And I thought that Roger Rabbit game was the worst thing LJN ever did
Widely reviled as one of the worst game companies of all time, LJN earned its infamy way back during the NES era, pumping out terrible licensed game after terrible licensed game. The company was bought by Acclaim where it continued to churn out dubious titles and eventually faded from the public eye. I always assumed its legacy of mediocrity caught up with the company and it just went out of business. As the above video from the Gaming Historian shows though, the story goes a little deeper than that.
LJN was first and foremost a toy company, and back in the wild and crazy ’80s it thought it would be a great idea to produce a line of realistic water guns. Every gun in the Entertech series was all black with no neon safety tip and based on actual weapons like the Colt 1911, the TEC-9, and M-16.
Do you see where this is going?
Accidental deaths, robberies, lawsuits, bans, bad news. LJN reworked the line to be far less realistic, but by then the damage was done. The next product idea to rally from the failure of Entertech? Paintball guns marketed towards kids. Nice.
LJN limped on for a few more years, but never quite recovered from the disaster of the Entertech line. For all intents and purposes, it folded up shop in 1995 before it could find any other ways to harm defenseless children (unless you count Maximum Carnage on SNES and Genesis, ugh).
