Ah, iMagic — the game developer that sounds like a magician got lost on their way to an Apple Store.
This was a company forged in the golden, lava-lamp-lit age of the early 1980s, when every game idea was apparently greenlit with the question, “What if we made it… sparkly?” Founded by ex-Atari employees (read: rebels with a joystick), iMagic was part of the original console wars — back when pixels were a bragging point and “16 colors” was considered high-tech wizardry.
They cranked out titles for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision with names like Demon Attack, Atlantis, and Dragonfire, which all sound like heavy metal albums or energy drinks your mom warned you about. The games themselves were basically fever dreams: aliens swooping, dragons spitting fire, and cities blowing up with all the subtlety of a Saturday morning cartoon.
In the early ’80s, iMagic rocketed to fame faster than a kid mashing the fire button. Their games looked slightly better than Atari’s — a fact they clung to like a life raft on the pixelated sea of competition. But alas, the Video Game Crash of 1983 hit them harder than a poorly timed laser blast in Demon Attack, and iMagic vanished from the scene faster than your older cousin when it’s time to share the controller.
In short: iMagic was like the glam rock band of early game developers — flashy, bold, gone too soon, and still making retro gamers sigh dreamily into their CRT monitors.
