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The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
- duxup 5y agoVery interesting I wasn’t aware of this during the NES days. I do wish Nintendo was a bit pickier about clearing games for sale on the Switch. On the estore specifically there’s a lot of low quality shovelware. I find myself a lot more nuanced about walled gardens sometimes.
- superdisk 5y agoThere was a vast amount of shovelware on the NES as well, it's just been forgotten and the gems have persevered in everyone's memory. I have an NES mini and I put the entire NES library on it, and went through some of them with some friends-- the vast majority were garbage.
- formerkrogemp 5y agoThere was a bunch of crud in the GBA system as well. A lot of it was fun to play though at the time.
- perardi 5y agoIt was a long time ago, but this game immediately popped into mind when I saw “NES” and “shovelware”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_II_(NES_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_II_(NES_video_gam... I am sure I shoveled a lot of garbage that I rented at the video rental store that was inside the grocery store into my NES, but that one just stood out.
- car_analogy 5y ago> I find myself a lot more nuanced about walled gardens sometimes. Getting the keys to your device's walled garden does not imply you're compelled to leave that garden. You can stick to the official store, that contains only high-quality games blessed and vetted by Nintendo.
- singlow 5y agoNot that I like walled gardens, but I do think that once you open up the door, many quality titles will skip the store which otherwise would have listed. So the garden is now incomplete. You haven't just given access to the things you previously blocked. Now some users will need to venture outside to find apps that otherwise would have been in the app store.
- whoopdedo 5y agoQuality is subjective. The value Nintendo was preserving with their cartridge licensing was the retail price. Too many low-cost games taking up shelf space in retail stores makes it harder to sell premium games. Games were sold for Nintendo consoles at remarkable prices, which encouraged studios to invest in high quality games. Chrono Trigger in 1995 was released for 11400yen (US$124.50 at the time). But an app store doesn't have the limitation of inventory. No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles. Not needing to worry about dilution, the store operator reverts to rent-seeking behavior and will approve the most number of games as they can. Or will create artificial scarcity by restricting access to popular titles. When buying physical media, licensing balances the needs of the publisher, producer, and customer. But in the digital world there's almost no overlap.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sitkack 5y agoSo how do we preserve an ecosystem and prevent what I think you are outlining is a bimodal distribution between a vast majority of cheap low cost games and a few high production value games, is that correct?
- brianwawok 5y agoIf you believe in the free market, the entire game ecosystem is free games with pay to unlock features. Or you believe in a curated market and let the curator of each market set rules.
- dwighttk 5y ago>No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles I think they do in a different way. An expensive phone game is $5. Every once in a while a game will try to break that mold and they get mocked.
- Jensson 5y ago
- lostgame 5y ago>> On the estore specifically there’s a lot of low quality shovelware. This hasn’t changed much since the NES days. That AVGN made his career reviewing - to start - shitty NES games, indicates that the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’, or it’s ‘curation’ - really didn’t matter much. And it’s not like the NES was alone, even more recently, the Wii was the literal king of shovelware - if you haven’t heard the story of ‘Gingerbread Ninja’ and it’s related clones hilariously sold as different titles, you should check it out. It’s always been this way. The walls of ‘Walled Gardens’ don’t seem to really hold up to any potential scammer with a ladder. The iOS App Store is filled with scammy garbage copies of legit apps.
- anthk 5y agoI had Tengen Tetris on a pirate cart. It was much better than the certified Tetris.
- ZoomStop 5y agoSeems down? Here is a mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20220410034726/https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220410034726/https://nicole.ex...
- NelsonMinar 5y agoWhat a great article. The part about other unlicensed game manufacturers sending a chip-frying amount of voltage to the DRM system is just nuts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- drited 5y agoMy father brought home unlicensed games from Hong Kong for my brother and I to play on the NES in the 80s. I recall after putting in the game and powering on the NES, the screen used to flash for a second, kind of like when the reset button was pressed. It's interesting to read that the negative voltage to evade the DRM may have caused that!
- ndiddy 5y agoThe "voltage spike" method caused a cat-and-mouse game between Nintendo and the unlicensed game companies, where Nintendo would make a new NES board revision and then the companies had to figure out a way around their new current protection. Some companies even published directions in their game manuals for how to modify the NES console to get around the protection: https://files.catbox.moe/9t03p6.png https://files.catbox.moe/9t03p6.png
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago> Nintendo would make a new NES board revision and then the companies had to figure out I don’t understand how they can Do that and still maintain backwards compatibility with old cartridges?
- toast0 5y agoThe changes only broke (some) unlicensed cartridges, it didn't break cartridges that had a Nintendo manufactured protection chip.
- tedunangst 5y agoYou stick a diode on the reverse fry line, so sending -5v resets the console instead of the copy chip.
- runevault 5y agoI actually had the crazy shaped Gauntlet game as a kid. Managed to get to the final boss once but never with the full password.
- dimator 5y agoI remember this! It was a black cart, and it stood out like a sore thumb.
- incanus77 5y agoI had it too (same shape) and it was definitely the hardest game, though I did beat it once with the wizard. While SMB 3, Zelda 2, and the Castlevanias were my favorites and clearly in another league, Gauntlet was outstanding to me at the time, especially the music.
- runevault 5y agoYeah Gauntlet holds a special place in my heart, which got me to buy the... remake? that came out on PC a few years ago. I respect a game that is savage and willing to stick to that. Though a fair bit of how insane it was may be tied to the arcade roots where they wanted you to keep feeding in quarters.
- ArtWomb 5y agoTY so much for reminding me to play Tengen Super Sprint! Was searching for the next NES racing game to conquer after racking up some ridiculous personal highs in R.C. Pro AM. Just endless fun ;)
- glhaynes 5y agoLove those kinds of games. Don’t miss [Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's] Super Off Road and its spiritual sequel (which I only just found out about the other day!), Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat.
- ilamont 5y agoWow, amazing research. I didn't even know I lived through a golden age of arcade games or home consoles (not sure which the author was referring to). I was confused by "Klax", thinking it was a pirate version of old Colecovision platformer Zaxxon but it was actually quite different. I didn't experience NES until 1988. Up to that point (<5 years after early home consoles like 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision had petered out) people of my age cohort had hoped that the pre-Windows PC platforms like the Atari 800, Apple IIe, or the first Macintosh would provide good gaming experiences but we were mostly disappointed. There were a few bright spots like Dark Castle and Choplifter, but the chasm between those experiences and what you could find in the arcades were significant. The NES was a huge development.
- valiant-comma 5y agoWow, Choplifter takes me back. There was also the excellent Rescue Raiders. Spy vs. Spy on the Apple II was pretty good for multi-player fun (using one computer and keyboard), as well.
- the_af 5y agoI owned a pirated version of C64 Spy vs Spy (don't judge me: nobody owned legit versions of any C64 games in my country) and I never figured out what you were supposed to do. I understood it was about setting traps for the other spy, but what the overall goal was eluded me. And I didn't even know it was based on some obscure comic or cartoon.
- micheljansen 5y agoKlax was actually a very good game. I spent many hours on it as a kid, as it came on a dodgy 60-in-1 Gameboy cartridge someone brought me from Asia.
- tom_ 5y agoYeah. Klax was great. I spent a lot of time playing it on the BBC Micro as a boy - possibly one of the last games released for the system. My high score was in the millions. I was surprised to later find out just how many other end-of-life platforms it was ported to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klax_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klax_(video_game) - who even signed off on all of this nonsense?! In particular, I have no idea why they bothered with the Atari 2600 version... how much did they make from that? Though I'm glad they did, because it's actually surprisingly good. (The ZX Spectrum version is decent too! You'd think it'd struggle, what with all those colours, but it's well done.)
- JohnHaugeland 5y agoTengen pirate tetris, sadly, was the good implementation back in the day
- nazgulsenpai 5y agoMy favorite unlicensed are then Wisdom Tree games. I have the bright blue Bible Adventures cartridge in my collection. It sticks out so badly and is such a terrible, terrible game... That it is one of my favorite thrift store finds for the console :)
- superdisk 5y agoAnother game they made was Spiritual Warfare-- and surprisingly, it's a fantastic game. It plays just like a sequel to the original Legend of Zelda, and I dare say is superior to it in some regards.
- coopreme 5y agoWhen I was growing up I didn’t have legend of Zelda, I had this game. The trivia where you get the question right and the guy‘s bowtie spins, The pomegranate which functions like a boomerang, getting punished for going into a bar. All of it is awesome.
- jaspax 5y agoWas going to add this myself. It's too bad that the videos linked above only give a minute or so to Spiritual Warfare, because unlike Bible Adventures, Spiritual Warfare was actually good! I played the heck out of that game, knew the location of every fruit, and had pretty much the entire game map committed to memory.
- filmgirlcw 5y agoI was about to bring this up! I got one of these absolutely terrible games in the mid-90s (long after the NES was the hot thing and we had all loved to the SNES or even N64, I can’t remember the year) at the Christian book store when I was with my aunt and my grandmother, and even at that age (10 or 11), I knew it would be both terrible and also terrible in a truly wonderful way. It did not disappoint. I can’t remember which one I had now (it might have been Bible Adventures but it might have been the one that was the Menace Beach clone), except that it exists in my parents basement somewhere along with my other oddities of childhood. IIRC, Wisdom Tree was the first company to bypass the lockout chip, before even Tengen/Atari. I have to think the low market for those games, unlike Tengen which was for sale at Toys R Us like real games, probably prevented them for being caught up in some of the legal stuff.
- funks_ 5y agoFun fact: Atari and Tengen are both named after terms from the game of Go, the former describing a group of stones that can be captured [1], the latter the center point of the board [2]. [1]: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Atari https://senseis.xmp.net/?Atari [2]: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Tengen https://senseis.xmp.net/?Tengen
- robador 5y agoI've been playing go for 25 years and never made the connection. Mind blown.
- jhbadger 5y agoAnd don't forget Sente Technologies, an arcade game company in the 1980s founded by ex-Atari employees. Sente is also a term from Go -- meaning to be in the strategic position where your opponent will have to respond to your attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sente_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sente_Technologies
- abeisgreat 5y agoA lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8&t=1s).
- franknine 5y agoThere's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.
- lupire 5y agoHacked not abused. Nintendo abused the copyright system to lock out cartridges.
- zinekeller 5y agoNope, while Nintendo definitely abused copyright law doesn't mean Atari/Tengen is in the clear. They specifically requested the lockout code fron the US Copyright Office under the pretense that they'll be suing Nintendo.
- etrevino 5y agoMy parents got me the Tengen version of Tetris back in the day. They didn't know the difference, of course, and neither did I. What I remember is that it looked different from my friends' version and it had two player. Pretty neat stuff. I don't know where all of my games went, unfortunately.
- mackman 5y agoYeah this finally clears up why I have memories of a completely different NES Tetris game than I could find any reference to online. I thought this was one of those Mandela effect situations.
- Kwpolska 5y agoThe games Nintendo didn't want you to play? Tengen didn't want to subject themselves to Nintendo's rules and quality control, and decided instead to work around Nintendo's lockout chip. Nintendo isn't really at fault here.
- brundolf 5y ago> Modern consoles maintain their lockout using cryptography. But in the 1980’s, that would get your console classified as a munition Hahah I didn't think about that
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoModern consoles need to be connected to the internet to work. I remember that with the PS2 they only had to hack it once and it could run pirated games forever.
- judge2020 5y agoNow a lot of games have enough internet features (including things like leaderboards or hybrid features, eg Luigi’s Balloon World in Super Mario Odyssey) that often exploits require you stick to a certain OS version, locking you out of those features, regardless of if it’s a pirated copy or not.
- asdff 5y agoNot the Nintendo Switch at least.
- brianwawok 5y agoNew games come with new firmware that is mandatory. Firmware installs off game card. Firmware burns e-fuses to prevent firmware rollback.
- quora 5y agoBurning an e-fuse can be bypassed with a softmodded switch.
- AussieWog93 5y agoIs that any Switch you can do this with, or just the old Switches with the Tegra vulnerability?
- wodenokoto 5y agoI don’t understand the security chip. So it expects a series of numbers. If you record those numbers, you are violating Nintendos copyright. But asking for them from the copyright office to use in court and then productionize them is okay?
- Arainach 5y agoNo, taking the code from the copyright office wasn't OK, but by the time the court cases were making progress the NES didn't really matter any more and they settled outside of court. Also, recording the numbers doesn't necessarily work. The chip is essentially an algorithm. I haven't dug through the source to understand the algorithm, but imagine a basic scenario where the algorithm is "challenge * 3" If the challenge is "1 2 3" and you record a response of "3 6 9", that response won't work if the next challenge is "2 4 6". If you actually dig into the chip and copy their algorithm, that can be copyright infringement (yes there's clean room reverse engineering, but if the logic is convoluted enough that can be rather difficult and take time)
- jrockway 5y agoClean room reverse engineering is for the case where you want to translate source code to source code and prove that you didn't just copy and paste it. (It's pretty easy for two people to generate the exact same bytes of source code for any given algorithm. The documentation around clean room reverse engineering is to prove that you independently came up with the same thing. The code is copyrightable, the idea isn't.) If you open up some chip and look at it under the microscope and translate the transistors you see into C code, that's not copyright infringement. (But it might be patented. Patents are super weird in that if you come up with an idea completely independently of someone else, and the other person patents it, you're not allowed to use the idea!)
- tedunangst 5y agoThe source, since I was curious. https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/ https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/
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- bullen 5y agoThe whole thing reads like a tragic waste to me. Too bad you couldn't code assembly on a C64/Amiga out of the box properly either. Now with the Raspberry 4 we finally after 40 years of corporate shenanigans have something where kids could make their own games and instead they are playing mobile games. I'm making an open 3D action MMO engine to sort this out. If your computer does not have a keyboard/mouse it's useless for eternity.
- the_af 5y agoEven before the Raspberry, with the rise of open source programming languages and libraries (or even commercial toolkits that are cheap), there was the possibility to make some pretty complex games! And indeed, some people made use of them. But for most people, it's easier to play games than to create them, just as for most people it's easier to read books than to write them. But tool-wise, we've been living in paradise for a long time now. Whether we take advantage of that is up to us.
- bullen 5y agoTrue, but the energy consumption is key: Raspberry 4 draws 1/3 of a C64 at 1000x perf, at 2Gflops/W not even the M1 (at 2.5Gflops/w) chip is hurting that stat with 5nm vs. 28nm for the Raspberry. Tools are peaking and linux with TWM from the 1987 is winning! ;) For more depth on my reasoning: http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html http://move.rupy.se/file/park_engine.html
- the_af 5y agoWhy does energy consumption matter? In any case, I was able to start programming my first games using a pirated copy of GW Basic on a PC XT. That's all you really needed. Then I think around the 286 or 386 PC clones I discovered open source libraries like Allegro (a competitor of today's SDL), and it wasn't even pirated anymore! Really, all you need to program games.
- bullen 5y ago
- roastedpeacock 5y agoAnyone care to comment how hard it would have been for a third-party to reverse engineer the 10NES chip at the time rather then perform the 'easy' way and obtain the source code under questionable circumstances from the copyright office?
- richard_todd 5y agoWe liked Tengen Tetris so much we "bought" it from Blockbuster by telling them we lost it and paying the fee. We couldn't find it to buy any other way, and now I know why! If they are rare and expensive now I guess that was a good move. I should call my parents and ask if they still have it.
- BizarroLand 5y agoDid a quick search and it seems unverified copies of Tengen Tetris in their custome case without the box or inserts are going between $55-$120 right now.
- lizknope 5y agoI was a big sports fan in the late 1980's and RBI Baseball had the actual Major League Baseball names and stats along with a big instruction book showing even more stats including speed. I still play it a few times a year and it's still a lot of fun. As the article said the Afterburner port was pretty good. The Gauntlet II port was far superior to the Gauntlet I version. The Gauntlet II game also supported the NES Satellite / Four Score attachments so you could have 4 players just like the arcade version.
- lupire 5y agoThe custom chip technique is the same technique tom7 used to create an SNES emulator in an NES cartridge.
- pafje 5y agoLink for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0