History
Take-Two was founded in 1993 by Ryan Brant, the son of Peter Brant, newsprint heir and co-owner of Interview magazine. In March 1998, Take-Two strengthened itself in a number of areas by acquiring the BMG Interactive unit from Bertlesmann AG for approximately $14.2 million. Take 2 published a game called "Rats!" in 1998, the game was developed by Tarantula Games. In February 1999 Take-Two published the game Biosys through the company Jumpstart Interactive. The game is a point-and-click adventure which follows the protagonist Professor Alan Russell and is set inside the fictional ecological facility Biosphere Four. In July 1999 they published Hidden & Dangerous, one of the pioneering tactical first/third person shooters, and its follow-up Hidden & Dangerous 2 in 2003. In 2004, Take-Two paid US$22.3 million to Infogrames for the rights to the Civilization series.
In 2005, Take-Two began a host of acquisitions, spending more than US$80 million buying game developers. It bought for US$32 million the development studios Visual Concepts and Kush Games, for US$11.4 million Gaia Capital Group and for around US$11.8 million the studio Irrational Games, which developed Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich. Take-Two formed the publishing companies 2K Games and 2K Sports to manage a group of newly acquired development studios, and publishing deals with a variety of other well known studios. As part of the creation of 2K Sports, Take-Two acquired from Sega the rights to the ESPN 2K sports games created by Visual Concepts (football and basketball) and Kush Games (baseball and hockey); when announced, Take-Two renamed the franchise to omit "ESPN" from the titles. Then in November, Take-Two acquired Firaxis for US$27 million including possible performance bonuses. At the annual meeting on March 29, 2007, Take-Two investors ousted five of six board members.
In February 2007 Ryan Brant pleaded guilty to falsifying business records. He faced up to four years in prison and received a lighter sentence by agreeing to cooperate in a plea agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. The charges stemmed from 2005 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a lawsuit that Brant, the company's head of sales Robert Blau, and its former chief financial officers Larry Muller and James David Jr., inflated revenue in fiscal years 2000 and 2001. In March, 2007, ZelnickMedia staged a takeover of the company together with some of Take-Two Interactive's largest investors.
On May 22, 2007, Oasys Mobile signed a deal to bring several of the Sid Meier licenses to the mobile market. The original Sid Meier games are developed by Take-Two's company Firaxis Games. Oasys will be bringing these games to the mobile market some time in 2008. In March 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit against Jack Thompson, to prevent him from filing a public nuisance complaint in Florida court as he did with Bully.
On September 8, 2008, they entered into an outsourcing agreement with Ditan Distribution LLC. Ditan assumes the responsibility for the pick, pack, ship and warehousing functions for Take-Two's publishing and distribution businesses previously handled by Take-Two's Jack of All Games subsidiary. The agreement allows Jack of All Games, to primarily sell third-party products, to focus on purchasing, sales and service for their customers. In September 2009, following a lawsuit, Take-Two Interactive were forced to pay a US$20 million settlement for an inclusion of a sex mini-game that was included in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. On December 21, 2009, they sold Jack of All Games to SYNNEX Corporation. In May 2007, the UFC filed a lawsuit against the company over the video game they created for the organization. In 2010, Ben Feder stepped down as CEO, and was replaced by executive chairman Strauss Zelnick.
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