Games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen (2022) | Hacker News Reader

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

nicole.express

193 pointsRyanShook111 comments

> 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?

As someone who lived through that era and had an atari 2600 it was really a combo of two things.

#1. The games on the atari were not games that you spent hours playing, they were very simple, space invader, pacman etc, and were not entirely that fun.

#2. Nintendo. Once the NES(1985) came out with mario bros. and duck hunt it was a like a tsunami of incredible game play that gamers had never experienced before besides maybe at the arcade. The games for the NES just kept getting better and better, Zelda, Mario Bros. 3 while the atari was languishing with its older technology and stable of boring games.

Atari fought back in terms of technology with the Jaguar(1993) but once again even with better technology you still need great games, and the jaguar did not have mario, zelda, and a host of other fun games that nintendo(snes had been out for two years now), and also genesis had. By that time the writing was on the wall and Atari was in its death throes.

So the trope of atari having a ton of unlicensed games being the demise of the 2600 platform is not true at all. I would have to say it really boils down to just the stable of quality games that nintendo and later genesis possessed and atari just didn't have access to.

I didn't live through the era but I did watch that "Icons" documentary detailing the crash. They had people from Activision stating that the issue was really that they initially ignored the avalanche of companies coming in and releasing garbage and just brushed it off. What caught them off guard was that all those companies going out of business and dumping their unsold product into the clearance channel for dollars per cartridge meanwhile good developers are still coming out with premium games and trying to sell them at top prices. It was very hard to survive this.

[1]:https://youtu.be/RuHbRPoOEEA?t=783

Rewatching this documentary they also talked about how it took them time to realize that you need to update the hardware and they dragged their feet on this before finally relenting. Looking at what ended up coming out (Atari 5200, 7800, Jaguar) its clear that they suffered the same nonsense that many American companies tend to end up as: A bunch of idiots parachute in from elite business schools who know nothing of the business and know better than the people on the ground. They manage to eventually destroy whatever advantage/good will they had. Why does this happen so much in the US?

I am left wondering if the execs at Atari even played video games?

Hiroshi yamauchi never played videos games, and Nintendo did well under his leadership.

He had the good sense to hire someone who understood fun. Did Atari have someone like Shigeru Miyamoto?

I didn't live in that era but I thought the video game crash which more-or-less killed Atari was before the NES was introduced?

The "video game crash" was a drop in capital, not revenue. Sales of Atari games continued to grow up until the introduction of the NES in 1984. But investors lost faith in the industry because sales didn't meet the wildly overstated forecasts made in 1982.

Atari saw a lot of unsold inventory returned to them and orders cancelled at the end of 1982 because of overproduction. This is what Nintendo was trying to avoid with their licensing requirement. Retailers were promised that they wouldn't have to overbuy game stock. Nintendo introduced artificial scarcity into the gaming business, something they probably already knew from their card game history. If you limit the supply it creates increased demand which keeps prices high.

NES didn't come out until the tail end of 1985 in NYC and 1986 in the rest of the country. Since no new Atari games we're even released by anyone in 1985 (with 2 minor Activision games as the only exception) your claim seems dubious to me. There may have not been a drop in sales numbers from the retailers (who were still burning through the glut of old stock by selling at a loss) but at that point I can't imagine that anybody was still making money up until the NES came out.

Technically correct but Atari attempted to compete later and failed with the Atari Jaguar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

I say attempted because as a teenager you could either afford the SNES or the Genesis but rarely both. The Jaguar came out after both the SNES and Genesis and IIRC had superior hardware, but no game support due to things like licensing agreements. It was never a real contender - not from my teenage 12 year old perspective.

The Atari that made the Jaguar isn't the same Atari that made the Atari VCS.

I thought the NES was known for revitalizing the home console industry in America, not for killing Atari?

The events that lead to the "death" of Atari as they were at the time is commonly known as "the video game crash of 1983," meanwhile the NES didn't come out in American test markets until late 1985.

Also, if you spent $20-$50 of 1970s money ($100-$250, adjusted for inflation) on a game and was bored of it in 15 minutes, that might make you wary of purchasing another 1970s game.

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.

I’ll say it simply: consumers had nothing to do with the demise of the Atari. It’s retailers, who bought cartridges without ever thinking the gravy train would stop. Atari and everyone else told them consumers had an insatiable appetite for full price cartridges.

But when the sales cratered, due to an oversupply, retailers were stuck with the cartridges without the ability to return them. So they turned to the measure that killed the Atari: clearance bins. When all the games you could hope to ever play are in a bin for a buck each, no one is buying anything at 30$ anymore.

Nintendo’s never going to say it, but their practices with the NES were not quality control; they were doing price control.

> retailers were stuck with the cartridges without the ability to return them

This was true when it came to dumping 3rd party cartridges, but that wasn't the case with Atari. Atari had a deal with retail that any unsold cartridges could be returned and exchanged for newer titles. So it was win/win for retailers -- just give Atari shelf space for carts and what was there would either sell or get returned. Zero risk to retailer.

This combined with the 2nd problem -- oversupply. What made matters worse is that for a while Atari was struggling to meet order demand. The 2600 was so hot that they couldn't fulfil 100% of retail orders. So if a store ordered 500 of something, they got 250 units. Atari built more manufacturing capacity, but sales still rose. So now the retailers were ordering 1000 units and only getting 500. The retailers got wise and started ordering a lot more than they needed, figuring Atari would only deliver half. Overordering wasn't an issue anyways due to the return policy.

The 3rd problem is that Atari expanded manufacturing enough to finally catch up with order volume. To make it worse the market had just started crashing. So now you have the makings of a perfect storm.

Retail orders double what they need, because historically Atari had trouble delivering. Atari actually delivers the goods in full this time due to increased mfg. Combined with the crashing market, this means that way too many carts were made. The carts don't sell, and semi trucks full of unsold cartridges start showing back up at the Atari docks.

Atari was blindsided, they didn't even understand what was happening at first. They were managed pretty chaotically anyways - like really badly -- and it hadn't mattered up until then because they were making so much money. Once Atari realized what was going on it was too late. They went from $300m profit in 1982 to $538m losses in 1983. They couldn't recover.

This is why there's a landfill full of Atari cartridges -- Atari realized that if they dumped the returns back into the market at a discount, prices would crater even more. So Atari actually lost less money by destroying the unsold cartridges.

What was crazy about the 1983 crash was that it took down the biggest company in that space. Usually the small companies go down but the biggest can weather it. This crash was so severe that it killed the largest company in the space. Imagine if a cratering phone market killed Apple, it was just that big of a shock.

That's very interesting, and the first time I've actually heard an explanation of the 1983 crash that makes sense.

It's always described as "the games were so bad that the market crashed" which never was a satisfactory answer to me.

You see this alot in business... its why there are business cycles.

The bad thing about "boom" markets is that you easily run the risk of building product the market doesn't need. You think it needs it, but it doesn't. So you overbuild without knowing it.

Once the market figures this out, it is usually the same story. Something along the lines of "I don't need any more product, I have enough product on the shelf to last a year" etc.

At this point you can't build anything more until the market recovers and the excess inventory is cleared out. This shuts down plants and is why people get laid off.

The more you overbuild the longer the recovery. We're dealing with the recovery due to overbuilding due to COVID right now.

In the case of 1983, it was a heck of a lot of overbuilding. Atari should be a case study in business school.

That's definitely the case. Nintendo even instituted a 5 games/year limit on publishers to limit the chances that they'd flood the market. Nintendo would have a group internally playtest games and provide feedback to publishers. Because the NES was so popular and games were cheap to develop, some publishers would submit more than 5 games per year and only publish the games that scored highest. As a result, there's tons of fully complete NES games that never got released.

Yes!

Check out the history of Ultra Games if you want some fun trivia.

Exactly this. Even to this day, Nintendo is very smart about almost never discounting their flagship games - and when they do, it’s by a small percent, sometimes with strings attached, not the crazy “90% off” tactics many other developers/publishers follow.

Playstation games being in the $15 bin while desirable N64 games never seemed to go on sale was a big reason kid me had a ton of games compared to my friends with N64s.

I still see this with my kids and their Switch. PS2 and GameCube seemed to follow the same pattern.

Yes. And it teaches the consumers that there's no point in waiting. When you want their game, you just buy it at full price on launch date, because you know that waiting for discount would take years and even then it would be 20-30% off at best.

Or in my case it taught me to not want to play the fucking thing at all.

Simple as.

Well the strategy relies on the games being really good in the first place, so that many people wouldn't take that option.

Although to continue the argument from GP: copious 90% off steam sales haven't killed PC gaming, enough people still preorder PC games at full price. It's literally a meme that people have more games than they can ever play but they still keep buying new ones.

In the '80s the games were mostly being purchased by adults for children, while today PC games are mostly purchased by adults for themselves. (I also remember being encouraged to spend my allowance on clearance-bin games when my parents wouldn't buy them new.)

Piracy of 100 in 1 cartidges for Game Boy was a thing along with Adibas bootleg. Memory was limited and the games are simple because of it. I had a 1 in 4 with space invaders and that was a comparatively shitty game but a hit on Atari (minimum viable product, worse than asteroids). So what killed Atari was extremely low quality, plain and simple.

You may have a point on price control, because I saw no main titles, and I remeber more recently the Mame community held back on (highly priced) arcade titles to not compete with sales. But you present a false dichotomy because quality control is marketing.

See, you're taking the point of view that it must happen through the prism of the player. That it has to be something the player has agency with, in this case, video game quality. I'll push back on that. Devs were making games for a console more akin to a tin can with a string than a computer. Most developers made their games alone, with very tight time constraints. Code quality was nowhere what it is today, due to the tooling. There were hard limits to what they could offer the player, so of course games look terrible with hindsight.

You can listen to They Create Worlds. They very expertly talked about the preconceived ideas about the crash, and why they're wrong.

http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/the-great-video-game-c...

> their practices with the NES were not quality control; they were doing price control

A little of both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Yes, restricting overall game production held up prices, but a market of uncertain quality tends to drive down prices even for high-quality goods.

$1 video games are an unsustainable market anyway.

Nintendo's practices saved the industry. They weren't suitable forever (limiting publishers per year wasn't popular to begin with) but it's undeniable that they rose the bar in game quality on home consoles and helped restore it to a respectable industry. The Seal of Quality used to mean something.

Iirc nintendo originally allowed retailers consignment for the NES, just to get them to carry it.

This is the correct way for a retailer to do business with new, unproven vendors that do not have any leverage.

Either do consignment or do half upfront. Otherwise the retailer will end up with a bunch of bad inventory.

But review magazines, and word of mouth, would have helped identify the good games?

Review magazines barely existed. Nintendo coming along later and creating it's Nintendo Power official magazine (based heavily on Famitsu) to help direct consumers to the good games was yet another piece of the puzzle that Nintendo laid in creating a vibrant games industry.

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.

Atari is before my time, but regarding SNES and gameboy, here the popular games went very much through word of mouth (and seeing) on the school playground.

I'd imagine this also be the case for Atari if multiple kids had Atari 2600's. Of course if it was rare, then that wouldn't work.

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms

Firstly, unlike a PC or phone, an Atari 2600 isn't useful without games.

Secondly, without ubiquitous reviews freely available on the net, players essentially had to choose new games based on the name, box design, and copy.

Beyond that, the games weren't necessarily low-quality in the QA sense, i.e. sloppily manufactured or buggy-- most of them just sucked, were ugly, and weren't fun for your average player. Keep in mind, these weren't targeted at video game enthusiasts: they were competing with home video as an entertainment device. You have to compare their appeal with movies, rather than then-current computer games or maybe even board games.

I worked in back-end web dev roles for over a decade, but more recently got an art school education in design (concentrating in a few disciplines,) and work in games in both design and technical capacities. Many old Atari games suck because they're either fundamentally bad ideas as games or disastrously implemented. Video game design wasn't really a thing back then, so all of the design work ended up being done by the developer that made the game. Though many developers get annoyed by my saying that design is a learned skill that you don't automatically gain by being a developer, I assure you that not having any designers involved ensures that these games will be more miss than hit. To make matters worse, Atari's success essentially created a gold rush condition. Everyone who was technically capable of making a game was trying to-- probably not even realizing that's exactly what everyone else was doing. It was like 2000 people on a beach saw 3 talented people surfing a wave, so they all grabbed the nearest flat object and jumped in to disastrous effect.

Poor retail strategy was obviously a problem, as others have pointed out, but if people buying games could be reasonably assured they were good, I doubt it would have had any more effect than any other big retail miscalculation.

The significant difference here is that back in the 1980s and 1990s there was the real valuable commodity of shelf space being taken up by garbage games. Something that would result in unhappy customers buying some random product on the shelf, and bad implications for the company that stocked said product.

In contrast with PC and Mobile it's all virtual. There's reams of trash out there and it can be ignored and there's less downside to it existing. However, it is still a problem, one that remains somewhat poorly unsolved, with huge effort being put into storefronts to serve as gate keepers to help direct people to good product and not the mass of trash out there.

TBH I think the millions of very bad games did kill the mobile market. Traditional game developers have near completely abandoned it. There's some alt universe version of that mobile market out there that is more healthy than it is now if different choices were made.

Similarly the PC market didn't used to be anywhere near as healthy as it is now. When I was younger developers had abandoned the PC market as well and the console market was thriving. Storefront curation is something that has brought more health into the PC space.

If the Apple Store had the same return policy as Steam, I would buy *a lot* more mobile games on iOS.

Unfortunately paying for mobile games is a gamble that I’m not willing to take most of the time. It takes heavy personal recommendations from friends or an exceptionally compelling gameplay video to convince me.

I never had a problem returning apps or games. But that's with Germany's "Widerrufsrecht" (right to revocation), admittedly.

The problem with the mobile market is that microtransaction laden dopamine traps dominate the stores. People who are looking for a game that isn't a glorified gambling-free real-money casino go elsewhere, so the people making these games just assume the only thing that will sell are games designed to extract money out of ADHD cases and children.

Apple seems to be trying to push against this, what with Resident Evil getting an iOS port and them shipping phone hardware with decent GPUs in them. Then again, we've seen this happen before. Every few years someone releases a mobile game that's really high quality, it gets ignored, and then it disappears off the App Store[0]. The mobile app stores are really hostile to anything that doesn't get frequent updates, which means the developer needs recurring revenue, and the only way to do that with a game is to shove your game full of microtransactions to spend on and release it as "free" to "play".

Steam has about the same amount of garbage that iOS and Android's app stores get, but people still sell older games there. I can drop $70 on a pay-once game and be somewhat[1] confident that it isn't going to disappear. Same thing with the console stores. Hell, on console you can still buy physical media and enjoy first-sale rights, which is the last bastion of consumer protection in this awful industry.

There's also the elephant in the room that mobile phones are just... not very good for certain genres. The Atari 2600 was the same way - it was designed to do Pong and not much else. Most of the games on the system were absolutely heroic efforts to bend H-Blank graphics to their absolute limit. In the case of phones, a lot of action games just need physical controls. Dropping the player into a 3D environment means they need at least two analog controls for camera and movement, which already means a good chunk of your screen is going to be covered in touch control overlays. Any finger-friendly alternate scheme you can think of (e.g. tap to walk, swipe to turn camera) is going to impose upon your game design because players now have their hands tied behind their back.

Meanwhile, the one thing mobile does do well? Menu driven games, where you pick from a list and tap things. That's basically RPGs and card games. Those all involve mechanics that measure "character skill" rather than "player skill", and character skill is something that the game retains complete control over. So you can sell power quite easily. The one thing that mobile does well is also the one thing that's absurdly easy to monetize. This post was brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends.

[0] Or worse, Apple breaks iOS compatibility and even redownloading the app you bought no longer works. The most egregious example being them changing their signature algorithm in a point update and forgetting to resign delisted software.

[1] Yes, I know, you don't actually own anything unless you pirate it. And game developers can still horrifically disrespect their own work by tying it to an online server that they can just shut down to turn that $70 to $70/year ala Madden.

ET is blamed and it might have just shined the spotlight on the quality issues, since it was a huge blockbuster movie and nearly everyone knew about it. So if you see an ET game in stores, loved the movie, but then got "falling in hole simulator" as a game it's even more egregious because the movie was so good in your opinion.

Maybe it helped people take the rose colored glasses off and realize that games are supposed to be fun, not just functional.

E.T.'s a funny one. It's one of the top-selling Atari games of all time, but they made 5M copies for (at the time) an install base of around 10M. Assuming half of your customers will buy the game is a bit bonkers to me. As far as E.T.'s quality goes: yes, it's extremely flawed, but it's honestly nowhere near the worst game ever made. I think it definitely contributed to Atari's woes, but it probably wasn't solely responsible.

Wikipedia says they produced 4M copies, sold 2.6M by the end of the year, but ultimately 3.5 M were returned as unsold or customer returns.

Wikipedia says, "Atari sold 1.25 million Space Invaders cartridges and over 1 million VCS systems in 1980, nearly doubling the install base to over 2 million, and then an estimated 3.1 million VCS systems in 1981", so if they thought E.T. was going to be as big of a hit as Space Invaders, 4M copies is actually low production. Pac-Man released in 1982, sold 7.2 M copies in 1982 and about 3M more in subsequent years.

I don't think people are understanding the problems with E.T. You cannot even finish it. The game does not fully function.

Like honestly, what game is worse? Custer's Revenge?

The main problem with ET is that there is a fault in the hit detection.

"Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600" http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/

> You spend a lot of time accidentally falling in to wells. I believe that I know reason why this happens to so many people, and what can be done to fix it.

You absolutely can finish it. I've done it. It's a confusing mess of a game, but it's not broken.

This reminds me of the fact the dos teenage mutant ninja turtles game had a jump you literally couldn't make and yet was loved by my whole friend group despite being unable to complete without exploiting a level skip bug.

I grew up during the Atari age. Anecdotally it was really a problem. Folks who owned one would play it, enjoy it, but then you'd start picking up games that were purely "twitchy" and had nothing else going for them... and then another and ... it just wasn't enough to want to keep playing. Eventually your system collected dust.

The NES came along and the gameplay on the games, while superficially similar, felt more dynamic and had more going for it.

As a kid I probably wouldn't have said "low quality cartilages" but it certainly colored your view of the system and how you spent your time. Atari had a lot of garbage and was woefully arcade style play. Nintendo came along with something more / great games.

Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun. Of course, for a while it was the best gameplay experience one could have, but when the next generation of consoles came, it was flat out outcompeted.

I (and quite a few people) still play NES-era games, and not just because of nostalgic value. A lot of them are still a lot of fun. I have tried some Atari games, and with hindsight and the internet, I can target the best ones, or even recent homebrews that were made with current knowledge about gameplay mechanics, but at best they can get a few minutes of my attention mainly due to curiosity. Gameplay is severely limited by the single-button controller and processing power, very tight memory constraints mean very limited content (at best a handful of different screens played in a loop), and graphics are horrible. My brain can "fill in the blank" with NES-generation or later pixel art, but not with Atari 2600-style big blobs of color.

>Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun.

I had a 2600 brand new and the games weren't fun. I feel like I have gone insane or entered a parallel universe whenever someone fondly remembers that era of video games.

I was there. Everyone was like "wow this is so cool" before coming to their senses and going "wow, this is shit". That's what caused the video game crash: the novelty of moving a square around on your TV wore off and people stopped buying all of the boring, samey, shit games.

I was very young, but I don't recall anyone referring to it as a crash until 20 years later. At the time it just seemed like Atari came out, ran it's course, and then the NES came out and blew it away.

Because the crash was a business issue. Players never saw anything bad happen; quite the contrary. The price of games went to the floor. Literally, most Atari games ended up in clearance bins for pennies on the dollar.

The business side was absolutely destroyed. Atari was broken up and sold off by its parent company. Every other 3rd party developer went out of business (or took enormous losses and closed their game division) except for Activision, which survived by the skin of its teeth by pivoting to computer games and spent years digging itself back up to profitability. Retailers lost so much money that the whole concept of "video games" became anathema, which is why Nintendo had to pitch it as a general "entertainment system" and sell it with the light gun and ROB the Robot (basically as decoys for the retail buyers) just to get a tiny foothold back on retail shelves in their NYC test market and prove out the market again.

Personally, I believe the 2600 was just a victim of age. There were a glut of shit games for it, don't get me wrong, but it's not like we were buying dozens of carts a week. We usually had 5-20 carts, with about half of them played regularly.

There was also the push to CDs, later, that doomed a lot of cart consoles. Not only was the media better, and cheaper, it was also "the new thing".

It was my last console. After that, PCMASTERRACE...ok..Vic-20/C64/Amiga/8088MASTERRACE. lol

Anecdotal, sure, but I was there. :)

The Atari was released in September 1977, so by 1983 it definitely was a bit long in the tooth. Arcade hardware continued to progress - then Nintendo hit the sweet spot in late 1985 with its resolution, colors, sprites, and cost (and licensing agreements because the Sega Master System was slightly better hardware wise but didn't do as well in the U.S.)

Six good years is a long time for any console in the US.

If you watch the documentaries with the original developers and CEO they expected the life of the system to be ~2 years. At that point they would refresh with maybe 100-200 games total for the system. But they realized they could play a different game and lock competitors out by buying up key components or tying up component makers and keep it going for longer. By the time 83/84 rolled around the mid 70s system was looking and sounding really dated next to a ti99 or c64 (with similar price points). It did not help that former atari devs were starting their own shops and cranking out games too. That 4-8 week cadence and they were blasting games out.

Nintendo with its seal of approval was to keep the number of games down and the quality up. But most importantly get in a percentage of every single sale.

> 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 had both and it's true that games on the 2600 were of low-quality. I mean: it was a very limited machine. The very best games were probably River Raid and Pitfall and maybe Combat. Stuff like that. There really weren't a lot of playable games on the 2600.

https://youtu.be/gombHp5wMrk

The Commodore 64 came five years later. Five years back then was like decades today. On the C64 you could draw (it was limited but doable), create music, program... And games were on another level.

The C64 had bad games for sure but also many incredible gems.

And there were some games on the C64 you could play for months or even years, like the Ultima series.

The 2600 came out in 1977. I think it did well for its time but when progress moved that fast, there wasn't much they could do to save a platform that was that limited.

The difference is that computers and phones do things other than play games. The 2600 didn't. Now, there is the fact that there may be two sides to the story: Is it that people stopped buying games or that the market was so crowded that it was difficult for companies to make a profit? I don't know if that is plausible or not.

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms.

It's because platforms (Steam, stores, etc.) hide them from users.

> But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?

More likely lack of good games. So when all you could find was trash...

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms.

The costs to produce cartridges are orders of magnitude higher than digital distribution. Retail storefronts are also limited in ways digital stores are not.

> 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.

The C64 was a home computer that encouraged user programming and development. The Atari 2600 was marketed as an entertainment device for consuming content. If the content is no good, the C64 can still get by but the 2600 loses its purpose.

> But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?

The NES locking out unapproved developers was really more about having the PR to say "Nintendo blessed this game" than trying to avoid another crash (which I don't think Nintendo at home cared about when developing the Famicom, as Japan never had a corresponding gaming crash). And of course profit. Nintendo does care about that.

Gaming was new enough in the 70s that in the minds of many it could have just been another fad, and the Atari crash helped "prove" that theory out. So there wasn't a big movement or anything to "save gaming" - as far as normal Americans were concerned, video games were just another pet rock and kids were going to glom onto something else soon enough. Psychologically, it made the medium "easy to abandon."

Then Nintendo came and saved American gaming from itself, and the rest is history.

Nintendo did not save American gaming from itself. US game makers created games for a lot of successful platforms including the PC/MSDOS, C64, the Mac, the Atari home computers, and the Amiga.

What Nintendo did do was create the first good home console which had good games. Note that it was not until the Xbox/PS2/GC generation that PC and console gaming merged (i.e. there were relative few titles which were not multiplatform).

This podcast goes into a lot more detail than most of the replies here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-4...

It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.

The Crash of '83 was precipitated mostly by the flopped release of E.T for the 2600. It's a game that was in such shoddy condition that you literally cannot finish it. It spent less than 8 weeks in development. People were so disappointed that it killed the market until quality software came back with the NES.

It's still in landfills today.

They dug (some of) them up: https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/landfill-smit...

It's important to remember that in the early '80s, it was unknown whether home video games were just a fad or a new long-lasting market. With the 1983 crash caused by the glut of low quality products, it was very easy for retailers and investors to decide it must have been the former and stop taking video games seriously.

We now have many good ways to curate and discover good-quality games. Atari didn't have that at the moment.

I think you could even argue that a primary reason Steam is so successful and powerful today is because of all the work and energy they put into browsing, reviewing and curating.

I totally agree with you that Atari was far more culpable for its demise than third party developers. It was a classic case of a company working so hard to avoid killing their cash cow that they end up killing the company instead. The 5200 was far more of a problem than the third party carts.

It makes sense to me. Computers and phones are used for many things, so if they're filled with bad games, you can just ignore that one use-case. A console's main, or even only up until recently, use case is games.

>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

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.

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.

Yes and no. Some SNES games (as an example, since were talking Mario RPG) would receive 50Hz "ports", but they were often quite lazy, such as only adjusting level timers but not character movememt. Some games originating in PAL regions, such as Donkey Kong Country, would have more work put into getting them to run right at 50Hz.

But the vast majority would just run around at 5/6ths the correct speed and have huge black borders at the top and bottom. This was standard up until the PS2/Gamecube era, when gamers started catching on and demanding better ports or 60Hz modes. Then the shift to HD rendered the whole thing moot.

Mario RPG and other SNES RPGs not receiving PAL releases or receiving them very late probably had more to do with translation of such text-heavy games. I believe Nintendo at the time had a policy that all (big-name?) PAL releases would have to be translated into several major European languages. This was an issue around the PAL version of the Gamecube Animal Crossing game that was reported at the time, although that eventually did receive a release IIRC.

Japan has 60Hz tv, but their electrity runs on a split grid, eastern Japan runs on 50Hz and western Japan runs on 60Hz.

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

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.

Nearly all electronics manufactured today are capable of being powered (or are provided with power supplies that rectify to DC) between 110-240v at 50 to 60 hertz for that reason!

That way the variances across the globe don’t matter too much.

You still don’t want to take your expensive 110v hair straightener to the UK without a step down converter though as my wife found out the hard way!

It is a mess. Nowadays all devices support both frequencies, but I have heard from Japanese colleagues that back in the day if you moved accross the frequency boundary, you needed to replace your appliances. Maybe that's one of the reasons why Japan has a huge second hard market?

But the real problem came after the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, when several powerplants in the Eastern half of the country went offline, and they couldn't not transfer enough power from the Western half. There are a few conversion stations, but their capacity was not enough, and as such the Eastern half endured long black-outs even though the country had enough surplus power generation capacity.

Perhaps "thanks" to the situation, inverter powered appliance are common in Japan, like A/C and microwave

Fun corollary: Tim Follin composed his tracks at 55Hz, so they'd sound "right-ish" when both sped up for NTSC and slowed down for PAL

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.

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.

So they might have been using their name as a psychological attack, implying they were outmaneuvering Nintendo? That's pretty cool :)

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.

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. :(

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

>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)

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.

This was a cool rabbit hole to dive down—thanks for the introduction to the Aladdin Deck Enhancer!

I grew up playing the Dizzy games on my Amstrad CPC so playing them on the NES was a natural next step.

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.

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.

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.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

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

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.

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.

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.

Konami wasn't a big at this time.

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.

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.

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

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.

Do you have any proof of this? I have played Nintendo games for decades and I have loved a lot of them. I have a hard time believing Nintendo or its employees "hate" their customers.

Why do you think they hate their customers?

They won’t even let people host tournaments

They did some guidelines on that recently.

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.

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