Acclaim Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher based in Glen Cove, New York. Originally formed by Greg Fischbach, Robert Holmes and Jim Scoroposki out of an Oyster Bay storefront in March 1987, the company established a worldwide development team through a series of acquisitions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After poor financial returns in their 2003 fiscal year, Acclaim filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in September 2004. Properties owned by Acclaim were subsequently auctioned off to various parties.
They published a number of Double Dragon titles for home consoles in America, including Double Dragon II: The Revenge and Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Double Dragon II and Double Dragon 3: The Arcade Game for the Game Boy.
History[]
In the early 1980s, Greg Fischbach was employed by American video game company Activision, where he worked together with Robert Holmes and Jim Scoroposki. In 1987, he met with Scoroposki in Oyster Bay to discuss a possible shared venture. After Scoroposki suggested that the two should re-enter the video game business, they contacted Holmes to join them and the three jointly founded Acclaim Entertainment. Their legal entity was incorporated on March 30, 1987. In its initial years, Acclaim was exclusively a video game publisher, either farming out the creation of its video games to external developers or localizing existing video games from overseas.
Many of Acclaim's products used licenses from popular comics, television series and movies. They were also responsible for the ports of many of Midway's arcade games in the early to mid-1990s, including the Mortal Kombat series. They also published some games from other companies that at the time of publication did not have an American branch, such as Technōs Japan's Double Dragon II: The Revenge and Taito's Bust-a-Move series.
Through much of the 1990s Acclaim were one of the most successful publishers of console video games in the world. In the financial year ending August 1994 they saw a profit of $481 million, and this figure rose to $585 million the following year.
Acclaim suffered financial problems in 2004, the result of poor sales of its video game titles. This resulted in the closure of Acclaim Studios Cheltenham and Acclaim Studios Manchester in England and other places, and their filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, leaving many employees unpaid.
When Acclaim's agreement with GMAC Commercial Finance, their primary lender, expired on August 20, 2004, the company closed all of its facilities on August 27, of which the Austin and New York studios saw all employees let go. Prior to the closures, as of March 31, 2004, Acclaim employed 585 staff worldwide. Acclaim announced on August 30 that they were to go bankrupt and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with the United States bankruptcy court in Central Islip, New York on September 1.
Acclaim's former IPs were put up for sale and were sold in auction. In 2006, Throwback Entertainment purchased more than 50 of Acclaim's games.
Double Dragon games published by Acclaim[]
NES[]
Game Boy[]
Genesis[]
- Double Dragon 3: The Arcade Game (under Acclaim's Flying Edge division)
External links[]
- Acclaim Entertainment at Wikipedia - Original version of this article.