Feature: 'Can Howard Marks Revive Acclaim?'

Fifteen years after reviving then-troubled Activision, Howard Marks has his eyes set on re-establishing recently-bankrupted Acclaim, reincarnating it as an MMO-specific publisher relying entirely on in-game advertising revenue. In this exclusive Gamasutra interview, we find out his motivations behind this move. As the introduction to the interview states: "With a storied history including relatively fondly received titles such as the early Turok games for N64 and the Extreme G series, alongside less well-reviewed licensed properties and numerous movie tie-ins, Acclaim Entertainment finally shuttered its business in 2005. The game properties it still owned were sold in a bankruptcy sale, and relatively few in the gaming community mourned its loss. But just as the post mortem had begun on the fallen giant, Howard Marks bought its remnants and restarted the company as "Acclaim Games." If that decision raised some eyebrows, the announcement of his proposed business model may have raised a couple more; the goals of the new Acclaim involve exclusively developing massively-multiplayer online games, all of which will be free to play, supported mostly through ad revenue." For Marks, who says the new Acclaim Games will be offering much more than simply "a badly translated Korean game" that does "a disservice to the player," the MMO market can support a far broader range of options than is currently being served, and is seeing "potential with music-based games (MMO type) in our market, also action-oriented and sports MMO games." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject with more from Marks on how to do free MMOs right, and a call to Microsoft to lift Live Arcade file size restrictions (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).