When you hear Rock Star Games, you think fun. Grand Theft Auto and Red Redemption games come to mind. Rock Star has made some of the best-selling and critically acclaimed games in history. If you grew up during the 8 and 16 bit eras, you know and love Capcom. They gave us classics like the Mega Man series, Ducktales and the Street Fighter games. Maybe you were a Konami fanboy. They made the hard games we love such as Contra, Lifeforce and Jackal. Or maybe you loved Sunsoft which gave us the awesome NES Batman game, the arcade classic Spy Hunter and the underrated Gremlins 2.

Then there is LJN. They were the exact opposite of the video game companies I named above. They made disaster after disaster. Failure after failure. And it’s not like they did this with one genre of games. They ruined platforming games, side scrolling games and sports. When you see a LJN logo, you would be better off using meth than playing these games.

Look, every company makes a bad game. Companies have low points during their history. Konami made Top Gun for the NES. It sucks worse than a Pauly Shore movie. You can’t knock them all out of the park. But it’s not like Konami kept making more Top Guns. They made classics with a fuck up there and there. LJN kept dumping out turd after turd. If I ever become an enemy of the state, the FBI or military would not need torture. Just put me in a room and force me to play LJN games. I would find the body of Jimmy Hoffa.

(The infamous LJN Logo. Also known as the video game face of Satan himself.)

I could name a bad game that Rock Star, Capcom and Sunsoft all made like I did with Konami. But their overall body of work outweighs the bad. LJN has a never ending list of shit. Back to the Future, sucks. Beetlejuice, horse shit. MLB (baseball) a broken mess. X-Men, basically unplayable. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, some of the worst video game controls in history. Nightmare on Elm Street, a real life nightmare. Bill and Ted, a disgrace to humanity. You see a pattern here?

We all should be thankful that LJN is no more. Sadly, us children of the 1980’s and much of the 1990’s had to suffer through their games. Our hard-working parents wasted money on these games that we stopped playing within the first hour of owning them. Many of us wasted a weekend renting these terrible games. We broke controllers over these worthless games. I still drink heavily when I hear someone utter the words “LJN”. I picture hell itself being nothing but NES systems with nothing but LJN games to play.