Acclaim Entertainment

» see acclaim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

acclaim was the publisher whose name was the loading screen of a lot of n64 games i never owned. n64 never really landed in turkey, ps1 won the local console war by a wide margin. the turok cartridge was at most a magazine spread for me, level 5 turok 2 with the t-rex bossfight was on the cover of pc world türkiye one month around '98. i remember the cover and the description, i never saw the game running on a real console.

acclaim was founded in july 1987 in oyster bay, long island, by greg fischbach, robert holmes, and james scoroposki. fischbach had been at activision before. the founding pitch was a console-publishing house with the licensing relationships to ship third-party nes games. acclaim got the nintendo seal in 1988 and was one of the first six approved third-party nes publishers.

the home-port era was the run that built the company. acclaim shipped the snes and genesis ports of mortal kombat in 1993 and mortal kombat 2 in 1994. those titles sold a combined six and a half million units between them, the nintendo version of mortal kombat had the blood sanitized to grey sweat and sold less than the sega version which kept the red, that was the whole story of how mortal kombat sold sega genesis units that year. nba jam home ports followed on the same calendar. by 1995 acclaim was the largest third-party publisher in the us by units shipped.

turok: dinosaur hunter on n64 in 1997 was the next pivot. acclaim had acquired iguana entertainment in austin, the studio that built the engine, in 1995. turok 2: seeds of evil in 1998 sold around a million units and was the first n64 title to use the expansion pak. south park on n64 in 1998 was the licensed-property side of the same pipeline. between turok, south park, the wwf no mercy line (also iguana), and the dave mirra freestyle bmx series, acclaim was running a healthy catalog through the late nineties.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it shipped ~

burnout in 2001 and burnout 2: point of impact in 2002 were the late-acclaim run that aged the best. criterion games in guildford built the engine, acclaim published in north america. the games barely sold on release, the cult formed later in the early 2000s when burnout 3: takedown shipped from ea instead. ea had bought the criterion contract out from under acclaim by then, that was one of the late losses that pushed the company under.

the catalog around the publisher was wide and thin. trans-am racing, dave mirra freestyle bmx 1 and 2, atv: quad power racing, all-star baseball, jeremy mcgrath supercross. by 2002 the company had a publishing slate of around twenty titles a year on multiple platforms and a research-and-development budget that was too thin to compete with ea or activision. iguana was renamed acclaim studios austin and shipped turok: evolution in 2002, which underperformed and effectively ended the n64-era franchise. the studio closed in 2003.

~ the postmortem ~

the financial side broke first. acclaim had restated multiple quarters of earnings in 1996 after an sec investigation, that history sat on the books. the early 2000s catalog was not earning enough to service the debt taken on for the studio acquisitions. when criterion was lost to ea and the turok franchise stalled, the cashflow gap widened.

acclaim filed chapter 7 in delaware on september 1 2004. chapter 7 rather than chapter 11 meant straight liquidation rather than restructuring. the catalog was auctioned in pieces over the following two years. the company had also become notorious for stunt marketing in its last years (paying parents to name their newborns turok, offering grave-stone advertising in england for shadowman 2econd coming, both rejected or retracted). the obituaries leaned hard on the stunts.

~ what got buried with it ~

the burnout franchise went to ea outright. criterion games became an ea internal studio and shipped burnout 3, revenge, paradise. the turok ip sat with acclaim's bankruptcy estate, eventually picked up by disney for the 2008 turok reboot that flopped. nightdive studios re-released turok 1 and 2 on modern platforms in 2015 and 2017 working from the original iguana code. the acclaim name itself was bought in 2006 by howard marks (founder of activision) for a casual-games revival that ran briefly and closed in 2010. a separate acclaim today is a different entity unrelated to the original company.

the catalog has a strange archival profile. mortal kombat ports are part of the warner bros vault now. nba jam home ports sit with the ea sports brand. burnout sits with ea. turok with disney's licensed catalog. the long island company that published all of them is gone, the games it shipped are distributed across four owners who do not talk to each other about it.

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