Once upon a time, Acclaim Entertainment was one of the biggest video game publishers in North America. The big secret of their success wasn’t in actually making consistently good games, but consistently good deals.
Between licensing with big names and acquiring several studios, Acclaim successfully rode the wave of growth in the video game industry in the 1990s.
They licensed ports of Midway’s arcade hits, including NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat, to consoles. Acclaim also made wrestling games for a good 14 years, most of them with the WWF. They also picked up licenses for some of 1990s most popular media, including Marvel Super Heroes, The Simpsons, Robocop and Terminator.
Acclaim also worked to import several games from Japan, such as the Double Dragon games. But their biggest achievements came when they acquired the blockbuster developers Iguana Entertainment, Probe Entertainment, and Sculptured Software.
Between these three and other studios, Acclaim’s original titles included the Turok trilogy, Re-Volt, the Super Star Wars games and many ports and licenses for NBA, NFL, NHL, and WWE games.
Without getting caught up in their history, a series of poor business and production decisions forced Acclaim file for bankruptcy in 2004. In the past 20 years, the rights to their games were slowly sold off, and that seemed to be the end of their story, until today.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, a group of investors have acquired the Acclaim trademark itself, with plans to relaunch the company as an independent game publisher.
Interestingly, they have named Alex Josef as Acclaim’s new CEO. Josef was the founder and CEO of Graffitti Games, the studio behind Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion.
Strangely enough, professional wrestler Jeff Jarrett is also in Acclaim’s board of directors. Jeff Jarrett has been in some WWF wrestling video games, and hardcore Jarrett fans know he’s run some companies himself, but this is his first foray into the video game business. Hopefully this venture will turn out more like TNA than Global Force Wrestling.
While fans are eager to speculate on wrestling games, this seems to be more about a new business entering the void left behind by other game companies that have deprecated or closed their initiatives to publish smaller independent games. Acclaim also expressed an interest in buying back some of their old properties, so who knows? We may yet see the unlikely situation of Mortal Kombat once again falling under the Acclaim banner in time.
