LJN
| ♥ | This article is dedicated to Founder Jack Friedman (1939-May 3, 2010, at age 70 from complications of a rare blood disorder). |
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 There is no gold at the end of this rainbow.
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"How many of these games are worthless?! All the LJN ones, I can tell you that, but there are good games here, there are! Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man, but then A BIG FUCKING SHITSTORM HIT IT! A SHITSTORM OF HORRIBLE GAMES! And at the middle of it all, a rainbow! A rainbow of shit! LJN!"
LJN Toys Ltd. was an American toy company and video game publisher founded in 1970. The company published movie tie-in and TV show-based games mainly for Nintendo consoles since 1987 and was owned by MCA. The company was sold to Acclaim Entertainment in 1990 and published games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy that Acclaim acquired the rights to, as well as getting rid of their toy counterpart. LJN produced the Roll & Rocker accessory and their console, the LJN Video Art.
LJN was dissolved in 1995 by Acclaim, but not before Jack Friedman, the founder of LJN, founded THQ as his new independent company following the acquisition by MCA in 1990. The brand was often briefly used in some of the subsequent products made by Acclaim, such as Spirit of Speed 1937 (released in 2000). After Acclaim's demise in 2004, the brand was later used by Hasbro for their reproduction of LJN toys.
Why There Was No Gold at the End of Their Rainbow
NOTE: The first six reasons are from the 94th AVGN episode Back to the Future ReRevisited, colored after the "Shit Rainbow/Spectrum of Awfulness". Below the reasons is a game showcasing them.
- Putrid gameplay.
- Major League Baseball: Poor physics, including terrible fielding, and sometimes the controls suffer from input delay.
- Bad musical abominations.
- Beetlejuice: The music in the game is not based on the movie, instead uses original music, which sounds way too silly and peppy for a game based on a horror movie. Despite this, the game still has great music thanks to it being composed by David Wise.
- Graphical farts and garlic.
- The Uncanny X-Men: The name is an accurate representation: poor graphics and palette swaps for every character.
- Piss-poor lack of loyalty to source material.
- Back to the Future: Barely faithful at all to the film, mostly in the horrible minigames.
- "Orange (aren't) you a fucking idiot?"
- Friday the 13th: A confusing to navigate game in which it may seem like you're going the right way, but you may actually be going the wrong way.
- High-stress anger-inducing masochism.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Horrible, slippery driving controls, slow searching, and a time limit to writing down a password after a game over.
- Sometimes LJN didn't even credit the developers at all.
- They are also known for forcing the developers who were developing for them to rush their games to meet their pitiful deadlines to get the game out while the movie's popularity was sky-high, causing their games to be released in unacceptable conditions.
- They also produced the Roll & Rocker, which, as shown in AVGN's NES Accessories episode, barely even works unless you found a rare one that worked.
Put that all together, you got all the colors of the shit rainbow. Hooray LJN.
Redeeming Qualities
- Some of the games they published, including Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, the 16-bit WWF games, the Town & Country Surf Designs games, the console port of Terminator 2: The Arcade Game and Alien 3, Wolverine: Adamantium Rage and True Lies are actually pretty decent, if not good.
- They've also made the awesome ThunderCats toy line, the first line of WWF action figures, and the popular but controversial Entertech toy line of water guns.
- A few of their games have great music (e.g. Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wolverine and Beetlejuice).