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Ding-Dong...the Witch is Dead! An Editorial by Bob Layton
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The
following is a press release from September 3rd, 2004: Acclaim
goes under So
–who cares if another bad video game company goes under? Certainly
not me. Not
that I don’t have sympathy for an entertainment entity going out of
business. Lord
knows—I’ve stared down the business end of that shotgun--very
recently, in fact. I’m
acknowledging this turn of events as more of an obituary than anything
else. This is more of a
final nod to the death of a dream that the corporate scumbaggery of
Acclaim brought about. I
find myself looking at their recent downfall as something more akin to
karma. I
was approached by Jim Shooter in 1988 to leave Marvel and come help him create properties (as a
junior partner) for his new start up company—Valiant. I
was originally brought in to handle the superhero line--only to find out
that we were going to sit on those properties and pursue Nintendo and
WWF. As it
turned out, Valiant couldn't give the damn Nintendo things away.
After
millions of dollars were lost to ill-conceived projects, Shooter's
relationship with Valiant’s owners (Triumph--the
venture capital company who bankrolled Valiant)
was in big trouble. At the end of two years, he had nothing to show for
it but a massive load of debt. The initial investment by Triumph was for
only two million dollars. By the time our first action book, Magnus:
Robot Fighter, appeared, Valiant owed them over three and a half
million. Needless to say, Shooter paid the ultimate price for failing
his investors and was ousted from the company. Once
Shooter was fired, Triumph offered the Senior V.P. position, since I was
instrumental in the co-creation of most of the characters there with
Jim. Originally,
I had come into the company with the concept of X-O
MANOWAR in hand and had subsequently co-created such popular titles
as ARCHER & ARMSTRONG,
DR. MIRAGE, THE H.A.R.D. CORPS and BLOODSHOT,
to name a few. Since
Valiant’s beginning, I had worked 17 hour days, seven days a week and
put myself into the hospital twice from exhaustion. I had paid my dues
and built up a great deal of “sweat equity” in my three years there.
So-- I wasn’t about to give it all up now.
I
took the job. What
else was I going to do? Then--
I was faced with the daunting task of pulling the entire company out of
debt. As
most of you know, with the help of some very talented and dedicated
co-workers, we succeeded in accomplishing that task. And,
shortly after Shooter had departed, our sales began to skyrocket.
Triumph, by the end of '93,
had made a small fortune off of our company. Valiant
was netting around 30 million a year and they had more than satisfied
their investors. If you
understand how venture capital works, they are short-term investors.
Always. Once Triumph had made sufficient profits, they
ordered us (upper management) to sell the company because they wanted
out. They were in the venture capitalists--not publishers, after all. And—we
were not given a choice in
the matter. For
months, the upper management team of Valiant met with a dozen potential
new owners, discussing the merits of the characters and their earning
potential in various entertainment mediums.
We met with all sorts of companies-- from Doubleday Books to
Paramount Films. Unfortunately,
the highest bidder turned out to be-- Acclaim. Greg
Fischbach, the C.E.O. of Acclaim Entertainment, offered 65 million for
Valiant—with about a 50/50 split in cash and Acclaim stock, valued at
the time at $16.00 per share. Ironically,
if he had done his homework, Fischbach would have discovered that
Valiant was only market valued at around 30 million. But
Mr. F was nothing if not a knee-jerk reactionary. He
wanted the company—so he bought it without the proper due diligence.
This habit of his would prove to be a fatal one. Only
after Fischbach acquired us did I find out that Acclaim had
previously attempted to buy Image (who they felt better matched their
video game demographics), but they were laughed out of their offices
(Image prided themselves on being
rebels and anti-corporation but no one at Acclaim was smart enough to
know that in advance). Then,
"Mr. Braintrust" got the idea to buy Valiant instead --and
simply morph us into a carbon-copy of Image. This
was an incredibly stupid idea—considering that Valiant comics had a
reputation for being more intelligently-written that the average comic
and appealed to a much older demographic than the more juvenile Image
line. Combating
this revisionist mentality eventually resulted in a shouting match
between me and Fischbach, once he started allowing his ‘suits’ (Acclaim
corporate executives with no creative experience to their names) to
make wholesale changes in the characters and premises of our titles. Greg
couldn't fire me, because he'd have to pay me the full term of my
contract if he did and he was way too vindictive to let me off the hook
so easily after publicly defying him.
So-- he basically locked me in my office for the next year and a
half, taking away my editorial authority over the comics line. In
his infinite wisdom, Fischbach gave my creative control to others in the
company with no editorial acumen whatsoever.
This mess finally culminated in my filing a civil suit against
Acclaim for 'obstruction of duties'.
As it turned out, I wound-up giving back most of the money the
made from the initial sale of the company in this settlement, in order
to get out of the job and as far away from Acclaim as possible.
Once I was gone, Fischbach brought
in a new Editor-In-Chief, renowned for his mediocre rehashing of Marvel’s
X-Men titles during the speculator boom. He finally had a guy who could
help him refashion the Valiant Universe in his own image. At
last, Greg Fischback got what he always wished for in the guise of V2—a
dumbed-down relaunch of the Valiant Universe. I
was lucky—I lost millions, but I got out of the company with my
integrity and self-respect still intact. One
of the reasons Triumph sold Valiant to Acclaim was that they were dumb
enough to offer 65 million for a company that was valued at the time at
only 30 million. They didn’t
do their homework in researching our company and got seriously burned as
a result. In
the years after Valiant’s closure, they continued putting out their
inferior video game products until the public finally caught on and quit
purchasing them altogether.
So--It’s
not a coincidence that these screeching morons have gone out of
business.
But, if the Valiant characters are the price we must to pay to rid the world of the corporate scumbags that comprised Acclaim Entertainment—it's a bargain.
9/29/04
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