In June 1998 Edge sat down with Acclaim’s chairman, Greg Fischbach, and put the charge to him directly. In the days of the Super NES and Mega Drive, the magazine said, there had been mountains of cartridges based on films and famous names, the games were typically poor, and “typically, the name on the box was Acclaim”. Could he admit it? “Can I deny reality?” Fischbach replied. “Certainly there were a lot of games that didn’t sell well.” Then he explained how a company that started with fewer than twelve people had become, for a while, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, and why it had nearly gone under.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1987, in Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York, by Greg Fischbach, Jim Scoroposki and Robert Holmes, all formerly of Activision. It later moved to Glen Cove, New York.
- Business: publisher, first for the NES; later a developer too, through the studios it bought.
- Bought: LJN (1990); the games of Mirrorsoft (1992); Iguana Entertainment, Probe and Sculptured Software (1995); Valiant Comics.
- Best-selling games: the home versions of Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam; Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
- End: Chapter 7 bankruptcy in September 2004, with about $100 million of debts.
Nintendo’s first American licensee
Fischbach and Scoroposki had known each other at Activision. In his history of Nintendo, David Sheff says they had once laughed at Nintendo’s tiny booth at a trade show, where Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln were showing the NES with its robot. By the Consumer Electronics Show of early 1987 the console was selling well and there were too few games for it. In the spring of that year they formed a company specifically to become Nintendo’s first American licensee, and brought in Robert Holmes, Activision’s former vice-president of marketing. They found the name in a thesaurus: Fischbach said it could be anything beginning with A or Z, so Scoroposki read words aloud until they settled on Acclaim.
At first Acclaim did not make games. Fischbach told Edge that he had run Activision’s international business and already had good relations with Nintendo and with Japanese publishers such as Square, so Acclaim licensed Japanese games to sell in America. Its first release, Star Voyager, came out in August 1987, and Tiger-Heli soon after. ACE, which visited the Oyster Bay office in 1988, found another source: some of Acclaim’s games were programmed by Rare, the company of the Stamper brothers who had founded Ultimate Play The Game.
“The market was absorbing anything,” Fischbach told Sheff. Acclaim made more than $1 million in profit in the first three months of 1988, merged with Gamma Capital Corporation and went public. Accounts of its early turnover differ: ACE reported sales of around $8 million in Acclaim’s first full year of trading, while Fischbach told Edge ten years later that it made “about $40 million in business” in its first year and $70 million in the next.
Licences
Fischbach blamed the retailers for the licences. He remembered taking Wizards and Warriors, a game of Acclaim’s own, to the buyer for a large chain, who told him: “You bring me a name I recognise and I’ll buy your title.” So Acclaim brought him Rambo. “Now, Rambo was not as good a game as Wizards and Warriors,” Fischbach said, “but that was the way he worked.” Hits, as he saw it, came from three places: the console makers, the arcades and licences. Acclaim did not make hardware, so it did deals for the other two.
It bought the right of first refusal on Nintendo versions of every arcade game from WMS, the owner of Williams and Bally’s Midway. In 1990 it bought LJN Toys, another Nintendo licensee, from the entertainment company MCA. Nintendo limited how many games each licensee could publish a year, and owning LJN made Acclaim only the second company able to release more than five. Sheff tells a story from the negotiation: Fischbach asked MCA’s president, Sid Sheinberg, why MCA did not buy Acclaim instead, and Sheinberg answered, “We need another company like a mouse needs a hat rack.” The same year Acclaim put game tips on the backs of Jell-O Pudding Pops, gave away games through Chips Ahoy coupons, promoted its Total Recall game in cinemas, and mailed its own magazine to 250,000 players.
Early in 1992 Acclaim moved into computer games when it bought what was left of Mirrorsoft after the collapse of Robert Maxwell’s companies; the Mirrorsoft entry tells that story.
Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam
The WMS deal produced Acclaim’s biggest games. Its home versions of Mortal Kombat all came out on one day, 13 September 1993, which Acclaim called “Mortal Monday”. Acclaim published for Sega as well as Nintendo by then, which Sheff saw as proof of how far Nintendo’s hold over its licensees had slipped. Acclaim did not write either 16-bit version itself: the British developer Probe Software made the Mega Drive game, with a cheat code that restored the blood, and Sculptured Software made the Super NES game, where the blood became grey “sweat”. The Mortal Kombat entry covers the two versions and the row over violence that followed. Acclaim also published the home versions of Midway’s basketball game NBA Jam.
The sales were enormous. In Fischbach’s account the first Mortal Kombat sold six million copies worldwide and the second four million, while NBA Jam sold four million and its Tournament Edition another two million. “They are so big that you can hide a lot of not-so-good stuff in-between these big hits,” he said. Edge described Acclaim at the height of Mortal Kombat’s popularity as the biggest third-party software publisher in the world.
Buying studios
In 1995 Acclaim bought three developers: Iguana Entertainment in Austin, Texas, Sculptured Software, and Probe, from Croydon. Edge reported that the Probe deal was rumoured to be worth £60 million. Acclaim had also bought Valiant Comics, publisher of the long-running comic Turok, and spent about $10 million on a motion-capture studio. Remington Scott, who ran it, told Edge that the company “cored out the centre of a building” to make a two-and-a-half-storey studio, which Acclaim used for games such as NFL Quarterback Club and which Hollywood used for some of the effects in Batman Forever and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
The move came late. When the 16-bit consoles gave way to the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, Fischbach said, “we chose a strategy of simply doing a lot more stuff. We would throw mud at the wall, hoping that some of it would stick.” Players now read reviews, and retailers listened. In 1996, he said, “we could see the bottom. And it wasn’t a pretty sight.” Acclaim’s share price fell by 76 per cent that year. Asked whether Batman Forever had nearly sunk the company, Fischbach laughed: “Batman Forever and forever and forever.”
Turok
The rescue came from Iguana. At the E3 show in 1996 its young project lead, David Dienstbier, showed a Nintendo 64 demo of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, a first-person shooter set outdoors among dinosaurs, based on a Valiant comic. It drew a crowd. “Everyone at the company suddenly went, ‘Turok equals money… Dave, my boy! Have a Cuban cigar’,” Dienstbier remembered. The game came out on 4 March 1997, which Acclaim called “Turok Tuesday”, and sold 1.5 million copies. Acclaim’s stock price recovered, and the mayor of Glen Cove temporarily renamed one of the town’s streets Turok Boulevard. By 1998 Edge counted Turok and the American football series NFL Quarterback Club as proof that buying studios had paid off.
Acclaim kept publishing through the late 1990s: Forsaken, Shadow Man, and wrestling games until the WWF licence moved to THQ in 1999. It also published outside developers’ work. Criterion’s Paul Glancey recalled that Acclaim, which had released Criterion’s TrickStyle on the Dreamcast, agreed to publish its racing game Burnout on the PlayStation 2 when other publishers had turned it down.
Stunts
By 2002 Acclaim was trying to sell its games with publicity stunts, several of them in Britain.
- Turok Evolution: in the United States, Acclaim offered $10,000 in US savings bonds to the first family whose baby was born on 1 September 2002, the game’s release date, and named Turok. The parents had to promise to keep the name for a year. In Britain it offered £500, an Xbox and a copy of the game to people who changed their names to Turok by deed poll, and the newspapers reported five who did.
- Burnout 2: Acclaim offered to pay British drivers’ speeding fines incurred on the game’s release day.
- Shadow Man: 2econd Coming: Acclaim announced that it would pay bereaved families to put small advertisements for the game on headstones, with payments based on each headstone’s “exposure potential”, according to The Guardian’s report. CBR later reported that apparently nobody took up the offer.
- BMX XXX: a BMX stunt game with added nudity and adult humour. Edge reported that three major American retailers refused to stock it.
None of this worked. Edge noted that Acclaim’s own financial statement blamed worse-than-expected sales of Turok Evolution for a shortfall in profits, and in 2003 it reported that BMX XXX and Turok had sold disappointingly “in spite of high-profile marketing campaigns”.
Bankruptcy
Acclaim ran out of money in 2004 and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on 1 September, which meant the company would be wound up, not rescued. Its assets were auctioned to meet some of its $100 million of debts. Edge went to the sale at the Long Island headquarters, where anyone who paid a $500 deposit could look around. The quality assurance department on the ground floor had been left as it was on the day the staff walked out, with test discs of unfinished games still lying on the desks, while upstairs security guards watched over the executives’ antique furniture and wine. One bidder “just wanted a couch”.
The name afterwards
The name outlived the company. Howard Marks, formerly of Activision, bought the Acclaim name and logo in 2005 and used it for a new company, Acclaim Games, from 2006. In March 2025 a group of industry veterans brought the name back again and relaunched Acclaim as a publisher of independent games, led by Alex Josef. Neither company is the one Fischbach and Scoroposki founded.
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition with new chapters by Andy Eddy, 1999), pp. 219–223: Fischbach, Scoroposki and Holmes; Nintendo’s first American licensee; the name; Star Voyager and Tiger-Heli; early profits and going public; the WMS deal; LJN and Sheinberg’s reply; the 1990 promotions. Pp. 429–430: Mortal Kombat and Acclaim publishing for Sega.
- ACE issue 9, June 1988, pp. 32–33: visit to Acclaim in Oyster Bay; the first American licence; sales in the first full year; Fischbach and Holmes from Activision; games programmed by Rare.
- Digital Press issue 50, January 2003, interview with Alan Miller: Fischbach, Scoroposki and Holmes “came out of Activision” and started Acclaim.
- Edge issue 59, June 1998, pp. 22–25, “An audience with… Greg Fischbach”: Acclaim’s reputation; “Can I deny reality?”; sales of Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam; Wizards and Warriors and Rambo; the three sources of hits; licensing from Japan; first-year business; the biggest third-party publisher; the 1996 crisis and Batman Forever; buying Probe, Iguana and Sculptured in 1995; Turok and Quarterback Club.
- Edge issue 28, January 1996: Probe’s merger with Acclaim, “a rumoured £60 million”; Acclaim’s recent purchase of Iguana and Sculptured Software.
- Edge issue 228, June 2011, “The making of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter”: Glen Cove; the 76 per cent fall in the share price; E3 1996 and Dienstbier; Turok Tuesday and 1.5 million sales; Turok Boulevard; Valiant Comics; Iguana in Austin; the $10 million motion-capture studio.
- Amiga Computing issue 46, March 1992: Mirrorsoft “picked up by Acclaim”.
- Official US PlayStation Magazine volume 2 issue 12, September 1999, p. 72: “The WWF license left Acclaim and is now with THQ.”
- Wireframe issue 29, December 2019, p. 21: Paul Glancey on TrickStyle and Acclaim publishing Burnout.
- Australian Personal Computer, February 2004, p. 91: the Burnout 2 speeding fines and the offer to people who changed their names to Turok.
- Edge issue 117, December 2002: reader’s letter on the Burnout 2 and Turok Evolution stunts, the five name-changers; Edge’s reply on Turok Evolution’s sales and retailers refusing BMX XXX.
- Edge issue 121, March 2003: disappointing 2002 sales of BMX XXX and Turok; feature on sex in games and BMX XXX.
- Edge issue 146, February 2005: the Chapter 7 filing, $100 million of debts and the auction.
- The Globe and Mail, “Be the first on the block to have a kid named ‘Turok’”, 27 August 2002, reporting Reuters (web, secondary): the $10,000 offer and its conditions. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/be-the-first-on-the-block-to-have-a-kid-named-turok/article1175691/
- Worthplaying, “‘Turok: Evolution’ – Baby Naming Contest”, 27 August 2002 (web, secondary): Acclaim’s announcement, birth on 1 September 2002, US savings bonds. https://worthplaying.com/article/2002/8/27/news/5426-turok-evolution-baby-naming-contest/
- Slashdot, “Video Game Advertising Reaches New Lows”, 17 July 2002 (web, secondary), summarising The Guardian’s report “Game publicity plan raises grave concerns”: headstone advertising and payment by “exposure potential”. https://games.slashdot.org/story/02/07/17/2141244/video-game-advertising-reaches-new-lows
- CBR, “Shadow Man: How a Morbid Video Game Ad Campaign Tried to Profit on the Dead”, 18 February 2020 (web, secondary): the headstone offer and that nobody took it up. https://www.cbr.com/shadow-man-2-morbid-campaign/
- International Directory of Company Histories volume 24 (St. James Press, 1999), “Acclaim Entertainment Inc.”, as republished by FundingUniverse (web, secondary): LJN bought from MCA in April 1990; Iguana, Probe and Sculptured bought in 1995. https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/acclaim-entertainment-inc-history/
- Wikipedia, “Acclaim Entertainment” (web, secondary): Chapter 7 filing on 1 September 2004; Howard Marks and Acclaim Games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acclaim_Entertainment
- Gematsu, “Game publisher Acclaim returns with focus on indie studios and classics”, March 2025 (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/2025/03/game-publisher-acclaim-returns-with-focus-on-indie-studios-and-classics
- GamesBeat, “Acclaim Entertainment reborn as indie game publisher focused on original IP”, March 2025 (web, secondary). https://venturebeat.com/games/acclaim-entertainment-reborn-as-indie-game-publisher-focused-on-original-ip/