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LJN

The toy company that became a Nintendo licensee

Companies & StudiosSource-checked

Jack Friedman's New York toy company made wrestling figures and laser-tag guns before it turned film licences into NES games: Jaws, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The entertainment group MCA bought it in 1985 and sold it to Acclaim in 1990, and Acclaim kept the LJN name on its licensed games into the mid-1990s. Its reputation for poor games was fixed later; the period press was more mixed.

In November 1988 Computer Gaming World gave out its awards for the best games on the NES. The prize for Most Innovative did not go to Nintendo, Konami or Capcom. It went to Jaws, from LJN Toys, a company the magazine had introduced three months earlier as “previously best known for its WWF Wrestling dolls”. Twenty years later, Retro Gamer gave the same game a retrospective that began “LJN, I hate you.” Between those two verdicts lies the story of a New York toy company that bought the rights to some of the biggest films of the 1980s, turned them into cartridges, and was sold twice in five years.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1970, by Jack Friedman, as LJN Toys. One public source gives 1967.
  • Business: toys (wrestling figures, the Photon laser-tag game) and games for Nintendo’s consoles.
  • Owners: bought by MCA, the parent of Universal Pictures, in 1985; sold to Acclaim in 1990.
  • Games: Jaws, The Karate Kid, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future, WWF wrestling games, Marvel games including Wolverine and The Amazing Spider-Man.
  • Last use of the name: the Dreamcast racing game Spirit of Speed 1937, published by Acclaim under the LJN label in 2000.

A toy company

Jack Friedman had been a salesman for the toy firm Norman J. Lewis Associates, and in 1970 he founded LJN Toys with his employer’s financial backing, according to the company history of his later firm JAKKS Pacific. LJN made toys from licences. Its WWF wrestling figures were what American games magazines knew it for, and in Britain it sold Photon, a laser-tag game with guns, helmets and chest sensors. In September 1987 Computer and Video Games ran a competition to win Photon sets from “LJN Toys and Nexus”, and in December CRASH offered its readers the Photon Double Warrior Set, “the top-of-the-market two-person light-tag system”, which normally cost £80.

MCA’s games company

MCA owned Universal, the studio that had tried and failed in court to claim that Nintendo’s Donkey Kong infringed its rights to King Kong (see Universal v. Nintendo). David Sheff writes in Game Over that MCA’s president, Sid Sheinberg, wanted MCA to be “a principal” in video games, as it was in records, films and videocassettes: “He formed MCA Video Games and later bought a company called LJN, makers of toys and Nintendo games.” The purchase came in 1985. MCA acquired a 63 per cent stake in LJN, and Friedman moved to Los Angeles with it.

LJN became one of the early licensees for the NES. Not every game was a film. In June 1988 Computer Gaming World reported that “the survival game craze inspired LJN Toys to create Gotcha! The Sport”, a combat game for the NES in which a hit on an opponent showed as “a bright colored paint spot”, and that LJN’s Major League Baseball let players pick line-ups from real statistics. But it spent most heavily on film rights. In September 1988 Computer Gaming World described it as “the licensing giant who has already spent big bucks for rights to the hit movies, Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th”, and announced its next: Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Several of LJN’s games were not made in America at all. The Leicestershire studio Rare wrote Who Framed Roger Rabbit, A Nightmare on Elm Street, WWF Wrestlemania Challenge, Beetlejuice and Game Boy games for LJN, according to the list of Rare’s games in Retro Gamer, and the British magazine Total! credited WWF Wrestlemania Challenge to “LJN Ltd/Rare”.

What the magazines said

The period press did not treat LJN as a byword for bad games. Computer Gaming World called Jaws “one of the most original, entertaining programs in the NES universe”: a multi-phase adventure with a scrolling map drawn in “an attractive angled overhead perspective”, in which the sea gets deeper the further out you sail, and “you do not want to confront Big Bruce in the shallows!” Its graphics, animation and play were “all first rate”, the reviewer wrote, and if this was what LJN could do, “they should forget about the wrestling dolls and buckle down to full-time game design immediately!”

Later reviews were cooler. Nintendo Power rated its games out of five for graphics and sound, control, challenge, and theme and fun; Beetlejuice scored between 2.6 and 2.9 in April 1991, and The Amazing Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six between 2.7 and 3.1 in October 1992. Total!, reviewing WWF Wrestlemania Challenge in January 1992, found it too easy: “Even the worst gamer is going to grapple his way to the top in a couple of days at most.” Its buyers’ guide summed the game up as “a real lightweight. It’s too easy, repetitive and graphically tame.” The American fanzine Digital Press grumbled in May 1992 about “mediocre wrestling games that capitalize on big-name stars but fail to deliver”, complaining that “LJN just couldn’t wait to get the first one out” on the Super NES. A year later the same magazine loved LJN’s WWF Royal Rumble: “Today, I feel like the president of LJN, because they’ve catered to my every need.”

The harsher reputation belongs mostly to later writers. Retro Gamer’s 2008 retrospective of Back to the Future, a game in which Marty walks down a street collecting clocks and dodging hula-hoop girls, asked “that common LJN question”: “did anybody at the company actually take the time to watch any of the movies?”

Sold to Acclaim

MCA did not keep LJN for long. In 1990 it sold the company to Acclaim, the first American NES licensee. Nintendo limited each licensee to five games a year, and owning LJN made Acclaim, in Sheff’s words, “the second licensee to be able to produce more than five games a year”. LJN, he notes, came with “strong games in its catalog, including ‘Roger Rabbit,’ several ‘Spiderman’ games, and ‘NFL Football.’” When Fischbach asked Sheinberg why MCA did not buy Acclaim instead, Sheinberg replied, “We need another company like a mouse needs a hat rack.” A company history dates the purchase to April 1990.

Friedman left before the sale. “When LJN was sold,” Sheff writes, “its chairman, Jack Friedman, founded another toy company called THQ”, which became a Nintendo licensee itself. Digital Press later described THQ in the same terms, as “founded by the former chairman of LJN”. Friedman went on to found the toy company JAKKS Pacific in 1995 and died in 2010.

Under Acclaim, LJN became a label. Magazines listed new games as “Acclaim/LJN” through the early 1990s: WWF games, Terminator 2, Alien³, and in 1995 a Computer Gaming World advertiser still listed Mortal Kombat II under “Acclaim/LJN”. The name then fell out of use, apart from one last appearance on Spirit of Speed 1937 for the Dreamcast in 2000.

Sources

  • Computer Gaming World issue 48, June 1988, p. 41: Joyce Worley’s newswire (Gotcha! The Sport; Major League Baseball).
  • NESdev wiki, “Board table” (web, secondary): LJN as publisher of The Karate Kid, Wolverine and other NES games. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Board_table
  • Computer Gaming World issue 50, August 1988, p. 45: Jaws review (LJN Toys “previously best known for its WWF Wrestling dolls”; quotations).
  • Computer Gaming World issue 51, September 1988, p. 50: news (the licensing “giant”; Who Framed Roger Rabbit).
  • Computer Gaming World issue 53, November 1988, p. 56: NES awards, “Most Innovative — Jaws (LJN)”.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 130, May 1995, p. 179: mail-order advertisement listing Mortal Kombat II as “Acclaim/LJN”.
  • Computer and Video Games issue 71, September 1987, p. 100: Photon competition.
  • CRASH issue 47, December 1987, p. 96: competition prize, the Photon Double Warrior Set.
  • Nintendo Power issue 23, April 1991, p. 97: ratings for Beetlejuice. Issue 41, October 1992, p. 115: ratings for The Amazing Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six.
  • Total! issue 1, January 1992, p. 19: WWF Wrestlemania Challenge review. Issue 2, February 1992, p. 68: buyers’ guide.
  • Digital Press issue 5, May 1992, p. 10: Super WWF Wrestlemania. Issue 12, July 1993: WWF Royal Rumble review.
  • Digital Press Psychopedia, 2003, p. 166: THQ “founded by the former chairman of LJN”.
  • GamesMaster issue 5, May 1993, p. 14: chart listing Alien³ as “Acclaim/LJN”.
  • Video Games (Germany), April 1991, pp. 61 and 66: Terminator 2 listed from LJN, with Acclaim.
  • Retro Gamer Collection volume 1, 2007: list of Rare’s games and publishers.
  • Retro Gamer issue 53, 2008: Back to the Future retrospective. Issue 54, 2008: Jaws retrospective.
  • David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 6, “For a Fistful of Quarters” (Sheinberg, MCA Video Games and LJN); pp. 219–223 (Acclaim’s purchase of LJN, Sheinberg’s reply, Friedman and THQ).
  • FundingUniverse, “History of JAKKS Pacific, Inc.”, from the International Directory of Company Histories (web, secondary): LJN founded in 1970 with Norman J. Lewis’s backing; MCA’s 63 per cent stake in 1985; Friedman’s departure; THQ in 1990; JAKKS Pacific. https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/jakks-pacific-inc-history/
  • FundingUniverse, “History of Acclaim Entertainment Inc.”, from the International Directory of Company Histories volume 24 (web, secondary): LJN bought from MCA in April 1990. https://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/acclaim-entertainment-inc-history/
  • Wikipedia, “LJN” (web, secondary): founding in 1967, citing The Record, 28 February 1990; the 1985 MCA purchase, citing the Los Angeles Times, 27 March 1985; the sale to Acclaim, citing The New York Times, 13 March 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LJN
  • Wikipedia, “Jack Friedman” (web, secondary): JAKKS Pacific in 1995; his death in May 2010, citing the Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Friedman
  • Sega Retro, “Spirit of Speed 1937” (web, secondary): published under the LJN label in 2000. https://segaretro.org/Spirit_of_Speed_1937

See also

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