The company was established in 1988 as The Intelligent Games Co. by Matthew Stibbe, who was studying at Pembroke College in Oxford.

He hired Imperium producer Kevin Shrapnell as director of development, who aimed for the company to develop "hit-driven, brand-led" games, among them a series of PGA Tour games (initiated by Steve Cuss) and a tie-in to the film Waterworld.

That year, Westwood was unsuccessful in acquiring Intelligent Games but inspired Stibbe to want to leave the company.

EA assigned Nicholas Wilson as the programmer and Carl Cropley as the artist for the project, with Kevin Shrapnell acting as producer.

While Evans created watercolour illustrations, Stibbe worked on the text and assembled the documents using Adobe PageMaker.

The process allowed for high-quality, coloured prints of the pitch documents, which Stibbe considered instrumental to the company's early success.

Intelligent Games pitched Sim Rainforest and USS Ticonderoga: Life and Death on the High Seas, which Stibbe had drafted in 1992, to Maxis and Three-Sixty Pacific, respectively.

Concepts like Dark Hermetic Order, Flying Circus, Bloodline, Conjure, King of Wall Street, Deadline News, and Cops and Robbers were scrapped.

[1] Intelligent Games was developing Waterworld, based on the film of the same name, by November 1995, at the time employing 25 people.

Shrapnell, Cuss and Neil Jones subsequently approached him with an offer and Stibbe sold the company in June 2000, leaving it in the same year.