Actually Magnavox won the case and celebrated by released a sequel called K.C.'s Crazy Chase. Both of them were better than Pac-Man. And I don't just mean the Atari version, I mean Arcade version too.
Funny you mentioned Star Wars and Star Trek. But Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica was the actual case. George Lucas sued claiming Battlestar Galactica was a copy of Star Wars. It was the maze game argument.
But the Atari also had a set of one button wheel controllers (and could use 2 sets for 4 players), a rotary dial controller, and a 12 button keypad controller.
Three people you may have never heard of. Warren Robinett, Chris Crawford, Gareth Rees. Shigeru Miyamoto is not the first, he's just the most successful.
I've only ever seen so much crap for Nintendo's legal department! People viewing this should look on the web where the truth can be found.
I believe someone else mentioned Atari Games/Tengen is NOT Atari Corporation. Blatant FAIL.
Pac-Man and E.T. were crappy game *directly*from*Atari*. No 3rd party crap involved.
Nintendo put out is own crap also. Such as Punch-Out staring Mr. Dream and the R.O.B. games (they actually named it R.O.B. I guess R.I.P.U.O.F.F. was too obvious) And the lockout system didn't stop them from approving crap form licensed developers like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The Atari 5200 had numerous 3rd party flooding protections that unlike the 10NES, were never bypassed.
The Atari 7800 had its very own lockout system of 96-bit encryption that unlike the 10NES, *was never cracked*! Hasbro later voluntarily released the the encryption code to the homebrew community because no one could crack it. (They did the same for the uncracked Atari Jaguar lockout)
Several companies bypassed the silly 10NES chip. They did not 'crack' any 'code'. They simply zapped the chip with 5 volts to temporarily disable it. (Later NES units would protect against this, but the protection could be removed by cutting an easy to spot resistor that the old units did not have) One of these companies freely and without solicitation gave this information to Tengen. Though Tengen engineers had already guessed it. Tengen didn't want to do this because they actually gave a damn about the possibility of frying a customers NES.
The Seal of Quality was little more than a way to try and fool customers into not buying games from companies who had not paid Nintendo an additional $10 *PER* cartridge like chumps. These 'licensed' companies also had to buy *everything* from Nintendo. Manuals, boxes, chips, the empty cartridge case, everything. Nintendo's contract said they could change prices whenever and deliver these items whenever (thus deliver their own game before Christmas and delay a competitor's game until after). Nintendo also got paid up front and they would except payment even when they knew they didn't have enough supplies. They'd just send a few units at a time instead, postage due, no refunds. This increased the licensee's distribution costs unless they waited for the full order.
Nintendo did not enforce the 5 game limit equally. Konami, for instance, just slapped "Ultra Games", or "Palcom Software" on another 5 titles and Nintendo pretended not to notice because they netted $10 per game for each additional game ordered, and perhaps profit on the other materials, even if they didn't sell well. This arrangement was perpetrated with several game makers. If it was only about the 5 game limit, Tengen would have tried to do the same thing. There were other more important issues.
The 10NES also allowed Nintendo to make multiple incompatible NES units that forced customers to buy multiple NES machines to play some games that were not available for all NES machines. This was especially bad in Europe where customers were often confused and ended up with games that wouldn't run on their NES version.
True, an employee of Tengen stole code illegally. Then people at Tengen actually tainted their legitimate hacking and used the code illegally. Turns out, they could have used *some* of the code under fair use laws and been allowed to continue selling their games. They would have gotten in trouble for the code theft, but not its use. They were allowed by law to use just the code necessary to make their games play. But they made the mistake of using the whole code. They saw from the 10NES design that Nintendo could chance future NES units of even update existing units to make the unlicensed games cease to work. Rather than sell as much as they could knowing that Nintendo could screw their customers later, they actually decided to protect the customers by making a system that Nintendo could not undo later. Unfortunately, the means of protection was illegally using almost the entire 10NES code.
Play Value - Mine!...Gaming and Copyright
Actually Magnavox won the case and celebrated by released a sequel called K.C.'s Crazy Chase. Both of them were better than Pac-Man. And I don't just mean the Atari version, I mean Arcade version too.
Funny you mentioned Star Wars and Star Trek. But Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica was the actual case. George Lucas sued claiming Battlestar Galactica was a copy of Star Wars. It was the maze game argument.
Play Value - Controllers
But the Atari also had a set of one button wheel controllers (and could use 2 sets for 4 players), a rotary dial controller, and a 12 button keypad controller.
Play Value - Shigeru Miyamoto
Three people you may have never heard of. Warren Robinett, Chris Crawford, Gareth Rees. Shigeru Miyamoto is not the first, he's just the most successful.
Play Value - Atari vs. Nintendo
I've only ever seen so much crap for Nintendo's legal department! People viewing this should look on the web where the truth can be found.
I believe someone else mentioned Atari Games/Tengen is NOT Atari Corporation. Blatant FAIL.
Pac-Man and E.T. were crappy game *directly*from*Atari*. No 3rd party crap involved.
Nintendo put out is own crap also. Such as Punch-Out staring Mr. Dream and the R.O.B. games (they actually named it R.O.B. I guess R.I.P.U.O.F.F. was too obvious) And the lockout system didn't stop them from approving crap form licensed developers like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The Atari 5200 had numerous 3rd party flooding protections that unlike the 10NES, were never bypassed.
The Atari 7800 had its very own lockout system of 96-bit encryption that unlike the 10NES, *was never cracked*! Hasbro later voluntarily released the the encryption code to the homebrew community because no one could crack it. (They did the same for the uncracked Atari Jaguar lockout)
Several companies bypassed the silly 10NES chip. They did not 'crack' any 'code'. They simply zapped the chip with 5 volts to temporarily disable it. (Later NES units would protect against this, but the protection could be removed by cutting an easy to spot resistor that the old units did not have) One of these companies freely and without solicitation gave this information to Tengen. Though Tengen engineers had already guessed it. Tengen didn't want to do this because they actually gave a damn about the possibility of frying a customers NES.
The Seal of Quality was little more than a way to try and fool customers into not buying games from companies who had not paid Nintendo an additional $10 *PER* cartridge like chumps. These 'licensed' companies also had to buy *everything* from Nintendo. Manuals, boxes, chips, the empty cartridge case, everything. Nintendo's contract said they could change prices whenever and deliver these items whenever (thus deliver their own game before Christmas and delay a competitor's game until after). Nintendo also got paid up front and they would except payment even when they knew they didn't have enough supplies. They'd just send a few units at a time instead, postage due, no refunds. This increased the licensee's distribution costs unless they waited for the full order.
Nintendo did not enforce the 5 game limit equally. Konami, for instance, just slapped "Ultra Games", or "Palcom Software" on another 5 titles and Nintendo pretended not to notice because they netted $10 per game for each additional game ordered, and perhaps profit on the other materials, even if they didn't sell well. This arrangement was perpetrated with several game makers. If it was only about the 5 game limit, Tengen would have tried to do the same thing. There were other more important issues.
The 10NES also allowed Nintendo to make multiple incompatible NES units that forced customers to buy multiple NES machines to play some games that were not available for all NES machines. This was especially bad in Europe where customers were often confused and ended up with games that wouldn't run on their NES version.
True, an employee of Tengen stole code illegally. Then people at Tengen actually tainted their legitimate hacking and used the code illegally. Turns out, they could have used *some* of the code under fair use laws and been allowed to continue selling their games. They would have gotten in trouble for the code theft, but not its use. They were allowed by law to use just the code necessary to make their games play. But they made the mistake of using the whole code. They saw from the 10NES design that Nintendo could chance future NES units of even update existing units to make the unlicensed games cease to work. Rather than sell as much as they could knowing that Nintendo could screw their customers later, they actually decided to protect the customers by making a system that Nintendo could not undo later. Unfortunately, the means of protection was illegally using almost the entire 10NES code.