BAM! Entertainment

BAM! Entertainment at a Glance

BAM! Entertainment was an American publisher founded in San Jose, California in October 1999 by Ray Musci. The company name came from its trade name Bay Area Multimedia. Their catalog on PlayPile contains 34 games, with the firm acting as publisher for 31 of them and developer on just three. They were active from 2000 to 2005, releasing all their titles during that single decade. The studio secured distribution deals with Cartoon Network, Ubisoft, Disney, and Sony while also maintaining a British development office in London. Their game library shows a clear focus on licensed content aimed at younger audiences or based on popular cartoons. Adventure titles made up the largest category with nine games, followed by seven platformers, five puzzles, and five shooters. The company also released four sports games, three racing titles, and three fighting games. Platform support was heavily skewed toward handheld systems from the early 2000s. They published fifteen games for the Game Boy Advance and six for the Game Boy Color. Their presence on consoles included five games each for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and PC, along with three Xbox releases and two original PlayStation games. Quality varies across their output. The average IGDB rating stands at 60.9 based on ten rated titles. One game achieved a great score of 80 or higher. Five titles fell into the good range between 60 and 79, while three received mixed ratings from 40 to 59. Just one title scored below 40. Hot Potato! released in 2001 with an 80/100 rating is their highest scorer. Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab? followed closely with 79.7, and Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo earned 69.4. Recent releases like Samurai Jack: The Amulet of Time struggled with a score of 55. Financial instability plagued the publisher after 2002. They faced difficulties that threatened to remove them from NASDAQ. In 2004 they sold their London office to VIS Entertainment, which went bankrupt shortly after. BAM! acquired VIS but then signed a deal with Acclaim Entertainment before it also collapsed. The company filed for bankruptcy by the end of 2005, ending their run as a major publisher. Their output ceased completely after that year.

Rating Distribution