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.

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.

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 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 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.”

You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".

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...

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.

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 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?

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.

Seems pertinent to the illegal copying of works before training your LLM tbh.

> 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

I wasn't aware of that story, a lot of irony in there...