently bought the immensely useful game database MobyGames.

Bruno Bonnell, meanwhile, resigned in 2007 and would eventually become the host of the very short-lived French version of The Apprentice before going into politics. I am not making this up.

Was looking at what GBA games sold over a million copies and despite their sales and big brand names I didn't even know these two existed. Neither of them have over 200 plays on the popular website Backloggd. Disney Princess doesn't even have a Wikipedia page while Tetris Worlds has its combined with the console game of that name.

This is only a sample of the full 100+ game list, which is here: https://backloggd.com/u/A90sKid/list/american-kids-games-on-windows-after-the-fall-2000-2003/

This list is a companion to my others, covering the downfall years, when sales plummeted and budgets were really slashed. In spite of this, the games are generally more popular on Backloggd than those on my 90s lists! Is it demographic bias - are there much more "00s kids" than "90s kids" on here? Or is it just due to the popularity of the licenses (which dominate here)?

Suggestions are always welcome.

I wanted to create resources because they were so popular, in both computer labs and big stores, when I was a kid and yet so forgotten now.

Edutainment: https://backloggd.com/u/A90sKid/list/back-to-school-on-windows-98-an-american-edutainment-list/

Kids' Adventure: https://backloggd.com/u/A90sKid/list/kids-adventure-games-90s-windows-american/

Activity Centers: https://backloggd.com/u/A90sKid/list/activity-centers-90s-windows-american/

Kids' Creativity: https://backloggd.com/u/A90sKid/list/kids-creativity-games-90s-windows-american/

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A guide to each picture:

George Read (Delaware) was an ancestor of the celebrated James Brolin (Westworld, The Amityville Horror, etc.) and his even more famous son Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc.).

William Ellery (Rhode Island) was an ancestor of Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer) and her daughter Sosie Bacon (Smile).

Carter Braxton (Virginia) was an ancestor of Zach Cregger (one of The Whitest Kids U' Know and the director of Weapons).

John Hart (New Jersey) was an ancestor of Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney.

The famed Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania) was an ancestor of Jack Coleman, who has had recurring roles on shows like The Office and Burn Notice but is best known as "HRG" on Heroes.

Lewis Morris (New York) was an ancestor of Emily Rutherfurd, "New Christine" on The New Adventures of Old Christine. Rutherfurd is also a descendant of Levi P. Morton, Vice President of the United States from 1889 to 1893.

Honorable mention: William Floyd and Philip Livingston (both New York) were ancestors of the late David Crosby, a rock music legend who didn't act much but who cameoed in a lot of movies and TV shows in the 90s, most notably Hook (which his photo is taken from).

The photos of the signers were taken from an 1876 lithograph by Ole Erekson. It can be downloaded from the Library of Congress.

It is worth noting that all the highlighted signers except Ellery were slaveowners.