11 ms·

Games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen (2022)

193 points by RyanShook 3y ago

Levitz 3y ago
One of the few times in which I see Tengen brought up without painting them as saints while picturing Nintendo as some evil monster, so kudos for that really. Not that that excuses any of the stuff Nintendo has done through the ages though, of course.
tmtvl 3y ago
So first they went with atari, then with tengen, now I wonder if there's a compony called mokuhazushi. For those who don't know, those are Go terms.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  So they might have been using their name as a psychological attack, implying they were outmaneuvering Nintendo? That's pretty cool :)
- Jeema101 3y ago
  There was also Sente (another Go term) which was used as the name of another company founded by Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari). I think he was an avid Go player.
MPSimmons 3y ago
>So instead, Nintendo developed a small microcontroller, which implements a program of sending random numbers back and forth. According to wikipedia[1], I think the author means the CiC chip sent a pseudorandom a random code, but otherwise, great write-up. Amazing that Micro Machines essentially used voltage fault injection to get past the chip. I had no idea. Very cool! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)
- mattl 3y ago
  Micro Machines, made by Codemasters who also made the Game Genie and the Aladdin Deck Enhancer. They made a few other standalone NES games, but the Aladdin Deck Enhancer is very cool and quite affordable to pick up still.
  - jonwest 3y ago
    This was a cool rabbit hole to dive down—thanks for the introduction to the Aladdin Deck Enhancer!
    - mattl 3y ago
      I grew up playing the Dizzy games on my Amstrad CPC so playing them on the NES was a natural next step.
speeder 3y ago
Heh, I always wondered who was the "Tengen" I saw in Paperboy. Also Paperboy was an absolute blast of a game, and hilarious. Quite hard though.
ben0x539 3y ago
Nice writeup! What a fun genre of crime! Aside: I understand the tradition of affixing the title of the submission with the date the submitted article was published, but I really thought I was gonna learn about a 2022 game here. :(
Agingcoder 3y ago
Incredible piece, very pleasant to read. I really like the technical vs business back and forth. I wonder how understandable it is for people with no understanding of nes internals though.
- lnsru 3y ago
  As electrical engineer doing digital designs I have hard time understanding things without knowing NES internals. Though I have idea what is being meant behind the rows. And probably I could implement them too.
livrem 3y ago
> The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980's did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?
- grumast 3y ago
  I think a large part of the problem was the cost of discoverability. On modern PC and mobile, with the availability of free games, it costs nothing but time to wade through piles of bad games. Even on the C64, piracy was prevalent enough that it was easy to obtain and try a large number of games. Atari 2600 games required purchasing cartridges and therefore an outlay of money. Without the internet, it was difficult to get reviews or feedback on the quality of a game without knowing someone that actually purchased it. Added to this, most of the games sold at full price, regardless of the quality. It doesn't take the purchase of too many full price games that were really bad before one gets very hesitant to lay out cash for a new game.
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    But review magazines, and word of mouth, would have helped identify the good games?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      review magazines were not universally available. a proper bookstore with a large enough selection of magazines was at least 45 minutes away from me during this time when i was too young to drive. word of mouth has a broadcast radius that is pretty limited as well. hell, i remember the first time i went to a mall with a computer store that actually had magazines dedicated to games. it's also something different from now where you might be into the games/computers, but your parents very well might have held the idea that you were rotting your brain with that stuff. it's probably pretty hard to imagine compared to what is available today. the 80s and early 90s were pretty much the dark ages if not stone age compared to today.
naikrovek 3y ago
my cousin had several Tengen carts when we were kids. He knew then that they would be valuable in the future, and he made us be very careful with them and wouldn't let us near them unless he was observing. we were 12-13, something like that. he was mature, even then.
- BizarroLand 3y ago
  I feel pretty stupid for not purchasing all of the tengen tetris carts I've come across over the last 3 years. They've all been in the $5 range and are selling for $80-$120 online. That's crazy to me.
phelm 3y ago
>How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it. Brilliant
Waterluvian 3y ago
> Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip Wait, did the copyright office actually hold on to source code? Or is it that a court made Nintendo share it? I’m trying to wrap my head around the effort required to catalog all source code for copyright.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Oh yeah, back in the day you could log your source code with the copyright office for copyright (technically you still can). The process is falling out of favor because the United States does not have a copyright regime where first filer is awarded the copyright, and creators are assumed to have copyright from the moment of creation. So if push comes to shove it is just easier to keep track of your own source code in your own repository and, should a court case ever come up, use your own documentation to prove the date of creation. ... Besides, in the modern era, things move so quickly and code churns so rapidly that, practically speaking, most source code is protected by trade secret and speed of development, not copyright. Once you do something clever and it's publicly visible, your competitors can probably just reverse engineer it without seeing your source code... You keep the edge by having moved on to the next clever thing already while they're still trying to implement the last clever thing you did.
- joveian 3y ago
  The amount of money you can get if someone violates the copyright is much more limited if you don't register. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register
cableshaft 3y ago
Was always a big fan of the Tengen games R.B.I. Baseball and Toobin' especially, played a ton of them as a kid. When I see them nowadays I buy any Tengen games I don't have, since it's a relatively small set of games. I don't have a full set yet but I'm getting kind of close now. Still don't have Tetris though which is the rarest one.
Kwpolska 3y ago
> One interesting thing about the RAMBO-1 is that it includes the Rabbit chip on-die. As far as I know, Nintendo never combined the mapper and lockout chip into a single chip. Nintendo's lockout chips were region-specific. Mappers weren't. It makes sense to keep them separate to make manufacturing easier.
TrackerFF 3y ago
Yeah, about that... I grew up in Scandinavia, and Europe was usually the last in line to get new games. Sometimes we didn't get Nintendo releases at all. For example, Super Mario RPG didn't get released here. When I first tried it out in 1999, through some emulator - and it was awesome! It was years later, I learned, that Nintendo simply didn't release games if they didn't believe that they'd "make it" in Europe, if they didn't make it win USA first.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  From a computing perspective, this kind of makes sense. Japan uses NTSC and 60 hertz electricity, while Europe uses PAL and 50 hertz. Any game they release in Europe would have to be somewhat "ported" to run on the different timings without it causing weird bugs. If it barely sold in the US, it might have been "too Japanese to make sense to non-Japanese people" and they just suspended the European launch.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Japan has 60Hz tv, but their electrity runs on a split grid, eastern Japan runs on 50Hz and western Japan runs on 60Hz.
    - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
      That I didn't know, thank you! That sounds like it could be messy though, I'd hate to move across the country and have to replace all my electronics lol
      - toast0 3y ago
        I beleive service voltage is unified at ~ 100V. Most electronics would be fine, as most electronics have a conversion to DC somewhere and that's unlikely to fail with a 20% difference in frequency. AC driven motors might not like to be moved, but might be OK given the domestic reality (unintended protectionism for stand mixers!). Line frequency clocks probably aren't sold in Japan or need jumpers/switches or would need to be replaced when crossing the frequency border.
babelthuap 3y ago
[dead]
DavidSJ 3y ago
Tengen, like the word atari, is a term used in Go. It means “origin of heaven” or “center of the universe”.
whoopdedo 3y ago
The other amusing tale that came out of Nintendo licensing is that of Ultra Games. It was a pseudonym of Konami so they could exceed the five titles per year cap that Nintendo enforced. As far as I know Nintendo never tried to challenge this legal subterfuge.
- ender341341 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo actively supported it, it let them say "see even Konami doesn't get special treatment and can only release 5 games/year" while also getting more high quality games from Konami.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    Konami wasn't a big at this time.
asylteltine 3y ago
Nintendo hates their customers and they hate you. Stop buying their games.
- mattl 3y ago
  Why do you think they hate their customers?
  - asylteltine 3y ago
    They won’t even let people host tournaments
    - mattl 3y ago
      They did some guidelines on that recently. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433 https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/... But yeah, Nintendo is very concerned about diluting their brand and their trademarks, as well as keeping things family friendly.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Sorry but Nintendo is one of the only big names who still has release standards and doesn't try to nickel and dime me to death. Their two big hits this year -- Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Bros. Wonder -- were both shipped with all of their features on day one and have only experienced bug patches since release. The only other players left in the space that respect the player are indie studios, and they have the update treadmill and eventual delivery problems. Nobody releases games like they used to be released. It used to mean something to buy a game, but today, I'm better off waiting literally years to buy a game, because for a lot of them that's how long it takes before they deliver, or are good enough to buy. I'll totally get in line and criticize their business practices, but their release practices are still some of the best out there and we could all learn something from the attention to quality paid to games back when you only had one shot to impress people. Games get released way too early now, and players are expected to put up with churn. People will not remember Minecraft and Terraria the way we remember Super Metroid. EDIT: I was mid-edit to add more context but HN died momentarily and lost my text. I'm angry that in 2023, browsers still have not found ways to prevent this. I will start composing in Vim.
dang 3y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31061154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31061154 - April 2022 (104 comments)

193 points by RyanShook 3y ago

One of the few times in which I see Tengen brought up without painting them as saints while picturing Nintendo as some evil monster, so kudos for that really. Not that that excuses any of the stuff Nintendo has done through the ages though, of course.

tmtvl 3y ago

So first they went with atari, then with tengen, now I wonder if there's a compony called mokuhazushi. For those who don't know, those are Go terms.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
So they might have been using their name as a psychological attack, implying they were outmaneuvering Nintendo? That's pretty cool :)
Jeema101 3y ago
There was also Sente (another Go term) which was used as the name of another company founded by Nolan Bushnell (the founder of Atari). I think he was an avid Go player.

MPSimmons 3y ago

>So instead, Nintendo developed a small microcontroller, which implements a program of sending random numbers back and forth. According to wikipedia[1], I think the author means the CiC chip sent a pseudorandom a random code, but otherwise, great write-up. Amazing that Micro Machines essentially used voltage fault injection to get past the chip. I had no idea. Very cool! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

mattl 3y ago
Micro Machines, made by Codemasters who also made the Game Genie and the Aladdin Deck Enhancer. They made a few other standalone NES games, but the Aladdin Deck Enhancer is very cool and quite affordable to pick up still.
- jonwest 3y ago
  This was a cool rabbit hole to dive down—thanks for the introduction to the Aladdin Deck Enhancer!
  - mattl 3y ago
    I grew up playing the Dizzy games on my Amstrad CPC so playing them on the NES was a natural next step.

speeder 3y ago

Heh, I always wondered who was the "Tengen" I saw in Paperboy. Also Paperboy was an absolute blast of a game, and hilarious. Quite hard though.

ben0x539 3y ago

Nice writeup! What a fun genre of crime! Aside: I understand the tradition of affixing the title of the submission with the date the submitted article was published, but I really thought I was gonna learn about a 2022 game here. :(

Agingcoder 3y ago

Incredible piece, very pleasant to read. I really like the technical vs business back and forth. I wonder how understandable it is for people with no understanding of nes internals though.

lnsru 3y ago
As electrical engineer doing digital designs I have hard time understanding things without knowing NES internals. Though I have idea what is being meant behind the rows. And probably I could implement them too.

livrem 3y ago

> The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980's did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?

grumast 3y ago
I think a large part of the problem was the cost of discoverability. On modern PC and mobile, with the availability of free games, it costs nothing but time to wade through piles of bad games. Even on the C64, piracy was prevalent enough that it was easy to obtain and try a large number of games. Atari 2600 games required purchasing cartridges and therefore an outlay of money. Without the internet, it was difficult to get reviews or feedback on the quality of a game without knowing someone that actually purchased it. Added to this, most of the games sold at full price, regardless of the quality. It doesn't take the purchase of too many full price games that were really bad before one gets very hesitant to lay out cash for a new game.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  But review magazines, and word of mouth, would have helped identify the good games?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    review magazines were not universally available. a proper bookstore with a large enough selection of magazines was at least 45 minutes away from me during this time when i was too young to drive. word of mouth has a broadcast radius that is pretty limited as well. hell, i remember the first time i went to a mall with a computer store that actually had magazines dedicated to games. it's also something different from now where you might be into the games/computers, but your parents very well might have held the idea that you were rotting your brain with that stuff. it's probably pretty hard to imagine compared to what is available today. the 80s and early 90s were pretty much the dark ages if not stone age compared to today.

naikrovek 3y ago

my cousin had several Tengen carts when we were kids. He knew then that they would be valuable in the future, and he made us be very careful with them and wouldn't let us near them unless he was observing. we were 12-13, something like that. he was mature, even then.

BizarroLand 3y ago
I feel pretty stupid for not purchasing all of the tengen tetris carts I've come across over the last 3 years. They've all been in the $5 range and are selling for $80-$120 online. That's crazy to me.

phelm 3y ago

>How did they do it? As it turns out, crime. Unable to reverse engineer the chip, Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip, claiming it was necessary for a lawsuit. With the code in hand, Tengen could make their own clone with ease. And Tengen was going to sue Nintendo for antitrust violations, so they probably figured they could get away with it. Brilliant

Waterluvian 3y ago

> Tengen convinced the United States Copyright Office to hand over the source code of the lockout chip Wait, did the copyright office actually hold on to source code? Or is it that a court made Nintendo share it? I’m trying to wrap my head around the effort required to catalog all source code for copyright.

shadowgovt 3y ago
Oh yeah, back in the day you could log your source code with the copyright office for copyright (technically you still can). The process is falling out of favor because the United States does not have a copyright regime where first filer is awarded the copyright, and creators are assumed to have copyright from the moment of creation. So if push comes to shove it is just easier to keep track of your own source code in your own repository and, should a court case ever come up, use your own documentation to prove the date of creation. ... Besides, in the modern era, things move so quickly and code churns so rapidly that, practically speaking, most source code is protected by trade secret and speed of development, not copyright. Once you do something clever and it's publicly visible, your competitors can probably just reverse engineer it without seeing your source code... You keep the edge by having moved on to the next clever thing already while they're still trying to implement the last clever thing you did.
joveian 3y ago
The amount of money you can get if someone violates the copyright is much more limited if you don't register. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#register

cableshaft 3y ago

Was always a big fan of the Tengen games R.B.I. Baseball and Toobin' especially, played a ton of them as a kid. When I see them nowadays I buy any Tengen games I don't have, since it's a relatively small set of games. I don't have a full set yet but I'm getting kind of close now. Still don't have Tetris though which is the rarest one.

Kwpolska 3y ago

> One interesting thing about the RAMBO-1 is that it includes the Rabbit chip on-die. As far as I know, Nintendo never combined the mapper and lockout chip into a single chip. Nintendo's lockout chips were region-specific. Mappers weren't. It makes sense to keep them separate to make manufacturing easier.

TrackerFF 3y ago

Yeah, about that... I grew up in Scandinavia, and Europe was usually the last in line to get new games. Sometimes we didn't get Nintendo releases at all. For example, Super Mario RPG didn't get released here. When I first tried it out in 1999, through some emulator - and it was awesome! It was years later, I learned, that Nintendo simply didn't release games if they didn't believe that they'd "make it" in Europe, if they didn't make it win USA first.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
From a computing perspective, this kind of makes sense. Japan uses NTSC and 60 hertz electricity, while Europe uses PAL and 50 hertz. Any game they release in Europe would have to be somewhat "ported" to run on the different timings without it causing weird bugs. If it barely sold in the US, it might have been "too Japanese to make sense to non-Japanese people" and they just suspended the European launch.
- toast0 3y ago
  Japan has 60Hz tv, but their electrity runs on a split grid, eastern Japan runs on 50Hz and western Japan runs on 60Hz.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    That I didn't know, thank you! That sounds like it could be messy though, I'd hate to move across the country and have to replace all my electronics lol
    - toast0 3y ago
      I beleive service voltage is unified at ~ 100V. Most electronics would be fine, as most electronics have a conversion to DC somewhere and that's unlikely to fail with a 20% difference in frequency. AC driven motors might not like to be moved, but might be OK given the domestic reality (unintended protectionism for stand mixers!). Line frequency clocks probably aren't sold in Japan or need jumpers/switches or would need to be replaced when crossing the frequency border.

babelthuap 3y ago

[dead]

DavidSJ 3y ago

Tengen, like the word atari, is a term used in Go. It means “origin of heaven” or “center of the universe”.

whoopdedo 3y ago

The other amusing tale that came out of Nintendo licensing is that of Ultra Games. It was a pseudonym of Konami so they could exceed the five titles per year cap that Nintendo enforced. As far as I know Nintendo never tried to challenge this legal subterfuge.

ender341341 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo actively supported it, it let them say "see even Konami doesn't get special treatment and can only release 5 games/year" while also getting more high quality games from Konami.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Konami wasn't a big at this time.

asylteltine 3y ago

Nintendo hates their customers and they hate you. Stop buying their games.

mattl 3y ago
Why do you think they hate their customers?
- asylteltine 3y ago
  They won’t even let people host tournaments
  - mattl 3y ago
    They did some guidelines on that recently. https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63433 https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/... But yeah, Nintendo is very concerned about diluting their brand and their trademarks, as well as keeping things family friendly.
zlg_codes 3y ago
Sorry but Nintendo is one of the only big names who still has release standards and doesn't try to nickel and dime me to death. Their two big hits this year -- Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Mario Bros. Wonder -- were both shipped with all of their features on day one and have only experienced bug patches since release. The only other players left in the space that respect the player are indie studios, and they have the update treadmill and eventual delivery problems. Nobody releases games like they used to be released. It used to mean something to buy a game, but today, I'm better off waiting literally years to buy a game, because for a lot of them that's how long it takes before they deliver, or are good enough to buy. I'll totally get in line and criticize their business practices, but their release practices are still some of the best out there and we could all learn something from the attention to quality paid to games back when you only had one shot to impress people. Games get released way too early now, and players are expected to put up with churn. People will not remember Minecraft and Terraria the way we remember Super Metroid. EDIT: I was mid-edit to add more context but HN died momentarily and lost my text. I'm angry that in 2023, browsers still have not found ways to prevent this. I will start composing in Vim.

dang 3y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31061154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31061154 - April 2022 (104 comments)