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Acclaim Entertainment Files for Bankruptcy
Prof. Jonathan Ezor, Touro Law Center writes "According to this story in Long Island Business News, Acclaim Entertainment has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Eastern District of New York bankruptcy court, meaning it will liquidate its assets and shut down. The story states in part, 'Computer game maker Acclaim Entertainment (Nasdaq: AKLM) has filed for voluntary Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which would result in the liquidation of the company's assets. The company filed papers in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Central Islip that estimated its debts at more than $100 million and its assets at $10 million to $50 million. The filing said it had more than 200 creditors.' Game Over."
With recent titles such as American Pro Trucker and Mary Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16, it's almost hard to believe they were losing money.
Constructor was my favourite Acclaim game, grumpy foremen, hired gangsters, people who you were supposed to thank after you moved them into a *pyramid* (surely it should be the other way around...), sending around the undesirables to mess up your opponent's city (go the clown!).
A great game - I've never seen anything quite like it. Anyone know of anything similar to this?
aterr - an open source threaded discussion board.
On July 9th of last year, Penny Arcade predicted this, perhaps in not as many words. And, they had the good class to make a cat catapult while they were at it. Is there anything Tycho and Gabe can't do?
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
So if I'm a creditor, where do I file if I have acclaim against them?
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Among the whole field of lousy game publishers, they were very close to the bottom. Maybe outshined by crooks at Take Two? Not that Acclaim wasn't crooked...
There was a point when Acclaim titles were respected. Turok was one of them, until they screwed it up with the XBOX version. South Park's FPS was a fun little game while it lasted, as well as countless other good games I can credit these guys with.
as far as I can see, though, they have failed to innovate:
South Park's N64 FPS, years ago, had run-shoot-run-button-shoot-run type gameplay. Since then, games have become increasingly more innovative, better-looking, and sleeker/more intuitive. Acclaim, though, hung on to their old business model, lost enough market share to go to the ranks of ValuSoft, and even then failed to realize their mistake and improve on it. Now, the former captain has sunk with his ship.
The Queen Is Dead. Long Live The Queen.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Wow,
Well, this looks like the end for Mortal Combat as well then. I haven't played it since #2 but it was still an amazing game for the time and one of my personal favorites.
Check out Mon and Mon.cgi
Taken from Acclaim's own pages, right now (linkage):
Don't think I'll be sending in my resume after all
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
God is Alive and benevolent!!!
Check out my foes list to see who is so retarded that they can't use the signature line!!!
Is it just me or are game publishers dying off? Sierra, Interplay and now Acclaim are all gone, or as good as dead. Moreover, IMHO we're seeing less and less new titles, and more sequels, rip-offs and shovelware.
A long time ago I read something to the effect that we'll see the death of the game industry (computer and console) if Moore's law slows down/stops/ceases to aplly to gaming. If new technology can't improve on last years games by a significant margin, then the industry's business model is in _real_ trouble (which might explain the abundance of sequels).
I know that, other than Doom 3 and Thief 3, it's been a long time since I bought a new release (no, I don't pirate). The last few original games I've liked had gameplay that was refined, but not really _new_ as such. Dungeon Siege, for example, was basically Diable meets Icewind Dale; it was good and well executed, but not really a new idea.
I'm not being a nostalgic geezer here, I really think we could be in trouble. Anyone care to comment?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Bankruptcy Wins...
FATALITY
Acclaim has always been on this cycle of boom and bust. They had NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat (neither of which were original titles - they were ports). Then things started to get a bit tight around the transition time between genesis/snes and saturn/ps1 (some baaad games came out for these - some, thankfully, never saw the light of day because they were sooo bad). Then came Turok. This got them going again. Did they rest on their laurels? Nah! They just started spending money like there was no tomorrow.
It all started to go really downhill with pretty much every product after N64. It's taken several years for them to die but they lost the momentum a *long* time ago. A string of very poor quality, dubiously marketed games got them in this position.
Is Acclaim management all to blame? Well, frankly, yes. Not just those in Glencove but all of the management. But the studio management teams had their hands tied by Glen Cove.
Have you noticed that the only part of the management team that has survived any appreciable period of time is Fishbach, Scorpowski and Cousins?
All the rest were fired or jumped ship.
They went through many CFO's, CTO's, COO's (and whatever made up job titles they came up with) within a very short period of time. The staffing turnover rate in glen cove was amazing.
I recall a meeting once where we were told, "if we don't pull out of this, we're going to hit a mountain". Today, they hit the mountain and slid down it in a big heap.
My thoughts go out to the employees who found out they were laid off when they couldn't get in to their offices. The management team never even had the decency to tell them they were no longer employed.
Aside from the GOOD versions of Mortal Kombat and MK:2, everyone I know always referred to Acclaim as "ACK! LAME!" .. because almost all of their titles sucked ass.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
"Race for pink slips" indeed..
Quality was definitely the issue. I have the Blockbuster GAME pass, unlimited video game rentals for a month, and I'm letting that thing expire after the first thirty days ends. Why? I have all three systems, and I notice the shelves at BBV groan under the weight of mostly Acclaim/Midway/Atari bombs. Sports (excepting the excellent Sega and EA offerings), fps, boooooring adventure task quests, EXTREME this and that. Blah. I can have any game I want and I hardly want any of them. I already own the keepers like DDR, Metroid Prime, Halo, etc. None of those is by Acclaim, I notice. I content myself with the occasional "pleasant surprise" game that looked iffy and turned out to be fun, like Blood Wake, Riddick, Pikmin, etc.
Who didn't predict this? I think everyone in the industry, and those outside of it (like your aforementioned heroes), know what's going down with their neighbor companies.
It doesn't take a genious to know a company is going to fold, and just because a couple loudmouth dudes have the same opinion as half a million other people said it while you happened to be listening does not make them the second-coming-of-gaming-christ.
Sorry to burst your bubble... fuck
I won't miss Acclaim at all. They acquired and then ruined one of the best independent comic book companies ever, Valiant. Shortly after purchasing the comic book company, they changed all the writers and artists, ran all the books into the ground and then canceled them. All this just to get the rights to make a few Turok games.
:-(
Not only did this really piss off loyal readers such as myself, it contributed to the comic book market crash, completely ruining the value of all of Valiant's back issues.
I submitted this story to Slashdot on Friday and on Tuesday, first just with the SPOnG.com story, then again on Tuesday with other sources.
The SPOnG story has feedback directly from Acclaim employees in the UK. Their forum on the story has a comment from an Acclaim employee that their pension contributions have not been payed since April!
Honestly, do the editors actually RTFA, or do they just see SPOnG and bin it? This is the 5th time I've submitted stories from SPOnG, just to have them appear on Slashdot days later, attributed to someone else, usually GamesIndustry.biz, who re-write SPOnG stories for their own front page.
What is up with this?
-- I like the cut of your thinking, young man. - me.
I mean, didn't everyone assume that Acclaim could rest its laurels on its old super-hot franchise?
You know what I'm talkin' 'bout... IGGY'S RECKING BALLS. The one where a bunch of balls, you know, "recked" each other.
Yup. All five of you balls-lovers remember that one, I'm sure.
(let's see how long until someone combines the trucking, olsen and recking game titles......)
wasn't Acclaim running some lame promotion where people had to change their names to Turok for a year or something? was that already over or are those people getting nothing for having a stupid name for a year? what were they supposed to be getting anyhow? i forget
TIAEAE!
In other words, they missed the swinging rope and finally fell into the tarpit.
I remember playing the Bard's Tale series on my Apple IIe! After playing AD&D as a teenager, I grew tired of games that depended on stroking the Dungeon Masters' ego. I thought "Wouldn't it be great if a computer could take over the duties of running games" The Bard's Tale was the answer, with much better graphics and audio than "Ultima." After that reality intruded, however and I never felt I had the time for RPGs.
After googling, I found Acclaim was only planning to be the European distributer of Inxile Entertainment's "Bard's Tale" (which was originally distributed by Electronic Arts) Why does the game industry mess with my nostalgia so!!! Good luck to Inexile, anyways.
It's true that Turok was developed by Iguana and published by Acclaim. Iguana was based in Austin and joined forces with Optimus, a British developer located in sunny Middlesbrough, who also adopted the Iguana name. Acclaim acquired both of these, which became Acclaim Studios Teesside and Acclaim Studios Austin. Teesside was closed in 2002, citing reasons such as centralizing development at Cheltenham, then kicked everyone while they were down by buying Software Creations to form Acclaim Studios Manchester, all in the same month.
Spare a thought for the hundreds of families in Austin, Cheltenham and Manchester, especially those who'd just uprooted and moved from Teesside to Cheltenham, now desperately seeking alternative employment.
Roses are red and ready for plucking.
You're sixteen and ready for high school.
From Breakfast of Champions
The pensions contributions issue is interesting. You can allocate a portion of your salary to be paid into the pension fund and Acclaim will match it penny for penny. It seems that Acclaim have not only been failing to match the contributions, but they've also been syphoning off the employee contributions into their own coffers. This is not just sneaky, it's downright theft.
Lately, Acclaim has become well known for one thing in particular (hint: baby Turok).
Maybe they're thinking on an abstract level, but isn't this taking the concept too far?
This is not my sig.
maybe whomever gets the NBA Jam license will actually release it on the gamecube.
yeah, and pigs might fly, right?
MORTAR COMBAT!
What effect does this have on their copyright? Does a Chapter 11 company that reincorporates under a new name still retain their intellectual property rights? It would appear that the creditors now own the rights to acclaim software, but would you pay fees to individual creditors, and would any one creditor own the copyright/code to their game(s)? I am sure this is just one example of the vagaries of bankruptcy cases, and a field day for lawyers.
Is everybody forgetting the good times from Acclaim? The original Turok on N64, Burnout 1 and 2, and for you guys in the US and Canada, Worms 3D. They even had W3D's Xbox (Live-enabled) release up their sleeve for this month, just like Juiced (which has even had a couple of reviews - good scores - here in the UK). There was even Worms Forts on the horizon which looks promising - and I guess Team 17 are currently rushing around for a US/Canada publisher right now.
So, sure, they made crap like BMX XXX, but we have to remember the good times - and that's not forgetting they were Sega of Europe's distributor for quite a few months until they found their feet post-Dreamcast.
Mattb90
Editor, allaboutgames.co.uk
It'll be kind of sad to see Acclaim go. Granted, most of their games were complete shit, but they had some pretty decent ones as well. I used to love playing Wizards & Warriors on my NES back in the day (almost 20 years ago!). They were a major player in the video game world, and now they're gone. I hope the talented employees are able to find work quickly, and I hope that Acclaim's good franchises find homes with publishers that will do them justice. For those curious about Acclaim's library throughout the years: http://gamefaqs.com/features/company/215.html The list is not quite complete, but gives a pretty good overview.
Good luck, man. You've got skills, you'll be fine!
-Ian
NEO-GEO went bankrupt, filed Chapter 13 or 11 (something..)
Then their CEO moves the people, buys all the old rights to the NEO-GEO games and starts a new company (And the new companie's name has the words "NEO-GEO" in it).
Makes you wonder how many creditors got the short end of the stick on that deal.
Chip and Zak of the defunct gamingnoise.com will be pleased to know that Asslame is gone.