This week Criterion Games’ 1999 hoverboard racing game TrickStyle for the PC and Sega Dreamcast was quietly rereleased on Gog.com.
What makes this interesting is the fact that TrickStyle was originally published by Acclaim, which sold the rights to TrickStyle, Re-Volt, Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance, and over 180 other “game-related properties” to Canadian publisher Throwback Entertainment in 2006 as part of a bankruptcy auction of assets.
In the nearly ten years since, Throwback seems to have done very little with those assets. As NeoGAF notes, it sold the Re-Volt rights to Korean game company WeGo Interactive (which has since rereleased a version of Re-Volt on mobile and PC) in 2010, but until this year the lion’s share of the Acclaim properties had gone unused.
Back in May Throwback promised to rerelease Gladiator on Xbox One, PC and Windows Phone this year, but has so far failed to follow through, making the TrickStyle rerelease the first notable return of Acclaim’s old assets.
Of course, the Acclaim name was bought at auction and slapped on a new game company back in 2006, though that version of Acclaim was later bought by social game company Playdom and subsequently shut down in 2010.