Acclaim's Marketing Geniuses

Acclaim Entertainment. Most gamers who grew up during the 8 and 16-bit era may fondly remember the name that brought home such great franchises as Mortal Kombat and the early Simpsons games – not that they were any good, but hell, it’s all we had at the time; we had to cope somehow. That’s not to say that everything that bore the Acclaim name was pure gold, as gems such as Total Recall, Friday the 13th, Revolution X, and Jaws could attest. Despite some minor (okay, major) movie-related slip ups (hey, everyone has them after all), Acclaim was at least a passively decent company. At some point, however, something went terribly wrong and Acclaim seemed to have lost its way. What would transpire thereafter would leave egg on the face of the gaming industry for years to come.

Around the time of the last generation of consoles, Acclaim became the whacked out Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan of the gaming industry. Before you could scream “MORTAL KOMBAT”, Acclaim seemed to find itself in a proverbial swirling toilet bowl of general zaniness and crackpot schemes. Amidst the games reaching new and exciting levels of wretchedness, there were rumors of adult-themed BMX games in development, lawsuits from spokesperson darlings like Dave Mira, and even worse, a whole new slew of Mary Kate and Ashley games. It was as if Acclaim had been hijacked by a new generation of guys resembling Howard Hughes complete with long beards, fingernails, and tissue boxes on their feet. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse…it seemed the cabin fever had spread to Acclaim’s marketing group and we were all too late to save them.

While the company was admittedly churning out more crap than a German porn star stuffed full of herbal laxatives and a bowl of colon blow to boot, the marketing team tried their damndest to generate some buzz in an attempt to sprinkle some potpourri on the thick, greasy sludge that was coming out of the company. This is the best those poor bastards could come up with, as the illustrious Jack Palance once said - believe it…or not!