Acclaim sued by Olsen twins over videogame contract

Dualstar Entertainment, the company which manages twin teen celebrities Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, has filed a lawsuit against Acclaim Entertainment alleging that the publisher breached its contract to develop games based on the Olsens.

Acclaim entered into an agreement with Dualstar in mid-1999, and published a large number of games featuring the twins - all of which were, unsurprisingly, critically reviled, but were apparently quite popular with the admittedly small market segment of younger teenage girls.

However, the deal was terminated last September, and Dualstar says that Acclaim was due to pay up over $177,000 as part of the termination deal. The company claims that Acclaim has now missed the final date for this payment, namely April 1st.

As a result, Dualstar is seeking to recoup all the monies it is owed, which comes to almost half a million dollars plus interest, for a final figure of around $660,000. It also wants Acclaim to destroy unsold inventory of its Mary-Kate and Ashley titles at the end of this year.

"The abandonment of the mary-kateandashley brand videogame franchise by Acclaim," ranted Dualstar's lawyers in a letter sent to Acclaim chairman Greg Fischback earlier this month, "is the single dark spot on the otherwise unblemished success story of the mary-kateandashley brand across myriad media and territories."