Why LJN Games Were So Bad

Why Were LJN Games So Bad? They're one of the most infamous video game publishers of all time; three simple letters which evoke fear, dread and angry memories for many frustrated players from the 1980s and '90s. Welcome to MojoPlays, and today we're going to be answering the question Why Were LJN Games So Bad? We're going to be deconstructing the LJN brand, what their publishing and development process was, and why gamers are highly frowned upon today, especially thanks to the “The Angry Video Game Nerd” series. First things first, however: are all LJN games bad? Well...no, actually. It's just, well...most of them are. This is due primarily to the huge gaps within the company's quality control. This resulted in games that suffered from a wide variety of glitchy graphics, monotonous music, poor controls or non-intuitive game play. LJN actually didn't develop games in house, but rather outsourced production of their titles to other companies, before slapping that infamous rainbow design on the box for mass market distribution. What's worse, for a lot of their earlier licensed titles LJN occasionally didn't credit the developers at all. LJN didn't even begin life in the video game business, which perhaps explains why they always seemed like outsiders from the start of their time in the industry. Their bread and butter was actually toys, and they did this really, really well. The company was founded by Jack Friedman in 1970, and was responsible for releasing some of the most iconic toys of the 1980s, including the Thundercats, a series of dolls based on the likenesses of Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields and an extremely popular line of licensed WWF (Now WWE) pro wrestling action figures. Friedman and LJN were all about those licenses, diving deep into this business model once the company entered the video game arena in 1986. The company had been acquired by MCA a year prior, who at the time also owned Universal, which afforded Friedman and LJN to license an astonishing amount of high profile media properties to small video game screens around the world. "Jaws," "The Karate Kid," "Back to the Future" "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and more were all given the LJN treatment, enticing young gamers in a pre-internet world with the promise of high energy game play based upon their favorite cinema classics. This is where the LJN bubble really burst, as word eventually spread via word-of-mouth that these tie-in titles usually resembled very little of what fans remembered watching on the silver screen. There are a lot of reasons why this could've been, with the most obvious being the rush to tie in a game to a popular movie of the time, a la "Roger Rabbit." This could explain the gaps of quality missed between development, design and release. At the same time, however, the "Friday the 13th" franchise got its start way back in 1980, so what excuse did LJN have to make their 1990 NES adaptation so difficult? To be fair, "Friday the 13th" does have its fans, and the game isn't so much broken as it is dense and obtuse for the average person to understand. It requires map-writing skills, time and a lot of patience, which in return is rewarded with some fairly frightening moments and a "game over" screen to die for. This isn't to say that a hearty challenge is bad, of course, but much of the LJN catalog suffered from game mechanics that pushed their titles from "difficult" to "what in the ever-loving HELL is going on?" Whether it was the terrible driving mechanics of "Roger Rabbit," the backwards map travel of "Friday the 13th" the gameplay restrictions of "Major League Baseball" and the outright broken "The Uncanny X-Men," LJN just couldn't seem to get it right. This isn't to say that there weren't the occasional bright spots in LJN's catalog. Games such as "The Punisher" and "Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood and Water Rage" on NES and are as fondly remembered as receiving … mostly good reception back in the day. In fact, there's actually a contingent of players-some of them too young to have even experienced the LJN catalog when they were initially released-who actually defend the company against their many, many detractors. These LJN apologists can be found on social media and YouTube, which is coincidentally where many fans were first exposed to one of the most well known (and hilarious) of the company's critics is ‘The Angry Video Game Nerd’. a.k.a. James Rolfe. He has earned a rabid fan following over the years reviewing, in character, some of the worst and most broken games of all time. LJN turned into something of a running joke within the series, often being skewered by The Nerd, while at the same time bringing to light some of the company's biggest titles. And that's the thing, the LJN games still sold well. Maybe we're masochists, and we just wanted the games to be good, or maybe parents didn’t know any better about these big name tie-in video game titles during the holiday season. This was despite the high frustration and return rate, which was usually associated with some of LJN's more notorious bombs, such as "Beetlejuice" or "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure." Fans felt betrayed that these games were straying so far from their source material, with the end results rarely matching up on anything other than a surface level, such as the arbitrary collecting of clocks in "Back to the Future." Today, the company is long gone, MCA sold the company to Acclaim Entertainment in 1990 following a scandal involving a realistic-looking line of toy guns called Entertech, where multiple children were shot and killed after police mistook them for carrying real weapons. While Acclaim still released a few titles under the LJN Rainbow after the purchase, (most notably “Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage”) the division was ultimately dissolved in ’95. Save for a failed comeback of the brand in 1999 with “Spirit of Speed 1937.” Jack Friedman only stayed on a couple years into the merge with MCA, leaving the company in the late eighties. He went on to found the companies THQ and Jakks Pacific and engaged in many philanthropic endeavors, including donations to the Special Olympics, Toys for Tots and the Boys and Girls Club of America. Friedman passed away in 2010, but he remains a well-remembered icon for the international toy industry. The sentiment surrounding LJN today seems to have evened out a bit, and to its credit, LJN does have a couple titles which have stood the test of time as capable slices of nostalgia. And hey, there have always been far worse games out there than the LJN catalog-"Action 52" and "Cheetahmen" we're looking at you-that make the company look positively golden. But Ultimately, LJN was a lower tier video game company who wanted to strike while the iron was hot for a quick buck (like many others), and who released bad, mediocre and occasionally o.k. games (like many others). They didn't thrive in the same way as some of their competitors, such as Capcom, because they didn't approach the medium with enough seriousness or attention to quality details. As a result, they're no longer here, but yet their legacy remains as a talking point to this day. In this way, maybe LJN did something right after all.