Irvine Game Maker Interplay’s Stock Rises 9% in Debut

Computer game maker Interplay Entertainment Corp.’s stock moved up 9% in its trading debut Friday on the Nasdaq market.

The Irvine company’s shares closed at $6, up 50 cents from the initial price of $5.50. Nearly 1.6 million shares changed hands in the scaled-back initial public stock offering.

The company had anticipated a price of $8 to $10 a share when it first filed plans in March to go public. Interplay also had planned to issue 6.25 million shares in an effort to raise about $72 million. In the end, the net proceeds totaled $26.9 million, which the company says it plans to use to repay debt.

Indeed, initial public offerings generally got rough treatment during the week. Companies that went public had mixed results, and other IPOs were delayed or canceled.

“The new-issue market is extremely challenging,” said Helene Sorin, co-head of the equity transactions group at Prudential Securities Inc. The market is characterized by “deals being priced below the range, deals cut in size, deals pushed off until the following week, and deals postponed indefinitely and withdrawn.”

Amdocs Ltd., which sells billing and customer support software to telecommunications companies, priced at the bottom of its expected range. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a computer consulting firm, priced below the bottom of its range.

Interplay’s scaled-back IPO, which was delayed a couple of weeks, also reflects ongoing difficulties that other game makers have encountered on Wall Street, market watchers say.