How Nintendo bled Atari games to death | Hacker News Reader

How Nintendo bled Atari games to death

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

211 pointssohkamyung152 comments

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.

You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split, Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market using the Atari name.

I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.

Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but management kept the product going far beyond its intended lifetime.

The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US.

Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US...

(Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)

atari marketing was pretty f---ing terrible. objectively so

i had one of the home computer division marketing types come to my office one day, and was asked:

"can you print out all possible 8x8 bitmaps? we'd like to submit them to the copyright office so no one else can use them"

a stunning lack of knowledge of copyright law and basic exponential math. i didn't bother to point out that he really wanted all possible 8x8 _color_ bitmaps (there aren't enough atoms in the universe for this, by many orders of magnitude)

they didn't make very good decisions about consoles or computers, either

Atari made a lot of bad decisions, but what you were asked is not something you should expect someone in marketing to understand in general. There is only so much someone can get good at in their lifetime and so eventually you will have to give up understanding everything - and then look like an idiot when you ask for something that is obviously unreasonable to someone who does know.

What was asked for is a reasonable ask. It just isn't possible to create.

> What was asked for is a reasonable ask.

No it isn't. You don't get any copyright protection on a volume of data produced by rules, such as "every possible 8x8 bitmap". Furthermore, you also don't get copyright protection against "copies" that were developed without reference to your work, as would always be the case for this idea. So there is no theoretical benefit from attempting it.

What's the reasonable part?

You are thinking as a lawyer, who for sure should have jumped in (if got that far - it appears to have went to engineering first who shut it down for engineering reasons). Someone in marketing should not be expected to know or think of those details about law. Maybe they will, but it isn't there job.

Specialization is a good thing. However it means you will have often ideas that because of something you don't know are bad even though within your lane they are good.

Agreed that a marketer can’t be expected to know the math. But is it really reasonable to attempt to copyright every possible 8x8 bitmap?

Asking if you can print all 8x8 bitmaps is very reasonable.

Wanting to copyright them to block competition is despicable.

I'm shocked at how "few" pages printing all 8x8 bitmaps would actually require. Assuming full page coverage of an 8.5 x 11 sheet at 600 dpi I'm only coming with a touch over 548 billion pages. I expected it to be more. Legal-size paper drops that to about 430.5 billion pages.

I think your math is a little off (or maybe mine is).

I'll take a short cut and imagine that you have an 8x8 square with no margins (68% of a borderless 8.5x11), then you have a grid of 600x600 bitmaps, which is 3.6e5. if each pixel is only black or white, than you have 1.8e19 possible bitmaps (64-bit), divide the two and you have 5e13, or about 50 trillion pages. Fix the equation, and you get a grid of 5.2e5, for 30 trillion pages instead of 50.

However, bring that up to 24-bit color or more (even 8-level greyscale is e154), and the exponentiality of the problem goes back to as described by the OP

I got Atari 5200 when I was a kid, and the disappointment was immense, considering the marketing and hype that went into it. The controller made playing games very difficult. And the games were pretty bad as well. Later, I got a Commodore 64 and then also NES, which just revolutionized home gaming in general.

Ahh, I always forget Atari Corporation and Atari games were different. Thanks for the correction.

Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600 era and could never move on from it.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.)

And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you.

Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted.

Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth.

Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort.

The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.

A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual.

“Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.

It's not a literal point, it's an observation of how far we've come. A single texture blows away 2600 and NES games in size quite handily. The emulation effort for either is a sneeze compared to what we pour into a single frame nowadays. Compared to modern stuff they're both just primitive beyond primitive as far as a modern kid is concerned.

And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't understand that so many people seem to have in their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it is no longer true. I do not understand it. Explaining why they haven't moved on does not suddenly make it so they have moved on. They haven't moved on. Best of luck to them but I doubt it's going to work very well as a strategy in 2025 any more than it did in the 1980s.

Even in early and late 00's, NES, SNES and MD games were emulated everywhere.

"And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't understand that so many people seem to have in their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it is no longer true. I do not understand it."

This is an interesting observation. I've seen the same thing.

I think the clue is in the "it is a choice"...perhaps they are perceiving seeing some sort of judgement being made of Atari implicit in your argument???

In other words, it can be true at the same time that (1) The are not moving on and (2) It is a choice.

And #2 does not invalidate #1.

What is a "modern kid"? :) Super Mario Bros. 3 is very enjoyable, even for a "modern kid"

Dude. There is no way in hell they probably even could move on. They probably simply do not have the organizational structure to develop modern games. They are like one of those companies making retro style record players. That is their niche. Not trying to go toe to toe with nintendo or playstation. Just a completely different business model.

Star Fox was made mainly by Argonaut Software, including the development of the Super FX chip. Only the scenario and characters were from Nintendo.

Donkey Kong Country was all Rare, except for use of the Donkey Kong character. If you look carefully at the DK sprite, you can even see design elements from Battletoads in there.

I agree with you up to a point. Epyx made the Lynx for Atari and it was by far better than the gameboy for the gaming of its time. It had hardware-based sprite scaling. It could’ve done a Mario kart type of game very well if someone had the foresight to. But Atari didn’t have Mario or any cutesy ideas that kids wanted. Nintendo was very smart in that they made the main target audience the kids. Nintendo also knew parents would only spend a certain amount of money so the gameboy had the price advantage.

Man, I remember learning that the VCS/2600 had successors well after there time and was like "gee, I wonder how powerful those were". The difference between a 2600 and 5200 is a small step up, and the 5200 to 7800 is damn near imperceptible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMXi1lAVow

Atari just never did....anything. It's so obvious in retrospect why the died.

The 5200 was essential the 8 bit Atari computer hardware on the inside. The controllers were different, and no keyboard, but almost exactly the same (IIRC one graphics mode was different in their GPU [not related to the GPU of today]). The 8 bit XEGS of 1987 was the same hardware as computer.

They did have some interesting handhelds in later years, but didn't have enough good ideas to make them catch on.

Early NES games were absolutely arcade style games too. It took a while for developers to figure out they could go more and it would work well.

Jeremy Parish’s YouTube channel does a fantastic job of documenting this on the NES and other consoles.

If Atari has been able to survive significantly longer I’m sure they would have learned too.

Even as a young kid I noticed that split. The NES included some posters and flyers listing all the original line up of games, with the same visual design (even cartridges stickers) and they were all simple arcade-like games. It already felt vintage even though this wasn't my generation, and rapidly the feel of games changed radically, it also merged with the current culture, with tv shows and movies of the 80s.

> And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics.

FWIW various Atari incarnations did try to move on to newer stuff but they all ended up with various levels of fail. The current Atari incarnation is probably the most (relatively) successful this side of the 2000s - though they're probably also (relatively) the smaller one.

I think they were close to closing shop before deciding to focus on the retro and indie gaming stuff.

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.

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.

It's not about visual quality so much as the complete inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was still hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800 launched with... Centipede.

Part of the problem is that the 7800 was a decent/good system when designed in ‘84 terms of tech, other than sound which I think was identical to the 2600.

But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel?

However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too.

In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games.

By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more.

The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had.

The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap.

So it didn’t do well at all.

Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.

Warner Atari had left an enormous amount inventory behind. (Beyond what they infamously put into a landfill.) They also had screwed-over the major chain stores, who wouldn't touch anything Atari.

Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets.

(There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)

That doesn’t surprise me. I know he was a “screw over anything if it will make the computers 0.05% more popular” guy. That was all that ever mattered in his mind.

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.

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.

The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game.

Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)

Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts

This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.

Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.

I hate to be so mean, but I'm surprised a crash hasn't happened yet because this situation of saturation right now is far far worse than 1983. As a gamer, there are just way too many games now, a slow down would be nice because may be then only passion projects or ones with actual investment can rise to the top.

I sort of understand the difference though...essentially steam's income stream is somewhat from gamers but you also make money from developers, and so there's no real incentive for devs to try too hard. That's why the "crash" hasn't happened yet.

Part of the reason for a crash was that the deluge of low-quality games hit a wall of limited retail space.

The retailer had to be much more of a curator. I'd be unsurprised if plenty of them lacked the knowledge and foresight to pick winners, so they ended up with racks full of lemons (like the famously bad 2600 Pac-Man) that eventually had to be flogged off at clearance prices. This also made it hard to have a breakout hit-- even if you did everything technically right, was it going to be in the right stores in the right quantity when lightning struck?

Part of it was also, of course, that the 2600 was running out of gas as a platform, it was going to be harder and harder to keep interest up, but that could have been more of a gradual fizzle (like how 8-track tapes or pre-revivial vinyl faded from the market) instead of a dramatic pop.

With digital distribution and a "pay on purchase" selling model, Valve can stock 170,000 titles without any real risk on their part. At worst, the search tools get a bit clumsier, but it's easy enough to put "trending/popular/liked by friends" features in place, and "Lamia Princess Dating Sim XVI" is still there waiting for the 6 people who want it... until it goes viral and sells six hundred thousand copies.

So the lament in this comment and from the parent post I made is from a gamer perspective. I understand your take on why it isn't crashing giving the situation...namely I get why steam and the devs don't pay any price. As an (albeit older) gamer though I definitely feel fatigue. In a normal market demand pressures exist and are natures way of correcting suppliers but in the modern steam world it's like demand doesn't even matter anymore.

But why is this a problem ?

Were you complaining about too many crappy Flash games being available at its heights ?

More generally, are you complaining about too many people, most of them amateurs, making their art available on the Internet ?

This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees.

Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).

I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.

Valve is shady, but their shadiness comes from things like Counter-Strike loot boxes rather than milking developers.

Valve forbids developers from selling their game on a different store at a lower price than steam, that's a bit shady. Not too bad, but not amazing either.

Huh, wouldn't this be illegal in at least some jurisdictions ?!?

Wait, not that I personally have much hope left for the worthiness of touchscreen gaming, but I doubt it's negligible ?!? (Web gaming might be ?)

And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.

That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less generic games, more organic-made ones.

On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.

While Steam could do that, there's no incentive for them to. They can lay out $0 into such a project and let third parties sift the trash for them and do journalism on letting potential customers know what games are good. Win-win.

Hence the demise of the Greenlight program...

Why? Steam already does a very good job surfacing good games and front page of their store shows way less garbage than Nintendo Store on Switch.

In praise of niches: Some of my favorite games were widely hated, and for reasons which I largely agree with. Not everyone values the same things.

It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch.

Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.

Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)

I don't agree that curation is a value proposition. I prefer to have the floodgates open and let me decide what I do and don't want to buy.

Who cares if you agree as a buyer?

In the early days the value proposition for both sides was staked on curation, but yeah you're totally right: their install base expanded until it encompassed enough people who don't mind having barrels of slop shoveled down their way... and that allowed them to do away with the curation.

But if you're on the other side of the equation that's paying for the privilege of being in dumped into the slop trough it's not a good deal.

You're paying the same amount to get dumped into a cesspit with minimal support as the earliest titles were paying to be hand picked like a golden child and paraded around high-intent buyers.

I'm curious when the cutover occurred in consumer sentiment from "We use Steam because we need to for some specific titlese" to "We use Steam because it's the most convenient way to purchase"

War Z (and especially its timing relative to Greenlight) probably represents the death rattle of their initial direction: https://kotaku.com/the-war-z-mess-every-crazy-detail-we-know...

$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

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.

I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a...

It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.

Reddit: I've seen and wishlisted or ignore every game on steam. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dm3gxh/ive_seen_a... It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.

When "reviewing every single game that came out" (rather than focusing on (sub)genres) by a single person was even still feasible ??

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.

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

You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games. Everything else is just a plus. That has been the case since I'd say N64 days. Before that it was still a toss up, especially with Sega. After that, Nintendo drifted wholly into its own world, supporting its own worldview, and others were competing for third party titles and using specs in the marketing as if it mattered - which it did if same game was available on multiple target platforms and you were buying for that.

> You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games

There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen

But largely you are correct

The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world

I’d argue their last two custom hardware competitors were xbox 360 arcade (the indie store) and cell phone games.

(I’m counting competitors as “the game mechanics are more important than production values”)

In a massive self-own, Microsoft killed arcade at xbone launch (worst. console. ever.), and cell phone games were ruined by pay to win (most games) and lack of first party physical controllers (the other games, e.g., Apple Arcade).

These days, it’s just steam, abandonware and nintendo. I used to pay for nintendo online to get the emulation games, but the library kind of sucked, and (more importantly) if you pay for it, there’s no way to turn off in-game ads for online play in stuff like mario, making the entire system inappropriate for kids.

I’m curious to see how the switch 2 does. The lock screen on our switch is wall-to-wall ads for it, but nothing looks compelling so far. The kids are more excited about an old switch 1 port of a wii game...

Technically there are also second-party games, which are independent companies exclusive to them like those from HAL Laboratory (Kirby), Intelligent Systems (Metroid), Game Freak (Pokemon).. maybe things have changed, but yeah.

The distinguishing feature of Nintendo is they're a toy company. That's the angle they approach the whole ecosystem from. It tends to result in consoles with features that are unusual (or, more specifically, it has ever since they decided to get off the CPU/GPU integration competition train Sony and Microsoft have first-class tickets on and made the Wii instead).

It's also why they released a fancy alarm clock with the same breathless excitement as a new game console.

> Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox.

It's the other way around, Microsoft games on PC and more recently PS5. Sony sometimes releases their games on PC (often years after console) but AFAIK the only one they've released on Xbox is MLB The Show and that was MLB forcing their hand if they wanted to keep the license.

Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality.

Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.

Steam is not capitalized.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

> I have seen painfully firsthand how giving customers free things almost always backfires and just creates extremely demanding customers

I appreciate that. Running a small business is no small feat, and takes every bit of blood, sweat and tears to make it work.

I also want to draw contrasts to the indie music scene in the mid-aughts and the situation with Nintendo now. A number of bands had their music pirated or offered for free, but truly appreciated by fans. As a result, these bands saw at least moderate successes when they toured: fans saw the effort of touring as actual work, rather than nickel-and-diming.

Nintendo should be following this “indie” path (continue creating innovative games), rather than aggressive rent-seeking (legacy IP property protectionism).

I really don't buy that what worked for the indie music scene, has anything to do with how Nintendo does business. Piracy can, and does, have a serious impact on video game sales - about 20% fewer sales according to the University of North Carolina (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game...).

I also don't buy that Nintendo is forced into an either/or. Their strategy is to do both; and it seems to be working just fine.

> Nintendo is the smallest of the three and has no fallback option

Nintendo reportedly has $15 billion in cash, while PlayStation and Xbox are both marginal

Framing Nintendo as "the small one" is funny :)

Sony has $20 billion of cash on hand as of December 2024, Microsoft has $70 billion of cash on hand, and Apple has $53 billion of cash on hand. If something goes south, the rest of the company can keep them afloat (and has in multiple cases, see Xbox 360 red ring); Nintendo has no such luxury.

Sony receives 38% of their revenue from PlayStation. Microsoft receives 8% of their revenue from Xbox. Apple's amount is four times larger than Nintendo, but insignificant to Apple. Nintendo, meanwhile, >90% at least comes from gaming-related activity (movie and toy licensing might be the exception).

Yes, Nintendo is the smallest, the most dependent on the industry, and it's not even close.

> Sony has $20 billion of cash on hand as of December 2024

Sony is $28 Billion in debt as of 2024 too

> Microsoft has $70 billion of cash on hand

Microsoft has $62 billion in debt

> Apple has $53 billion of cash on hand

I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader

How much debt is Nintendo in? (Hint- It's insignificant)

Now you can do the usual capitalist moron MBA shit and moan about how debt is good actually, but frankly

Nintendo is Japans most successful company and Sony isn't even in the top 300

Nintendo is real, Sony is a paper tiger

> Nintendo is Japans most successful company and Sony isn't even in the top 300

by what bizarro metric is Nintendo more successful than Toyota? debt to equity ratio is all you care about?

Successful may have been the wrong term, but Nintendo is (or was last year at least) Japan's richest company.

This is not a trivial thing

https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/713322

> debt to equity ratio is all you care about?

All I care about? No, but you cannot so easily dismiss it either

Companies, even huge ones, that are highly leveraged are in a precarious spot. A competitor could simply buy them, a bad product launch could lead to investors pulling out and the company being parted out and sold... Many industries are littered with the remains of huge, "untouchable" companies that were vulnerable because of their debt load

Companies having savings and low debt load is good for the company and its employees actually

It is only bad if you are a hyper capitalist investor idiot who doesn't care about the long term success of the company and just want to extract as much wealth as you possibly can for yourself before leaving it to crumble

So toyota made more in net income last quarter alone than nintendo has in net cash, but they're less successful? Seems like a really weird metric.

They also have way more debt than Nintendo's net cash so?

Businesses may be comfortable operating in massive debt but it's clearly only sustainable for so long

Businesses operating under the kinds of debt loads they take on are what leads to irresponsible government bailouts to keep "key industries" from collapsing when they are unable to service their debt

Sure, Toyota is "successful" until it isn't, and then their debt comes due and they can't pay so it collapses

We should be encouraging more companies to be responsible like Nintendo

> 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).

Copyright doesn't work that way. You're thinking of trademark law, which only covers how you can name things in commerce, not what you can and can't copy.

The only thing about copyright that's use-it-or-lose-it is fair use, and only because of how English-language[0] legal systems work. You may have heard that Japan "doesn't have fair use", but what that really means is that they don't have binding precedent. This gives copyright owners an incentive to litigate novel reuses of their work early and often.

Nintendo, of course, is the kind of company that doesn't need an excuse to sue someone; but it does explain why they tend to be very slightly more litigious in common-law countries.

I imagine the real reason they released the soundtrack app is to keep third-parties out of their business. i.e. they don't have to pay 30% to Apple or deal with Spotify's shitty "pay out of a pot" system if their soundtracks are just an NSO benefit.

[0] Yes, I know this is "English-heritage" not "English-language", but in practice this is a language split.

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.

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.

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_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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> They've had the worst online stores for a while now.

Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.

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?

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-thei...

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.

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.

Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.

You don't know what "MBA-type" is.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The guys you don't mess with.

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.

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?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

    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".

> 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

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.c...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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-wh...

[1] https://www.nostalgianerd.com/the-amiga-story/

[2] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207245-secret-atari-dram-r...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Business-Curt-Vendel/dp/098...

[4] https://forums.atariage.com/topic/227211-atari-corp-business...

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.

First you're successful because you didn't listen to anyone telling you that you were going to fail. Then you fail because you didn't listen to anyone telling you that you were going to fail.

There's a story in business that the CEO that built the company is not the CEO that can keep it running. That definitely seems to be true.

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

It was a different era.

I worked in a mall arcade in the early 90s, and because we purchased arcade games, I had access to the trade shows and various promotional events. For instance, E3 invited me to come out for their first event.

The size of the teams in the early 90s was TINY; I met the dudes who made Mortal Kombat at the AMOA convention, and the entire team was less than ten people. The main programmer had so little experience, he was largely known for doing the voice of "Rudy" in the pinball game "Funhouse."

Basically, the tech community was tiny and the gaming community was a tiny subdomain of the tech community.

Atari's big innovation may have simply been that it was founded in the right location (Silicon Valley.) If it wasn't for that, Steve Jobs wouldn't have worked at Atari. (And Wozniak wouldn't have moonlighted at Atari.)

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/steve-jobs-atari-empl...

I'm doing this from memory, but IIRC:

Atari was the only major gaming company based out of Silicon Valley

A lot of the games of the time were basically just Japanese games that were licensed by US distributors. Pac Man came from Namco in Japan and was distributed in the US by Chicago's Midway, Space Invaders was made by Taito in Japan and licensed in the US. (Also by Midway, IIRC.) "Defender" was one of the first 'homegrown' games in the US that wasn't coming out of Atari in Silicon Valley. (Defender was made by Eugene Jarvis in Chicago for Williams, who later merged with Midway.)

Although Nintendo was NOT based in Silicon Valley, they had the dumb luck of locating just up the hill from Microsoft. If you've seen "King of Kong," the dude from the documentary basically lives halfway between Microsoft in Redmond and Nintendo in Snoqualmie: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_North_Bend

Sega WAS based in Silicon Valley, but their slow decline was arguably due to a political tug-of-war between Sega of America (based in Silicon Valley) and Sega (based in Japan.)

> "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?

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.

A great history of Tengen is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA

Sorry, can't watch a video at work. Does the video answer the question I asked?

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.

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

Oh, lest we forget, some space indvader'ing:

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/)

>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.

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

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.

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

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?

> 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.

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

Is there s human species who do not like games ?

> 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...

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.

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.

Obligatory: and the rest was history.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com