LJN

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LJN Toys Ltd. was an American toy company and video game publisher. It produced toy lines and video games based on movies, television shows, and celebrities. It was headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, and later in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

History

LJN was founded in 1970 by Jack Friedman, the companies name came from the initials of Lewis J. Norman, the reverse of Norman J. Lewis, whose toy company Friedman had been employed by as a sales representative in the 1960s.

In 1985, MCA, which had been actively acquiring companies in the mid-1980s, acquired LJN for $66-67 million in an effort to retain more profits from the merchandising of its film properties. LJN began publishing video games for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. Although this was LJN's first foray into the video game business, it was not for MCA who had previously started MCA Video Games, as a joint venture with Atari, to create coin-operated and home games and computer software based on various MCA properties. In 1989, MCA decided to sell LJN after years of losses since 1987. MCA finally agreed to sell LJN to Acclaim in March 1990 for cash and Acclaim common stock.

During the time the company was owned by Acclaim, LJN mostly retained the same movie/cartoon direction for their video games it pursued under MCA. Acclaim rid LJN of its toy division and re-branded it exclusively as a video game developer. During the 8-bit gaming era, Nintendo, as a form of quality control, regulated the number of titles to appear on its console, the Nintendo Entertainment System. As a result, companies like Acclaim used divisions such as LJN to produce more games than Nintendo would have allowed. Konami also utilized such tactics with their division Ultra. Unlike Ultra which was a brand name of Konami, LJN was still a legal company operating independently from Acclaim. Even after Nintendo dropped its rule in the early 1990s, LJN still went on to publish several titles for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

All of LJN's video games were developed by external developers, although many of their video games did not disclose the developer.

Criticism

LJN has become synonymous with badly-made games, despite never developing the games themselves. Almost every game associated with LJN has been viewed as awful. Many episodes of internet reviewer The Angry Video Game Nerd have been based around LJN games.

Games released by LJN

Nintendo Entertainment System

Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Game Boy

External links

• LJN at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia