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Acclaim Entertainment (stylized as A«laim) was an American video game developer and publisher. It developed, published, marketed and distributed interactive entertainment software for a variety of hardware platforms, including Mega Drive/Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, and Game Gear, NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, PlayStation and PlayStation 2, Xbox, personal computer systems and arcade games. It also released video games for the Sega Master System in Europe. After Acclaim Entertainment's 2004 demise, the Acclaim brand and logotype were purchased by the unrelated company Acclaim Games (defunct from August 27, 2010). Canadian video game publisher Throwback Entertainment acquired more than 150 titles from Acclaim's video game library. In July 2010, We Go Interactive Co., Ltd., based in Seoul, Korea, purchased all IP related with ''Re-Volt'', ''RC Revenge Pro'', ''RC De GO'' from Throwback Entertainment. ==History== Founded in 1987 as a Delaware corporation, Acclaim maintained operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Australia, and Japan. 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. But as it grew, it purchased some independent studios, including Iguana Entertainment of Austin, Texas; Probe Entertainment of London, England; and Sculptured Software of Salt Lake City, Utah.〔 The name of the company was picked because it had to be alphabetically above the co-founder's former place of employment, Activision, and also had to be alphabetically above Accolade (another company formed by ex-Activision employees). This was a common formula for picking names of new companies that were founded by ex-Activision employees (the founders of Activision used this formula when they left Atari). Many of Acclaim's products were licensed titles: games based on 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 didn't have an American branch, such as Technōs Japan's ''Double Dragon II: The Revenge'' and Taito's ''Bust-a-Move'' series. In the 1990s, Sunsoft joined forces with Acclaim Entertainment to handle ad sales rights to Sunsoft's video games for game consoles. The waning of the arcade game industry, coupled with some poor sales and public enthusiasm from several key titles led to the eventual loss of many of their licenses. One result of this was their late refactoring of the Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX series. In June 1994, the company switched from video gaming to a media conglomerate. In 1995, the company acquired Sculptured Software, Iguana Entertainment and Probe Entertainment and the companies switched to the first-party development studio, known as Acclaim Studios from 1999 to 2004. The company also had a motion capture studio built into their headquarters, making them the first video game company to have an in-house motion capture studio. A less significant aspect of Acclaim's business was the development and publication of strategy guides relating to their software products and the issuance of "special edition" comic magazines, via Acclaim Comics, to support the more lucrative brand names. Lastly, they created the ASF/AMC motion capture format which is still in use in the industry today. Acclaim enjoyed a long relationship with the World Wrestling Federation dating back to 1988's ''WWF WrestleMania''. However, after failing to match the success of World Championship Wrestling's THQ/AKI games amidst the Monday Night Wars, the WWF unexpectedly defected to THQ in 1999. Acclaim then picked up the license to Extreme Championship Wrestling and released two games for the company. ECW declared bankruptcy in 2001 while still owing Acclaim money. The game publisher would release three wrestling titles under the ''Legends of Wrestling'' banner in the throes of its final years.〔McLaughlin, Rus (IGN Presents the History of Wrestling Games ) IGN (November 12, 2008). Retrieved on 2-03-11.〕 In 2001, Probe Entertainment became Acclaim Cheltenham. In May, 2002 Acclaim bought most of the assets of the Software Creations studio and established a new development company, known as Acclaim Studios Manchester. In December 2002, Acclaim closed its Salt Lake City studio (formerly veteran developer Sculptured Software). Acclaim suffered multiple lawsuits, a portion of them with former partners. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen sued over unpaid royalties. Acclaim suffered financial problems in 2004, the result of poor sales of their video and 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. Amongst the titles under development at the UK studios were ''Emergency Mayhem'', ''Kung Faux'' and ''Made Man''. On September 1, 2004, Acclaim filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York, which would virtually annihilate their company in liquidating all possible assets to pay off their debt which reportedly tops USD$100 million. An attempt to reopen the Cheltenham and Manchester studios in October 2004 (under the new name Exclaim) failed due to legal wrangling over IP, with both the US and UK administrators claiming rights. In August 2005, former Activision executive Howard Marks purchased the name "Acclaim" for a reported $100,000. In the beginning of 2006, Marks formed a new company called Acclaim Games. According to a job listing for the company, Acclaim Games was aimed at the US and UK preteen multiplayer markets. However the second iteration of Acclaim did not go well due to connectivity and payment issues for their online games, along with a lack of action against dishonest players, earning that iteration of the company an "F" grade from the Los Angeles/Southern California Better Business Bureau. In 2006, Throwback Entertainment, a video game company that had once considered acquiring Acclaim Entertainment, announced that it had purchased more than 50 of Acclaim's games, and vowed to bring such titles as Re-Volt, Extreme-G, Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, Vexx, Fur Fighters and many other franchises into the next generation and beyond. In July 2010, ''We Go Interactive Co.,Ltd'', based in Seoul, Korea, acquired all IP related with ''Re-Volt'', ''RC Revenge Pro'', ''RC De Go'' from ''Throwback Entertainment''.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Acclaim Entertainment」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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