The life and times of Hulabee Entertainment

[Udvarnoky]

I stumbled on this forum thread that does a deep dive into the strange history of Hulabee Entertainment, the would-be spiritual successor to Humongous Entertainment.

 

The backstory for the unfamiliar: Humongous changed hands a few times over its existence, first in 1996 when it was sold to GT Interactive. This was a "benevolent" acquisition along the lines of Double Fine and Microsoft, with the studio continuing to enjoy some kind of creative autonomy. However, GT in turn sold the studio off to Infogrames in 1999, and that's when Humongous aficionados will tell you things went sour. The founders of the studio - that would be Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day (producer of Monkey Island 2, among other titles) felt similarly, and they consequently made an attempt to buy back the company. In the end they couldn't put the money together due to the dot-com bust, and instead they founded a new company, Hulabee.

 

The potential for Hulabee to be a continuation of the spirit of classic-era Humongous can be seen in their 2002 release Moop and Dreadly, a point 'n click adventure along the lines of Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam that even had Dave Grossman as writer.

 

 

Alas, Hulabee ran into financial problems that saw their offerings quickly devolve into the lamest sort of mid-2000s casual licensed game dreck, and the tawdry ignominy of it all culminated when Shelley Day got busted for bank fraud.

 

Anyway, if you're interested in some archeology of this less-than-beloved company, you may want to give that thread a read.

 

[ThunderPeel2001]

What a sad turn for Shelley Day... Has Gilbert ever talked about it? A weird way for your company to go down  And was Gilbert set for life after Humungous? He doesn't seem to have done that much and yet lived a good life (or was his time at Double Fine and agreeing to do Return partially down to the money?)

 

Gilbert is quite a mysterious guy now that I think about it.

 

Edited April 22 by ThunderPeel2001

[Kolzig]

Hulabee made some fun kids adventure games even though there was licenced IP in the mix with original IP. It's a really shame that Shelley Day did what she did.

 

Our family has in the recent years played Ollo in the Sunny Valley Fair and the Monsters Inc game Mike's Monstrous Adventure that Hulabee made and the kid really loves the Piglet's Big Game Disney adventure game. That one she has played multiple times through on her own also.

 

Moop and Dreadly in the Treasure on Bing Bong Island we actually finished just last winter finally.

 

Dave Grossman wrote the story and dialogue for Ollo, Piglet and Moop & Dreadly. With Monsters Inc he wrote only part of Mike's dialogue.

Those four games would be absolutely great to have officially available, but who knows in which rights hell those games are. Disney possibly owns those two games that had their IP.

[ThunderPeel2001]

15 hours ago, Kolzig said:

It's a really shame that Shelley Day did what she did.

 

I feel sorry for her