12 ms·

How Nintendo bled Atari games to death

211 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

aa-jv 2y ago
The only thing that matters in all of this is the fact that there are still new things being developed for old computers. Like, delightful and whimsical things. Just look at this years 10LINEBASIC competition entries, for example, to see why information just wants to be free. PAC10Liner says wa'!?!? https://bunsen.itch.io/pac-10liner-atari-8-bit-by-vitoco https://bunsen.itch.io/pac-10liner-atari-8-bit-by-vitoco Oh, lest we forget, some space indvader'ing: https://bunsen.itch.io/wave-invaders-sinclair-zx-spectrum-by-lupoman https://bunsen.itch.io/wave-invaders-sinclair-zx-spectrum-by... These symbols are very, very fairly used these days. (NB; - these aren't the winners, just my favourites, go check out the rest here: https://homeputerium.de/ https://homeputerium.de/)
xattt 2y ago
There’s an interesting shift in perspective that’s been happening around Nintendo over the last decade. While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese company with quirky qualities, it’s becoming more and more apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun. Things I’ve purchased from them in the last little while are probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.
- ericzawo 2y ago
  Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.
  - decae 2y ago
    I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies. Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      Every time Nintendo tries to set foot in the competitive scene or permit tournaments, this happens. https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_of_sexual_and_nonsexual_allegations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_o... I don't blame them for trying to keep out. It would seem that professional Smash players are not to be assumed as stable people.
    - mrandish 2y ago
      Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored. This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand. This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
      - bzzzt 2y ago
        Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is. 15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works. The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better. There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers. Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They didn’t have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a pro controller. At least for that one product there was a hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own? Please help me understand
  - xattt 2y ago
    Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc. In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu). Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright). Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app? There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      I don't know, I actually do somewhat get it. If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was not okay. Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers. Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now that the Welcome Tour be free; even though they would not be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards. On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious about their intellectual property in ways other companies do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes four times as much money per year from mobile gaming than Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty of fallback cash from the rest of their respective companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option.
- numpad0 2y ago
  You don't know what "MBA-type" is.
  - xattt 2y ago
    Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
    - skyyler 2y ago
      If they were making decisions based on maxing out profits, there would be a Mario Wonder Battle Pass and the gacha mechanics in the new zelda would include microtransactions. Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the gamers really upset.
      - egypturnash 2y ago
        According to online calculators, $20 in 1980 dollars is worth about $80 today. $77.something to be precise, close enough. I chose 1980 because that's when Space Invaders came out for the VCS. And $20 was, IIRC, the going rate for the average VCS cartridge.
        skyyler 2y ago
        For a more direct comparison, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! came out in 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube, at an MSRP of $49.99. That is $86 in today money.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      The guys you don't mess with.
- seventhtiger 2y ago
  Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on. A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-their-first-arrest-over-video-game-spoilers https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down. For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry? Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies. Don’t even get me started on Toyota.
- wan23 2y ago
  If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.
- jjice 2y ago
  As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone. They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too. I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library. The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    > They've had the worst online stores for a while now. Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
    - jjice 2y ago
      Absolutely - I only buy physical for Nintendo. Seems like they’re going to be attempting to make a move away from that from what I’ve heard. Something about physical boxes just having download codes instead of a cart for some Switch 2 games?
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete with any of its subsequent consoles after the VCS (although it did have some success with its PCs). The consoles were all flawed in some way. They were underpowered, didn't offer much over the previous iteration, or simply didn't have a strong enough library of games to compete. Atari was famously slow to realize that maybe people want more out of a game console than home ports of decade-old arcade games. On top of that, their original games that weren't home ports were mostly lackluster or were just outside of what gamers of the time were demanding. Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games, publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but Tengen was going strong.
- duxup 2y ago
  I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise. Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality. It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
    - 2y ago
throw_m239339 2y ago
> Except, the game designers were paid a flat salary, not royalties, unlike the rock stars in Warner’s stable. In late 1979, four defecting Atari designers and one music industry executive disrupted the video game console business model by aligning it with the recording industry’s: Hardware would be just hardware, and content would now be supplied by third-party content providers. Activision was formed, with a little business and legal help from the Sistine Chapel of Silicon Valley law firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I wasn't aware of that story, a lot of irony in there...
- lordfrito 2y ago
  Atari tried to sue Activision out of existence, only to have the courts affirm Activision's right to make games for the 2600. Prior to this, only OEMs made games for their consoles. That court case opened the floodgates for 3rd party game companies to exist. Arguably one of the most important lawsuits in the history of gaming.
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Obligatory: and the rest was history.
- johnvanommen 2y ago
  LED light bulbs are a multi-billion dollar global industry The dude who invented LED light bulbs got a bonus of something like $50 for his invention He later left his employer to go work for Cree, who was making LED lightbulbs. His former employer sued him.
CSMastermind 2y ago
Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they managed to have the success they did.
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  I took a class from an ex-executive. It was trajecially worse. Almost every morning for them was a jaw dropping knuckle dragging experience. This is the Harvard text book example of "let the adults handle it."
  - lordfrito 2y ago
    I'm endlessly fascinated by the stories that come out about the execs dealings during that period. How they were offered and passed on being the American distributor for the NES (all because the exec saw Donkey Kong running on a Coleco Adam at CES). [0] And how they funded but f'ed up the deal with the Amiga chipset (it should have been theirs but Commodore stole it at the 11'th hour). [1] Or how they were illegally bypassing DRAM price controls in the Tramiel era (the illegal $$$ is the main reason Atari stayed afloat after the disastrous Federated Group purchase). [2] The list goes on and on. I'm under the impression that there's a lot of real dirty stuff that's been swept under the rug, maybe now lost to time, as many of the execs are no longer with us. A lot is documented in the book "Atari: Business if Fun". [3] A shame that the follow up book "Atari: Business is War" will likely never be finished. [4] [0] https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-remember-when-atari-turned-down-nintendo-and-sega https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-remember-wh... [1] https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/ https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/ [2] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-resale-operation-revealed-by-fbi/page/2/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-r... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/0985597402 https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/098... [4] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-business-is-war/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-business...
- lordfrito 2y ago
  Mainly because they were the only game in town back then. At the time they were the fastest growing company in history... So many $$$, for a time everything they touched turned to gold. Being first in a new industry, they made all the mistakes that subsequent companies learned from and avoided. For example, putting a textiles executive in charge, treating developers like assembly line workers, etc. This all laid the seeds for their subsequent implosion... Epic rise, epic fall. I wish someone would make a movie about that story.
EncomLab 2y ago
The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform. The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.
- iteria 2y ago
  $100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces. This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many
  - dtagames 2y ago
    It definitely isn't a lottery ticket. Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.
- boxed 2y ago
  Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches. You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
KHRZ 2y ago
At least they had trials back then. Switch emulators last year simply got intimidated to abandon their projects.
ksymph 2y ago
Not mentioned in the article is Nintendo's strongarming of retailers. The lawsuit wasn't settled until the mid 90s, and Nintendo failed to legally stop cartridge manufacturing until then - but what they did do was threaten to pull the NES from any store that sold unlicensed games. Most stores complied, unsurprisingly.
29athrowaway 2y ago
Hiroshi Yamauchi was highly selective when it came to what games could be released for Nintendo consoles. Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.
- johnvanommen 2y ago
  > Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development. It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari. It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around. Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg. That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure." Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history. Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    They could have just made the game not suck. The original Star Wars arcade game that Atari did was received quite well. Video game franchises based on movies did tend to have this cash grab quality to them though for long afterwards (with some exceptions), even on the NES.
  - flomo 2y ago
    The Atari 2600 had a certain type of "adventure game", which was basically walk-around until you found this blob of pixels (see manual). "Adventure" was famous, and "Superman" (also a Warner movie franchise) did well with this style. Atari "Raiders of the Lost Ark" seemed to be a game that sold very well on name value, but it was hard dexerity, and required reading the manual, and so most people probably didn't make it more than about 5 screens in. That and Atari "Pac-Man" and a few other games, and HEY Atari is just ripping us off!! "E.T." was pretty half-assed, but IMO a big part of it was the entire game design was not all that entertaining to begin with. It was "Superman" with pits.
shadowgovt 2y ago
Nintendo (and Apple, and Microsoft) are the counterpoint story to the story that I think a lot of hackers (especially of the open-source and DIY variety) tell themselves about the way the world works: There are benefits to both open and closed approaches, and people that really prefer each. Nintendo succeeded in contrast to Atari because they clamped their jaws as tightly onto the supply chain as they could. In doing so, they created for their users a minimum quality standard expectation that could be relied upon: if it ran on Nintendo at all, it was a good game. That was the goal. There's value and comfort in predictability and expectation satisfaction. While we shouldn't let the scales tip too far and give the exclusive platforms full control, it's possible for them to tip the other way too... A world where one can't create and protect a Nintendo is a worse world for end-users.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  I'm fine with pretending that a game console focused on kids is not a general purpose computer, but this is unacceptable threat to liberal democracy when applied to PCs. And nothing (yet) is as much of a PC as a smartphone.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    The PinePhone is right there, waiting for more people to use it. I don't think iPhone and Android constitute a threat to liberal democracy; I think they're just more reliable, and PinePhone hasn't taken off because it's actually not okay to have the tool you carry in your pocket to (possibly) make emergency calls be unreliable.
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      Yes, sadly for now I can't just shame normal people for using iOS / Android ( / Xiaomi HyperOS ? ) : there just don't seem to be any good enough alternatives for non-computer geeks. (Dumbphones rather than smartphones are today the ethical option for them I guess, but also a sacrifice that I don't feel comfortable enough to ask of them either.)
ryao 2y ago
Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key? Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States Copyright Office?
- ndiddy 2y ago
  > Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key? The 10NES chip was a bit more complicated than that. Basically the way it worked was that there was a chip in every NES, and another chip in every cartridge. On reset, the chip in the NES randomly picks 1 of 16 bitstreams, and tells the chip in the cartridge which bitstream it chose. Each chip then starts continuously sending the chosen bitstream to the other chip. If the chip in the NES sees a discrepancy between the generated bitstream and the bitstream it received, it will reset the NES. This is the cause of the famous NES "blinking red light". > Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States Copyright Office? If a copyright holder registers their copyright, it amplifies their rights (such as granting them a higher amount of damages in an infringement lawsuit). Registering the copyright for a piece of software involves submitting the first 25 pages and last 25 pages of the source code, or the entire code, whatever's smaller. The 10NES chip used an extremely simple 4-bit microcontroller with only 512 bytes of ROM, so the copyright office has the entire source code.
rvba 2y ago
Quote from the article: > I would deliver my game software code to Nintendo, who would add the secret key to it Did it really work this way on NES? I thought they only used the lockout chip and no signatures, since it would use too much processor power 40 years ago
- nicetryguy 2y ago
  The lockout chip(s) are physical chip(s) on the cart and in the console that communicate directly with each other on the cart pins. The CPU is not involved. It's not a "secret key" in the cryptography sense per se.
bityard 2y ago
For anyone reading the description of the NES's copy protection scheme in this article and thinking, "that doesn't sound right," you would be correct. The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets once per second. As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_ copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game distributors who tried to work around it.
- dfxm12 2y ago
  I always wondered who they learned from. What caused Nintendo to be this thorough, with technical and multiple legal hurdles so early on. Was rom cartridge piracy a big problem for previous cart-based consoles? What were their contemporaries doing to combat piracy?
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    IIRC, it wasn't piracy in the sense of copying games that they were trying to prevent, it was unlicensed studios developing games for the NES. The great video game crash happened and they wanted to control the quality of games released for the system to prevent trash games being shoveled into the market. It was a quality control thing.
    - MattGrommes 2y ago
      Yeah, they were also very strict about the "types" of games that could be released for the NES. No porn games, very adult violence, etc. that might tarnish the reputation of the console.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    "Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft." - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed. Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market. Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures. There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals. If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway. You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you". [0] Japanese domestic market [1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes! [2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple. [3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.
juancn 2y ago
The Atari judge agreed: “When the nature of a work requires intermediate copying to understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work, that nature supports a fair use for intermediate copying,” he wrote. “Thus, reverse engineering object code to discern the unprotectable ideas in a computer program is a fair use.” Huh... that argument seems to apply to training an AI model. You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".
Dwedit 2y ago
Atari Corp and Atari Games were separate companies by the time the NES was released. Atari Corp was responsible for the consoles and computers, while Atari Games did the arcade games. Atari Games used the name "Tengen" for all home releases. Atari Games did both licensed and unlicensed works for the NES. Notably, Tengen Tetris was originally a fully licensed VS arcade game called "VS Tetris" before its unlicensed home release. Tengen didn't have the rights to home versions of Tetris, only arcade versions, and Nintendo did not have the rights to arcade versions. Hence Tengen/Atari Games developing an arcade version of Tetris for Nintendo hardware.
djmips 2y ago
Further to Accolade - briefly mentioned in the article - Allan Miller one of the “Gang of Four,” photo about the start of Activision went on to start Accolade but it was also destroyed by SEGA's legal actions despite winning it's court case. However while that was being decided, SEGA had already been previously granted a months long injuction against the sale of Accolade's legally reverse engineered game cartridges for the Genesis / Mega Drive which cut off the life blood of the scrappy publisher and lead to it's eventual demise even if they were to later win in court.
Lammy 2y ago
> Soon, however, the game market became saturated. Too many players for too small (at a time) a market meant it became impossible for most developers to scale and recoup their costs. I had to re-read this sentence a couple of times. Players is an overloaded term here when we're already thinking about video games, and the other interpretation would mean the opposite (too many customers) of what the author intended (too many sellers). > Three years later, competitor Sega introduced the Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). Both companies had learned from the crash and took steps to prevent third-party developers from releasing unapproved games. This implies that the MD/Genesis shipped with a lockout mechanism, which is not true. TMSS didn't exist until the seventh revision (VA6 board) of the console: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions It also focuses on the Sega vs. Accolade case and fails to mention EA's clean-room reverse-engineering: https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.com/display_article.php?id=773681 https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.c...
mrandish 2y ago
> "In July 2024, a new company called Tengen Games released its first game, “Zed and Zee,” for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ... Tengen and its parent company, Atari Games, had disappeared 30 years ago after being crushed in court by Nintendo for doing exactly the same thing: manufacturing unauthorized cartridges for the NES." The article doesn't address how Tengen is now able to produce unauthorized NES-compatible cartridges. Is Tengen paying Nintendo for a license? Did the patents expire? Did relevant legal precedents change? Another possibility might be that, while Atari's 80s legal actions established that intermediate infringement during reverse engineering could be fair use, Atari itself was precluded from relying on that fair use because its lawyers did naughty things. Maybe "new" Tengen reversed engineered it again from scratch without naughty lawyers? Does anyone know?
- ericzawo 2y ago
  A great history of Tengen is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA
  - mrandish 2y ago
    Sorry, can't watch a video at work. Does the video answer the question I asked?
- erik 2y ago
  The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply. And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
protocolture 2y ago
>The underlying legal sub-questions were particularly complex, and both federal appeals court judges distilled their astute reasonings in clear ways, ultimately ruling that intermediate (temporary) copying of software code in the process of reverse-engineering it is generally permissible as fair use under copyright law. At the heart of their technical legal rulings was economic policy. Seems pertinent to the illegal copying of works before training your LLM tbh.
revskill 2y ago
Is there s human species who do not like games ?
twilo 2y ago
Sony did something very similar to Sega and now they are the “good guys”

211 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

The only thing that matters in all of this is the fact that there are still new things being developed for old computers. Like, delightful and whimsical things. Just look at this years 10LINEBASIC competition entries, for example, to see why information just wants to be free. PAC10Liner says wa'!?!? https://bunsen.itch.io/pac-10liner-atari-8-bit-by-vitoco https://bunsen.itch.io/pac-10liner-atari-8-bit-by-vitoco Oh, lest we forget, some space indvader'ing: https://bunsen.itch.io/wave-invaders-sinclair-zx-spectrum-by-lupoman https://bunsen.itch.io/wave-invaders-sinclair-zx-spectrum-by... These symbols are very, very fairly used these days. (NB; - these aren't the winners, just my favourites, go check out the rest here: https://homeputerium.de/ https://homeputerium.de/)

xattt 2y ago

There’s an interesting shift in perspective that’s been happening around Nintendo over the last decade. While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese company with quirky qualities, it’s becoming more and more apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun. Things I’ve purchased from them in the last little while are probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.

ericzawo 2y ago
Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.
- decae 2y ago
  I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies. Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Every time Nintendo tries to set foot in the competitive scene or permit tournaments, this happens. https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_of_sexual_and_nonsexual_allegations/ https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/hjfv0y/summary_o... I don't blame them for trying to keep out. It would seem that professional Smash players are not to be assumed as stable people.
  - mrandish 2y ago
    Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored. This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand. This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
    - bzzzt 2y ago
      Nintendo isn't changing, the world around it is. 15 years ago there were no youtubers who built a business around pasting a talking head over a video game stream. It seems nobody even asks Nintendo if they are ok with that and now people are angry because the answer turned out to be 'no'. That's not how copyright works. The emulator authors who made millions by accepting donations with the explicit promise of facilitating piracy of the latest Nintendo games still for sale also should have known better. There's a lot of hate for Nintendo right now, but imo it's all on entitled gamers who want stuff that Nintendo created for free. There's no company that can safisfy those demands and stay in business.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers. Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They didn’t have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a pro controller. At least for that one product there was a hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own? Please help me understand
- xattt 2y ago
  Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc. In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu). Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright). Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app? There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    I don't know, I actually do somewhat get it. If there is a product, you pay for the product. People do not respect, or value, things they do not pay for. Steve Jobs had a similar philosophy with refusing to offer free meals at Apple - subsidized meals was okay, free meals was not okay. Having worked in a small business, I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers. Look at how demanding customers are of Nintendo right now that the Welcome Tour be free; even though they would not be demanding it if Nintendo had just not made the Welcome Tour at all. They would be literally happier and less demanding if it had never been made, which is backwards. On that note; Nintendo does have to somewhat be cautious about their intellectual property in ways other companies do not. We like to think of things as Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo; but this is an illusion. Apple makes four times as much money per year from mobile gaming than Nintendo does in entirety. Xbox and PlayStation have plenty of fallback cash from the rest of their respective companies; Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option.
numpad0 2y ago
You don't know what "MBA-type" is.
- xattt 2y ago
  Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
  - skyyler 2y ago
    If they were making decisions based on maxing out profits, there would be a Mario Wonder Battle Pass and the gacha mechanics in the new zelda would include microtransactions. Mario Kart for $80 is not MBA stuff, even if it makes the gamers really upset.
    - egypturnash 2y ago
      According to online calculators, $20 in 1980 dollars is worth about $80 today. $77.something to be precise, close enough. I chose 1980 because that's when Space Invaders came out for the VCS. And $20 was, IIRC, the going rate for the average VCS cartridge.
      - skyyler 2y ago
        For a more direct comparison, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! came out in 2003 on the Nintendo Gamecube, at an MSRP of $49.99. That is $86 in today money.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    The guys you don't mess with.
seventhtiger 2y ago
Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on. A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-their-first-arrest-over-video-game-spoilers https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...
kjkjadksj 2y ago
When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down. For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry? Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies. Don’t even get me started on Toyota.
wan23 2y ago
If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.
jjice 2y ago
As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone. They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too. I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library. The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > They've had the worst online stores for a while now. Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
  - jjice 2y ago
    Absolutely - I only buy physical for Nintendo. Seems like they’re going to be attempting to make a move away from that from what I’ve heard. Something about physical boxes just having download codes instead of a cart for some Switch 2 games?
rightbyte 2y ago
Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete with any of its subsequent consoles after the VCS (although it did have some success with its PCs). The consoles were all flawed in some way. They were underpowered, didn't offer much over the previous iteration, or simply didn't have a strong enough library of games to compete. Atari was famously slow to realize that maybe people want more out of a game console than home ports of decade-old arcade games. On top of that, their original games that weren't home ports were mostly lackluster or were just outside of what gamers of the time were demanding. Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games, publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but Tengen was going strong.
duxup 2y ago
I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise. Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
- toast0 2y ago
  Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality. It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
  - 2y ago

throw_m239339 2y ago

> Except, the game designers were paid a flat salary, not royalties, unlike the rock stars in Warner’s stable. In late 1979, four defecting Atari designers and one music industry executive disrupted the video game console business model by aligning it with the recording industry’s: Hardware would be just hardware, and content would now be supplied by third-party content providers. Activision was formed, with a little business and legal help from the Sistine Chapel of Silicon Valley law firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I wasn't aware of that story, a lot of irony in there...

lordfrito 2y ago
Atari tried to sue Activision out of existence, only to have the courts affirm Activision's right to make games for the 2600. Prior to this, only OEMs made games for their consoles. That court case opened the floodgates for 3rd party game companies to exist. Arguably one of the most important lawsuits in the history of gaming.
ForOldHack 2y ago
Obligatory: and the rest was history.
johnvanommen 2y ago
LED light bulbs are a multi-billion dollar global industry The dude who invented LED light bulbs got a bonus of something like $50 for his invention He later left his employer to go work for Cree, who was making LED lightbulbs. His former employer sued him.

CSMastermind 2y ago

Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they managed to have the success they did.

ForOldHack 2y ago
I took a class from an ex-executive. It was trajecially worse. Almost every morning for them was a jaw dropping knuckle dragging experience. This is the Harvard text book example of "let the adults handle it."
- lordfrito 2y ago
  I'm endlessly fascinated by the stories that come out about the execs dealings during that period. How they were offered and passed on being the American distributor for the NES (all because the exec saw Donkey Kong running on a Coleco Adam at CES). [0] And how they funded but f'ed up the deal with the Amiga chipset (it should have been theirs but Commodore stole it at the 11'th hour). [1] Or how they were illegally bypassing DRAM price controls in the Tramiel era (the illegal $$$ is the main reason Atari stayed afloat after the disastrous Federated Group purchase). [2] The list goes on and on. I'm under the impression that there's a lot of real dirty stuff that's been swept under the rug, maybe now lost to time, as many of the execs are no longer with us. A lot is documented in the book "Atari: Business if Fun". [3] A shame that the follow up book "Atari: Business is War" will likely never be finished. [4] [0] https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-remember-when-atari-turned-down-nintendo-and-sega https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-remember-wh... [1] https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/ https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/ [2] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-resale-operation-revealed-by-fbi/page/2/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-r... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/0985597402 https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/098... [4] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-business-is-war/ https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-business...
lordfrito 2y ago
Mainly because they were the only game in town back then. At the time they were the fastest growing company in history... So many $$$, for a time everything they touched turned to gold. Being first in a new industry, they made all the mistakes that subsequent companies learned from and avoided. For example, putting a textiles executive in charge, treating developers like assembly line workers, etc. This all laid the seeds for their subsequent implosion... Epic rise, epic fall. I wish someone would make a movie about that story.

EncomLab 2y ago

The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform. The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.

iteria 2y ago
$100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces. This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many
- dtagames 2y ago
  It definitely isn't a lottery ticket. Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.
boxed 2y ago
Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches. You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less

KHRZ 2y ago

At least they had trials back then. Switch emulators last year simply got intimidated to abandon their projects.

ksymph 2y ago

Not mentioned in the article is Nintendo's strongarming of retailers. The lawsuit wasn't settled until the mid 90s, and Nintendo failed to legally stop cartridge manufacturing until then - but what they did do was threaten to pull the NES from any store that sold unlicensed games. Most stores complied, unsurprisingly.

29athrowaway 2y ago

Hiroshi Yamauchi was highly selective when it came to what games could be released for Nintendo consoles. Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.

johnvanommen 2y ago
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development. It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari. It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around. Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg. That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure." Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history. Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
- chrisco255 2y ago
  They could have just made the game not suck. The original Star Wars arcade game that Atari did was received quite well. Video game franchises based on movies did tend to have this cash grab quality to them though for long afterwards (with some exceptions), even on the NES.
- flomo 2y ago
  The Atari 2600 had a certain type of "adventure game", which was basically walk-around until you found this blob of pixels (see manual). "Adventure" was famous, and "Superman" (also a Warner movie franchise) did well with this style. Atari "Raiders of the Lost Ark" seemed to be a game that sold very well on name value, but it was hard dexerity, and required reading the manual, and so most people probably didn't make it more than about 5 screens in. That and Atari "Pac-Man" and a few other games, and HEY Atari is just ripping us off!! "E.T." was pretty half-assed, but IMO a big part of it was the entire game design was not all that entertaining to begin with. It was "Superman" with pits.

shadowgovt 2y ago

Nintendo (and Apple, and Microsoft) are the counterpoint story to the story that I think a lot of hackers (especially of the open-source and DIY variety) tell themselves about the way the world works: There are benefits to both open and closed approaches, and people that really prefer each. Nintendo succeeded in contrast to Atari because they clamped their jaws as tightly onto the supply chain as they could. In doing so, they created for their users a minimum quality standard expectation that could be relied upon: if it ran on Nintendo at all, it was a good game. That was the goal. There's value and comfort in predictability and expectation satisfaction. While we shouldn't let the scales tip too far and give the exclusive platforms full control, it's possible for them to tip the other way too... A world where one can't create and protect a Nintendo is a worse world for end-users.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
I'm fine with pretending that a game console focused on kids is not a general purpose computer, but this is unacceptable threat to liberal democracy when applied to PCs. And nothing (yet) is as much of a PC as a smartphone.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  The PinePhone is right there, waiting for more people to use it. I don't think iPhone and Android constitute a threat to liberal democracy; I think they're just more reliable, and PinePhone hasn't taken off because it's actually not okay to have the tool you carry in your pocket to (possibly) make emergency calls be unreliable.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Yes, sadly for now I can't just shame normal people for using iOS / Android ( / Xiaomi HyperOS ? ) : there just don't seem to be any good enough alternatives for non-computer geeks. (Dumbphones rather than smartphones are today the ethical option for them I guess, but also a sacrifice that I don't feel comfortable enough to ask of them either.)

ryao 2y ago

Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key? Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States Copyright Office?

ndiddy 2y ago
> Why did Atari not just use a signal analyzer to get the key? The 10NES chip was a bit more complicated than that. Basically the way it worked was that there was a chip in every NES, and another chip in every cartridge. On reset, the chip in the NES randomly picks 1 of 16 bitstreams, and tells the chip in the cartridge which bitstream it chose. Each chip then starts continuously sending the chosen bitstream to the other chip. If the chip in the NES sees a discrepancy between the generated bitstream and the bitstream it received, it will reset the NES. This is the cause of the famous NES "blinking red light". > Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States Copyright Office? If a copyright holder registers their copyright, it amplifies their rights (such as granting them a higher amount of damages in an infringement lawsuit). Registering the copyright for a piece of software involves submitting the first 25 pages and last 25 pages of the source code, or the entire code, whatever's smaller. The 10NES chip used an extremely simple 4-bit microcontroller with only 512 bytes of ROM, so the copyright office has the entire source code.

rvba 2y ago

Quote from the article: > I would deliver my game software code to Nintendo, who would add the secret key to it Did it really work this way on NES? I thought they only used the lockout chip and no signatures, since it would use too much processor power 40 years ago

nicetryguy 2y ago
The lockout chip(s) are physical chip(s) on the cart and in the console that communicate directly with each other on the cart pins. The CPU is not involved. It's not a "secret key" in the cryptography sense per se.

bityard 2y ago

For anyone reading the description of the NES's copy protection scheme in this article and thinking, "that doesn't sound right," you would be correct. The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets once per second. As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_ copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game distributors who tried to work around it.

dfxm12 2y ago
I always wondered who they learned from. What caused Nintendo to be this thorough, with technical and multiple legal hurdles so early on. Was rom cartridge piracy a big problem for previous cart-based consoles? What were their contemporaries doing to combat piracy?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  IIRC, it wasn't piracy in the sense of copying games that they were trying to prevent, it was unlicensed studios developing games for the NES. The great video game crash happened and they wanted to control the quality of games released for the system to prevent trash games being shoveled into the market. It was a quality control thing.
  - MattGrommes 2y ago
    Yeah, they were also very strict about the "types" of games that could be released for the NES. No porn games, very adult violence, etc. that might tarnish the reputation of the console.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  "Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft." - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed. Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market. Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures. There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals. If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway. You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you". [0] Japanese domestic market [1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes! [2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple. [3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.

juancn 2y ago

The Atari judge agreed: “When the nature of a work requires intermediate copying to understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work, that nature supports a fair use for intermediate copying,” he wrote. “Thus, reverse engineering object code to discern the unprotectable ideas in a computer program is a fair use.” Huh... that argument seems to apply to training an AI model. You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".

Dwedit 2y ago

Atari Corp and Atari Games were separate companies by the time the NES was released. Atari Corp was responsible for the consoles and computers, while Atari Games did the arcade games. Atari Games used the name "Tengen" for all home releases. Atari Games did both licensed and unlicensed works for the NES. Notably, Tengen Tetris was originally a fully licensed VS arcade game called "VS Tetris" before its unlicensed home release. Tengen didn't have the rights to home versions of Tetris, only arcade versions, and Nintendo did not have the rights to arcade versions. Hence Tengen/Atari Games developing an arcade version of Tetris for Nintendo hardware.

djmips 2y ago

Further to Accolade - briefly mentioned in the article - Allan Miller one of the “Gang of Four,” photo about the start of Activision went on to start Accolade but it was also destroyed by SEGA's legal actions despite winning it's court case. However while that was being decided, SEGA had already been previously granted a months long injuction against the sale of Accolade's legally reverse engineered game cartridges for the Genesis / Mega Drive which cut off the life blood of the scrappy publisher and lead to it's eventual demise even if they were to later win in court.

Lammy 2y ago

> Soon, however, the game market became saturated. Too many players for too small (at a time) a market meant it became impossible for most developers to scale and recoup their costs. I had to re-read this sentence a couple of times. Players is an overloaded term here when we're already thinking about video games, and the other interpretation would mean the opposite (too many customers) of what the author intended (too many sellers). > Three years later, competitor Sega introduced the Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). Both companies had learned from the crash and took steps to prevent third-party developers from releasing unapproved games. This implies that the MD/Genesis shipped with a lockout mechanism, which is not true. TMSS didn't exist until the seventh revision (VA6 board) of the console: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions It also focuses on the Sega vs. Accolade case and fails to mention EA's clean-room reverse-engineering: https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.com/display_article.php?id=773681 https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.c...

mrandish 2y ago

> "In July 2024, a new company called Tengen Games released its first game, “Zed and Zee,” for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) ... Tengen and its parent company, Atari Games, had disappeared 30 years ago after being crushed in court by Nintendo for doing exactly the same thing: manufacturing unauthorized cartridges for the NES." The article doesn't address how Tengen is now able to produce unauthorized NES-compatible cartridges. Is Tengen paying Nintendo for a license? Did the patents expire? Did relevant legal precedents change? Another possibility might be that, while Atari's 80s legal actions established that intermediate infringement during reverse engineering could be fair use, Atari itself was precluded from relying on that fair use because its lawyers did naughty things. Maybe "new" Tengen reversed engineered it again from scratch without naughty lawyers? Does anyone know?

ericzawo 2y ago
A great history of Tengen is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA
- mrandish 2y ago
  Sorry, can't watch a video at work. Does the video answer the question I asked?
erik 2y ago
The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply. And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.
deleted 2y ago
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protocolture 2y ago

>The underlying legal sub-questions were particularly complex, and both federal appeals court judges distilled their astute reasonings in clear ways, ultimately ruling that intermediate (temporary) copying of software code in the process of reverse-engineering it is generally permissible as fair use under copyright law. At the heart of their technical legal rulings was economic policy. Seems pertinent to the illegal copying of works before training your LLM tbh.

revskill 2y ago

Is there s human species who do not like games ?

twilo 2y ago

Sony did something very similar to Sega and now they are the “good guys”