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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.

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.

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.

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.

    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".

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.

> 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.

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.

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

> "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?

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.

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/)

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 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.

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

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

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?

Is there s human species who do not like games ?

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

> 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...