Gaming Historian
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2022
26:10 · 2.4M views · May 29, 2015
Gaming Historian recounts how Atari subsidiary Tengen challenged Nintendo's licensing rules with a lawsuit and unlicensed NES games, including the lockout chip fight.
Recommended as a compact account of the Atari-Nintendo lawsuit and its technical and legal details, which shaped the game industry.
4 comments from Hacker News
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. :\
> 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
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.
Atari actually got the code illegally from the copyright office. Here's a video discussing that portion - this video