Acclaim is Dead! Long Live Acclaim!

Acclaim was pronounced dead on Thursday, August 26th 2010. It leaves behind only Playdom and Disney Interactive who have swiftly cannibalized its rotting and dessicated corpse.  Cause of death is listed as piss-poor management, obtuse and damaging marketing, and over-extension.

Begun in 1987,  Acclaim is credited with bringing us some of the best known titles in gaming. Turok, Burnout, Crazy Taxi, and Mortal Kombat are just to name a few.  But it also brought more infamous titles as well. BMX XXX might be the best known of them.  It was released at a time when Acclaim was in serious trouble and it featured sex and nudity mixed with BMX bike racing. It was roundly received as being both awful and of bad taste, and was even disowned by Dave Mirra himself who's name and likeness was used on earlier Acclaim BMX titles.

[caption id="attachment_8872" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="BMX XXX. Acclaim's finest moment."][/caption]

It's been a slow, drawn out death for Acclaim.  They've had troubles since 2001 and filed for bankruptcy for the first time in 2004.  In 2005 Activision swooped in, purchased the Acclaim name and resurrected it under the name Acclaim Games where it focused on smaller online-based titles.  But this was really nothing more than putting the corpse on life support.  It reminds me of the movie Day of the Dead where the Doctor, called Dr. Frakenstein in the movie, has the zombies hooked up to all sorts of machines so that he is able to study them.  Acclaim ended up in that condition but instead of eating flesh and generally being fucking awesome, they just made shitty games.

[caption id="attachment_8873" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="This guy ended up being much cooler than Acclaim"][/caption]

So there we have it, the end of another era.   Farewell acclaim.  Without you we wouldn't have the Turok series to make fun of Nick Henderson for. We would never scream out "FINISH HIM!" at the end of any fight, and our taxi's would just seem a little less crazy.

Godspeed