At the Wake of a Fallen Monster
By Frank Cifaldi
It wasn’t until September of 2004 that the predictions of experts and the long-time secret hopes of videogame players worldwide finally came true. Acclaim Entertainment – mass-market publisher and pioneer of the Names Above Games business model – finally collapsed under its own bloated mass. Acclaim was in debt for well over $100 million dollars, with an estimated $10 to $50 million worth of assets left to its name and no quality product in the works to help it bounce back. Not that it would matter, of course, with no conceivable way to pay their employees and a track record that would make even the most foolish investor shudder in his expensive trousers. They had no money, and they had no conceivable way to get more money. It’s a situation the more educated among us refer to as “completely fucked.” So, the guys running the show did the only thing that made sense. They admitted defeat. They filed for what’s called Chapter 7 Bankruptcy, which is the technical term for calling a government official on the phone and saying, “Hi, Government Official? This is Acclaim. We’re completely fucked. Help.” They immediately turned over everything they owned, told everybody in the building to go home, and shut their doors for good. And, let’s be honest here, it was a long time coming.
It’s 1988, in a nameless university dorm room. A grad student, suddenly nostalgic for his playground days back home, decides to pop in a copy of Major League Baseball for his Nintendo Entertainment System, which he has just purchased with the last remaining bit of his student loan. After an awkward moment of figuring out how to choose his batting order, the game is ready to begin! It’s a sunny day. The crowd is cheering in anticipation. Sure, it sounds like television static, but this is 1988 and we’re lucky to have any kind of noise at all. The lead-in batter, good old Number 24, is warming up at the plate. The pitch comes, hard and straight and fast as an arrow, and with a snap of the A button contact is made. It’s flying low, but it’s making its way deep toward the outfield. It could go all the way, folks! Suddenly, disaster! The ball’s about to make contact with the wall. But then, like magic, the go through it. But hey, who’s to argue, it’s a home run! The outfielders don’t seem to notice this, as they continue to run in place, grinding against the backstop as if they, too, want to break the laws of physics. Next pitch, it’s a hard swing and an obvious foul, as the ball goes screaming left. It makes contact with the stands and immediately gets lodged on the border. The defense, one by one, runs toward it, trying in vain to catch the ball that is forever stuck in limbo. Nothing happens for a good, long while, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent to the student that nothing is going to happen. He rips out the cartridge in disgust, takes a good look at it, and swears to forever remember the logo on the game’s label. Acclaim[1].
It’s 1991. A young boy in the western part of the United States saves up for months in order to buy a copy of Total Recall for the NES, which isn’t exactly an easy thing for a ten-year-old to do. And, really, who could blame him? What kind of ten-year-old kid with a Nintendo rigged to his television and discerning ten-year-old taste wouldn’t want to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, busting Martian heads open and hanging out with gorgeous three-breasted women? After squirreling away his menial loot for what seemed like an eternity, starting a small business of purchasing bulk candy from the neighborhood grocer and selling them individually at an inflated rate to the kids at school, skipping the latest issues of his beloved Uncanny X-Men and generally starving himself at lunchtime, he finally had the means to attain his grail. Total Recall, by Acclaim Entertainment, now available for your Nintendo Entertainment System! Let the games begin!
The pathetic little block of vomit-green and fecal-brown pixels doesn’t look a thing like Douglas Quaid. He doesn’t move like him either. Hell, his punches are little girly stiff-arms with a disapproving thud noise. And the boy could be wrong, but he certainly doesn’t remember any scenes in the movie involving Quaid being dragged into the sewers by a midget who wants to kick him in the shins, or any multi-storied building inhabited by tramps carrying machine-guns. The only thing even vaguely resembling Total Recall, he thinks, is the barely recognizable face of Arnold Schwarzeneggar on the game over screen saying “I’ll be back.”
He looks to the instruction manual for guidance, some sort of explanation, any kind of justification for whatever the hell it is that’s happening on his TV screen right now that is anything but the Total Recall he remembers. No explanation comes. It’s then that he notices, for the first time, the weird little fruity rainbow symbol on the manual’s cover. Acclaim. He’ll take that name with him to the grave.
It’s 1992, and a badly-drawn Christopher Lloyd keeps falling off of his horse in the impossible first stage of Back to the Future III for the Mega Drive. It’s 1995, and the world’s greatest detective is a stiff walking corpse with no sense of grace in Batman Forever. It’s 2000, and someone is wondering why the hell the cast of South Park are racing go karts on their PlayStation. It’s 2002, and BMX XXX – a game featuring topless women riding bikes – hits the bargain bins immediately after release, to no one’s great surprise. We grew up. We got smart. And though we knew there was always that slim possibility that just maybe this time Acclaim had done something right – it certainly wouldn’t be the first time – we had given up, and a majority vote with our dollars ruled in favor of Acclaim not being worth our attention.
It was December 1, 2004, that I caught wind of an estate sale being held by a liquidation firm called David R. Maltz & Co., offering every physical asset left in the Acclaim corporate headquarters in Glen Cove, New York; not to mention the building itself, valued at a cool $11 million or so. At the time I was employed as something of a desk jockey at a Medicaid-funded mental health clinic in Las Vegas, NV, which is even less exciting than it sounds. I picked up a freelance gig here and there, sure, but at the end of the day it was my pencil-pushing that paid the bills.
Now, there are two things I realized when I saw the auction listing. First, I knew that this was Something Important. I knew that this was history, that this was an event that needed to be recorded for posterity and for the good of future generations. There is a lesson to be learned here, after all. And second, I knew that no videogame publication was going to cover the auction, because silly things like history and stories and actual journalism get in the way of their 8-page mega previews. It was obvious from the get-go that I was going to have to be the dumb bastard to fly out there and save the day. I had no money, I had no vacation time, but dammit, I wasn’t going to miss this.
There isn’t much to say about Glen Cove. It was the location of five and dime store creator Franklin W. Woolworth’s summer home. It’s the rumored burial site of Captain Kidd’s mysterious treasures. It’s the birthplace of R&B star Ashanti; I have no idea who that is, but Wikipedia has yet to lie to me. And, of course, for a good fifteen years or so, Glen Cove, New York was home to videogame history’s greatest monster.
My cab arrived at the entrance to Acclaim’s former corporate headquarters around 11 a.m. on Monday morning, the day of the public viewing. I suppose “public viewing” is technically an auction term, used to describe the time potential customers are allowed to view the items they’ll later bid on, but I knew the real meaning here. This was Acclaim’s open casket, and I was here to pay my final respects. Which, having just finished an 11-hour plane trip, I was more than ready to do. I tipped my cabbie, stepped out, lit a cigarette, walked over to the fancy Acclaim sign sitting in the parking lot, and took the greatest piss of my life.
It was a long, almost painful piss, the result of diligently storing eleven hours worth of beer, coffee, orange juice, assorted whiskeys, and that warm methane-tasting crap that comes out of the water fountains at Philadelphia International Airport (Home of the Three-Hour Layover). I couldn’t help giggling, audibly, even as a homeless man made eye contact with me and shook his head in disgust. He obviously wasn’t a videogame player.
An odd bunch came down that day to pay their respects – intentionally or otherwise – at the wake of a fallen monster. Some claimed to have never played a videogame in their lives. A good number came to buy some cheap goods to resell for a quick buck. Others came dragged by significant others, a few seemed genuinely lost, and one lady "just wanted a couch." God himself poured down his fury from the skies, with a poetic flair not seen since Nixon's body was carried through the streets of Yorba Linda. It was, if nothing else, a funeral worthy of Acclaim.
Inside the three-story property, the ghostly remnants of the moment the bomb hit – when everything was officially over, and the employees were asked to leave – lay strewn about. The first floor housed a massive quality assurance department. Half-finished Mountain Dew cans sat next to stacks of beta disks of games like The Red Star and Juiced, unfortunate casualties of the fallout. Some poor bastard was forced to leave behind his signed Anthrax poster and photos of Jessica Simpson, hung proudly around his desk. A white board was covered in red scribblings outlining primitive designs of a baseball game that just wasn’t meant to be, along with an unofficial company motto reading, “All customers suck.” A Tupperware container housing someone’s lunch (an odd mix of shrimp, cherry tomatoes, spinach, and various species of mold) sat expectantly in the employee refrigerator. The moment the was preserved for all to see and few to comprehend and tomorrow – on the 63rd anniversary of the day the Imperial Japanese Navy lay waste to an American Naval base just west of Honolulu – the entire lot of us could officially be called grave robbers.
I wandered the empty halls, snapping photographs, preserving what I could and occasionally – I’ll admit – pocketing the odd memento. There were plaques and awards celebrating the occasional hit, and lots and lots of really awful videogames lying around in every room of the building. One room contained several gigantic crates, each filled to the brim with copies of Turok: Rage Wars for the Nintendo 64, an elaborate shrine to failure. One room was entirely dedicated to paperwork, with fun stuff like an entire series of binders filled with nothing but rejection letters from Nintendo of America. Another contained videotapes and even 16mm film, containing commercials, marketing pitches, and even a special for-your-eyes-only-holy-SHIT-don’t-let-anyone-see-this advanced copy of Batman Forever which, judging by the game, they never got around to actually watching.
The second story was entirely devoted to marketing, finances, and everything else that makes videogame production boring. Attempts at rifling through the paperwork for a good laugh or two were met with threats of evacuation by a white-haired mafia-looking thug in, I swear to god, a pinstripe suit, who had been eyeing me since the moment I walked in. Apparently wearing a wool trench coat, a fishing hat, and a smile isn’t a very good disguise when you’re trying to look like you have money, but that’s all I brought. The third story, apparently, is where the Big Boys spent their days. There was elaborate antique furniture. There were vintage wine bottles and cheeses. There was even a whiteboard attached to a color printer, so you could theoretically write on it with a red sharpie and print an exact replica, in red.
By mid-afternoon I had seen enough, and made my way to the bar across the street. The place is called Shnooky’s, and it’s a “vintage” pub so far as the owner and, I’m guessing, the décor have not changed a bit in the fifty-plus years it’s been in business. Even the clientele were vintage, with not one hint of pigment on anyone’s scalp. This is an old man bar, where old men come to get drunk, read the newspaper, and complain about the state of everything, as old men are prone to do. I ordered a shot of Black Velvet – a nasty habit I picked up from a poet back home – and slumped in the stool slightly in a barely passable attempt at looking old.
“Oh yeah, it was a pretty big deal when those guys moved here,” the frail old bartender – I insisted on calling him Shnooky – would eventually tell me. “It was all over the papers. I’d see them in here once in a while but, really, they were just kids. They were young kids, working their asses off and getting paid nothing. It was a shame.”
To the left, on tiny little television screen suspended from the ceiling, Dennis Quaid was ruining a perfectly good movie called Enemy Mine.
“Oh, yeah, that’s that War of the Worlds,” said Shnooky. “That’s a good movie, that War of the Worlds. Another?”
“No thanks, Shnooky. Call me a cab, will you?”
I came back bright and early the next day to snap a few photos of the action, but my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Maybe it was knowing that I’d maxed out my credit cards and called in sick to work for three days straight just to snap a few photographs that probably wouldn’t even pay for the plane trip. Maybe it was the lousy weather, or the Anthrax poster, or thinking about all the kids who lost their jobs because their bosses still believed in a decade-old business model. Maybe it was the image of poor old Shnooky pouring whiskey as everyone and everything around him slowly withered and died. Or maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t actually eaten in two days. Well, I figured, at least that can be fixed.
I popped in to a tiny little Mexican restaurant right next to Shnooky’s, sat down, and pointed to the most expensive thing on the menu. It ended up being a huge plate filled with meat from at least four different animals, and I somehow managed to get it all down. This a family joint, and the owner’s two daughters – aged 7 and 12, as they were more than happy to explain – decided to sit next to me and ask the sorts of questions curious little girls like to ask. Not really wanting to leave (and having about twelve hours to kill until my flight home), I pulled out my laptop and decided to go over the photos I’d taken that day.
“Oh! Do you have any games on that?” the 7-year-old asked, wide-eyed and curious. Of course, I said, what kind of guy would I be if I didn’t?
I spent the next half hour teaching two little girls how to play Tetris, an entirely new phenomenon for them both. At first they just didn’t get it, but after a while, they were screaming at each other and, once in a great, great while, even scoring a line or two. And you know, if nothing else, at least I did that much right in this depressing little town.
There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest where Cary Grant – mistaken for a government agent – is abducted and taken to a secluded mansion in Glen Cove, where he’s force-fed copious amounts of bourbon and forced to drive a Mercedes Benz on a dangerously winding ocean cliff road. When I think about all the promising young kids moving to Glen Cove to work for Acclaim, I think about that scene, and like a homeless man watching some maniac in a fishing hat and trench coat pissing on a sign, I shake my head in disgust.
Acclaim was stubborn, old, and stupid, serving poison to its customers and seeing an H.G. Wells classic where there’s nothing but an overacting Dennis Quaid. They thrived in a time where games were nothing but Christmas toys in the Sears catalogues, where kids like me would see Spider-Man and Bart Simpson and the rest of our heroes starring in their own videogames and, foolishly, not knowing any better, would force our parents into feeding this monster with their cash.
We grew up, and so did our demands, but Acclaim stayed behind. They sat around on their antique chairs in their third story suite, drinking their vintage wines and purchasing whiteboards attached to colored printers[2] and thinking that their brilliant scam would last forever. They offset development costs by hiring starry-eyed kids, not even old enough to order a beer, and put as little funding as they could get away with into their assembly line products. Hell, all kids like Batman, right? You could shit in a box and the kids are going to eat it up as long as their hero’s on the cover, right?
Right?
Weep not for Acclaim, for Acclaim was a dinosaur who did not know it was extinct. Let its passing signify not a loss, but a life to be examined, and a lesson to be learned by all. Farewell, you magnificent bastard. Farewell.
In memory of Acclaim Entertainment, Inc. (1987-2004)