Our research group, over the past ten years, has been very interested in the structure and reactivity of nickel acylate complexes, i.e., those organonickel complexes generated from the reaction of Ni(CO)₄ with an alkyllithium or other nucleophile. In this article, we first discuss what was known about nickel acylate complexes before we began, and then, we discuss our contributions to this area of chemistry.