Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell) | Hacker News Reader

Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)

filfre.net

138 pointsdanso7 comments

Spent the last couple weeks binging on the archives for this blog. It was a fantastic read. The author does a great job of researching primary and secondary sources, and has a real talent for clear writing that digs into the details of people, games, and technologies. Totally recommended.

Seconded! Jimmy Maher is one of the writers that I'm extremely happy to support with Patreon's "blind" model, where the author gets paid $X for publishing an item regardless of its content.

I don't read everything he writes (recently there was a series about WWI fighter aces that I didn't have the patience for)... Yet I feel it's absolutely proper to pay for anything he chooses to publish. That's the only way an author can have the freedom to pick his topics without having to think about its short-term commercial viability in terms of clicks/shares/donations.

Thanks for suggesting patreon! Used it for the first time with him.

If you make it through the ~7000 words, there's a fascinating footnote at the bottom which speculates that Phillips lawsuit against Nintendo explains why Legend of Zelda was licensed for Phillips CD-i console. And possibly that the Nintendo settlement meant that Nintendo couldn't make a CD-based product, which led to Sony creating the PlayStation.

The nintendo settlement theory makes sense, but I wonder, shouldn't SEGA also have been sued by Phillips for the Mega Drive/Genesis? The Mega CD[0] came out in '91.

[0] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Mega_CD

The title here omits the name of the series this was published in "A time of endings".

The article is really about the death and re-birth of Activision. It covers the role the Baer patent played in this, rather beautifully.

I was really impressed by this great long read, will have to go back and read the rest of these articles. We so often focus on success, it's interesting to read detailed accounts of how things fail.

(It's "Philips", BTW, not "Phillips".)

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