Bit Histories: The Story of Acclaim Entertainment

Mrs. Bit and my son, whom we'll call Little Bit, have been on vacation for the past week to go and visit her father in Alabama. Because of my schedule for work, school, and game-playing, as well as my love for you, dear readers, I was regrettably unable to accompany them.

Having them gone has left me to my own devices (a phrase that has a very literal slant to it with all the various gaming gizmos I have employed in their absence) for the week, and as you would expect, Mrs. Bit's fastidiously clean house has, as they say, gone to pot. It started with a Taco Bell wrapper on the floor in the living room, or a glass left on the table, instead of immediately cleaning it. Before I even knew what had happened, I was living like a hobo, knee-deep in my own filth. I have almost completely forgotten how to take care of myself without the assistance of Mrs. Bit, to the point where I would not be surprised if you came to visit, and found me sitting on the living room floor, a huddled mass near a fire that was kindled in a hubcap. All things have their natural state, and apparently mine is vagrancy.

We'd like to thank the local Police Department for this
wonderful shot of me from the last time Mrs. Bit went out of town.

The reason I tell you this, aside from being an illustration of how pathetic I am when my wife is gone, is because having all that free time got me thinking about game-related topics I haven't thought about in a long time. My thoughts turned to old games, people, companies, development houses, and consoles, and amid all the synapses snapping busily around my sugar-addled brain, one name rose to the top and gave me impetus to do some research.

Readers, for my enlightenment, and yours, I give you a brief history (read: only the funny stuff) of ACCLAIM ENTERTAINMENT. 

Those of us who have been gaming for more than a decade will recognize Acclaim Entertainment immediately. They were one of the largest game development houses of their time. They developed software for MANY platforms over the course of their history, including: Sega Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, and Game Gear; Nintendo's Nes, SNES, Nintendo64, Gamecube, Gameboy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance; Sony's Playstation and Playstation 2; Microsoft's Xbox; as well as some PC games and a few arcade game titles. Acclaim, in their time, was force to be reckoned with.

They are also (in)famous for the NEVER-ENDING parade of licensed titles that they helped find their way to market, preying on the naivete' of children in order to turn a profit. Acclaim, in many ways, created the expectation that games based on movies always suck.

Yeah. This made a difference

for the young ones.

Even if they were most famous for their terrible licensed games, and that was much of what they produced, this is a company that once maintained operations in the United States, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, and Japan. Acclaim purchased independent studios as they grew, including Iguana Entertainment, Probe Entertainment (bad name), and Sculptured Software. They even owned a freakin' comic book studio! Their company was wide-reaching, and had a great deal of clout, is all I'm saying.

Now with that bit of back-history, I'm sure that you are wondering what happened to them. "How did they go out of business, BitNick?" I can hear you say.

Well, let me set the stage for you. This is where our story becomes both fascinating, and insane.

The Law Suits

As the video game market continued to grow, Acclaim Entertainment began to suffer from brand dilution. Their primary money-making brands (which included things like the Dave Mirra BMX series, various WWF and ECW wrestling licenses, and more Simpsons video games that you could swing a game-controller at) were not making as much money at retail, aminly due to exceptionally poor game design and play control. They also suffered from a slew of lawsuits, my personal favorite being when they suffered heavy losses because Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sued the pants off of Acclaim for unpaid royalties.

We wish for... Our friend Vito to come over there and break your kneecaps!
(Photo by ABC Television/Getty Images)

Dave Mirra, a BMX rider, also sued Acclaim for using his image and name to promote a game that some of you may have heard of... it was a subtle little title called BMX: XXX. Not surprisingly, Mr. Mirra did not want his name associated with a game that featured full-motion videos of naked strippers riding BMX bikes, and some of the least sexy polygonal nudity in history. To boot, it was a game whose play-control was well-known for being terrible before it was even released. In spite of the fact that the game had loads of nudity crammed in at the last second in hopes of propping up sales, BMX: XXX still sold, and was reviewed, terribly, showing that even gamers have standards. I'm sure that this revelation came as a surprise to Acclaim.

Pictured: The day many gamers discovered what
"Exploitation" was.

The Marketing

As Acclaim lost money at an ever-increasing rate, Steve Perry, an executive at Acclaim made some REALLY dubious, but immensely entertaining marketing decisions that will never be forgotten for their absolute lunacy and the complete lack of judgement they exhibited.

One of those marketing decisions was Mr. Perry offering a £500 reward to anyone who was willing to legally name their baby "Turok" as a promotion for the game, Turok Evolution. He also, even more infamously, attempted to purchase advertising space on actual tombstones in actual graveyards to promote a Shadowman game.

Because that's where all the young people are.
Image: scottchan

The Employment Contracts

Acclaim was also famous for dealing with employees, especially those who were FORMER employees, in a really shady way. After they had acquired Sculptured Studios, and had offered all the employees of that development house a contract that involved receiving stock in the company (which would have been a red flag to me, knowing what I know now of the company), everything seemed fine. Two years after the acquisition, Acclaim laid off about half the employees of Sculptured Studios, violating their contracts in the process, but gave them a Sucker's Choice: Either take the modest severance package and sign and agreement stating that they will never sue for the value of your stock, or attempt to bring a lawsuit, and receive no severance. The choice would not be very difficult (i.e. sue the crap out of them because you have a contract in hand that says they owe you the value of that stock), if it weren't for one small fact... You remember how I told you that they had a problem with lawsuits? If you wanted to sue them as well, you had to get in line behind an impressive amount of other debtors and creditors who wanted to sue them first. In other words, by not accepting the severance package, you were rolling the dice in hopes that Acclaim would have anything left worth taking when it was finally your day in court.

"Ummm... My client has authorized me to offer the plaintiff
as many paperclips  as they can carry from the supply closet."
Image: Photostock

The Final Days

On September 1, 2004, Acclaim filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. This meant that, essentially, the company would be no more, as all of their assets would have to be sold in order to pay their debts, which totaled over $100 million according to sources. After all these setbacks, and terrible sales from their largest franchises in 2004, they closed their doors. A later attempt by the executive team at the studio to revive their company (under the new name Exclaim Games) fell flat when they couldn't obtain the rights to their own intellectual properties.

In 2006, Throwback Entertainment announced that it had purchased the rights to over 50 of Acclaim's games like Extreme G, Re-Volt, and others. Throwback has had problems with both the finance and gameplay sides of their iterations of these franchises, and has been given an "F" grade by the Better Business Bureau.

Conclusion

As can be seen, Acclaim Entertainment saw some good good days, and obviously saved up all the money they made during those times so that they could use it to finance making bad decisions later. In all fairness, Acclaim made some fun games (like NBA Jam, Extreme G, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and Re-Volt), but their devotion to poor-quality licensed titles, and cheap ploys to get customers ultimately proved to be their undoing.

 Do any of our readers have any nice memories of playing Acclaim

games that they would like to share, as a eulogy? Should we, instead,

unceremoniously dump Acclaim in a hole in the ground and never

mention them again? Let us know what you think in the comments!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!

-BitNick