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Tengen: Atari Games vs. Nintendo

Tengen: Atari Games vs. Nintendo on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2017–2022.

Gaming Historian

documentary · evergreen

Open on YouTube

Gaming Historian recounts how Atari subsidiary Tengen challenged Nintendo's licensing rules with a lawsuit and unlicensed NES games, including the lockout chip fight.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as a compact account of the Atari-Nintendo lawsuit and its technical and legal details, which shaped the game industry.

people recommended it
1
separate months
1
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2017–2022
“Highly recommended to learn about the technical and legal details of the lawsuit that shaped gaming industry landscape to this day.”
— AceJohnny2, Jul 2017, in “A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 6: Total War”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

AceJohnny2Jul 2017Strongly recommends

Another take about Atari's subsidiary Tengen and the Atari-Nintendo lawsuit is this wonderful 30minute video by Norman Caruso, the Gaming Historian: ▶ this video Highly recommended to learn about the technical and legal details of the lawsuit that shaped gaming industry landscape to this day. Edit: And come to think of it, some of the details and wording in Maher's 2017 article seem pulled straight from Caruso's 2015 video. :\

in “A Tale of the Mirror World, Part 6: Total War” · View on HN

franknineApr 2022Cites it

There's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen: ▶ this video It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.

in “The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen” · View on HN

yosefjaved1Apr 2022Cites it

Atari actually got the code illegally from the copyright office. Here's a video discussing that portion - ▶ this video

in “The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen” · View on HN

AceJohnny2Nov 2021Cites it

> Times have changed, though, and you could argue that now many people would like less app clutter and easier discoverability of the apps they actually want. Time and time again people & markets need to relearn this. The "video game crash" in the early 80s that collapsed Atari was because of so much shovelware that came out (with the infamous E.T. game being seen as the "pinnacle" of that era). Nintendo emerged from that rubble by being more selective about the games they allowed [1] on their platform, something which Atari fought them on tooth and nail [2]. (The amount of shovelware games on mobile platforms is a tragic repeat of that era.) One of the more memorable aspects of classic management classes like the case study of the Challenger Disaster is that you don't want more information, you want better information. Google's mission statement remains to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." How are they doing on that these days? How's the Play Store compared to the Apple App Store or Microsoft's Windows Store? [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video

in “Firefox is the 45th result when searching for “Firefox” on Windows Store” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Game history & retro gamingTech company stories & documentariestengennintendones10nesvideo game historylawsuit