Virgin Interactive Entertainment

Avalon Interactive Group, Ltd., formerly known as Virgin Interactive (Entertainment), was a British video game distributor based within Europe that formerly traded as the video game publishing and distributing division of British conglomerate the Virgin Group. During the company's time under the Virgin brand, they had developed and published games for major platforms and employed developers, including Westwood Studios co-founder Brett Sperry and Earthworm Jim creators David Perry and Doug TenNapel. Others include video game composer Tommy Tallarico and animators Bill Kroyer and Andy Luckey. Formed as Virgin Games in 1983, and built around a small development team called the Gang of Five, the company grew significantly after purchasing budget label Mastertronic in 1987. As Virgin's video game division grew into a multimedia powerhouse, it crossed over to other industries from toys to film to education. To highlight its focus beyond video games and on multimedia, the publisher was renamed Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993. As result of a growing trend throughout the 1990s of media companies, movie studios and telecom firms investing in video game makers to create new forms of entertainment, VIE became part of the entertainment industry after being acquired by media companies Blockbuster and Viacom, who were attracted by its multimedia and CD-ROM-based software development. Being located in close proximity to the thirty-mile zone and having access to the media content of its parent companies drew Virgin Interactive's U.S. division closer to Hollywood as it began developing sophisticated interactive games, leading to partnerships with Disney and other major studios on motion picture-based games such as The Lion King, Aladdin, RoboCop, and The Terminator, in addition to being the publisher of popular titles from other companies like Capcom's Resident Evil series and Street Fighter Collection and id Software's Doom II in the European market. Within the late-1990s,...