Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Feb 26th, 2009
There were three immutable laws of video gaming during the late 1980s:
Rule #1: If you are a princess, you will be kidnapped. No exceptions.
Rule #2: Spikes will kill you just for looking at them.
Rule #3: Never, ever cross Nintendo.
Nintendo, during its peak, was to the gaming world what Microsoft is today to operating systems. That is, they steadfastly believed in being, not merely the largest video game company in the world (or at least North America), but deep down they wanted to be the only one as well. Perfectly good competing systems such as the Sega Master System or the Atari 7800 were decimated in the American marketplace thanks in very large part to the big N’s Draconian licensing practices; no NES game was allowed to appear on any other console (barring those that predated the NES), and no developer that signed a licensing deal with Nintendo was allowed to develop games for any competing console. Failure to comply with these and other similarly tight-fisted restrictions would result in Nintendo yanking your license, and since they had the exclusive manufacturing rights to NES cartridges this meant you were SOL as far as the biggest money-maker in the industry was concerned. (At least, this was the case until Tengen cracked the NES lockout chip and thus opened the door to unlicensed carts, but that’s another tale. Several of them, in fact.)
Nintendo was also fiercely protective of its intellectual property. They resisted for years releasing any games directly for home computers, largely due to concerns about software piracy; this was what kept the N’s feet stuck firmly in the mud for years regarding CD-ROM technology, and why neither the Famicom Disk System nor the 64DD add-on for the Nintendo 64 ever saw a Stateside release. And woe be to any software house that decided they wanted to ride the coattails of Nintendo’s success, as a lawsuit was inevitably forthcoming.
I present the following Commodore 64 game, virtually unknown in the US at the time of its release but now considered one of the essential C64 imports, as an example of what can happen when legalities get in the way of gameplay. I give you… The Great Giana Sisters.
CASE FILE: RA-2009-03
NAME: The Great Giana Sisters
PLATFORM: Various (Commodore 64 version reviewed)
PUBLISHER: Rainbow Arts (UK)
RELEASE: 1987 (UK)
In an industry where it’s traditional for companies to fall all over themselves trying to clone a breakthrough success, The Great Giana Sisters stands, at least on the surface, as one of the most brazen ripoffs of all time. The name was clearly arrived at by playing around with a thesaurus and coming up with a title similar enough to Super Mario Bros. (changing the gender of the protagonists in the process) so as to make their intentions clear, while at the same time deftly avoiding Nintendo’s legal eagles in the same fashion all those clone-happy Golden Age companies that slipped the words “Pac” and “Kong” into their titles were able to.
Unfortunately, it was now the Silver Age, and we were living in the post-K.C. Munchkin! world by then. For those who came in late, that was the title of Magnavox’s Pac-Man clone for their ill-fated Odyssey² console. Even though it wasn’t that similar to the parent game (though it resembled the arcade Pac-Man several orders of magnitude more than the “official” Atari 2600 port), and despite the fact other companies were pushing out Pac-clones that were even closer to the real thing, it was poor little K.C. that bore the brunt of Atari’s legal department; Atari, the lawsuit pointed out, was the only company allowed to make a Pac-Man game for the home market. To make a long story short, after an initial ruling in Magnavox’s favor, Atari appealed to a judge that was more sympathetic to their cause, and Magnavox was obligated to yank K.C. Munchkin! from store shelves. (Sadly, since Magnavox had positioned this game as the O²’s “killer app,” this pretty much sealed the fate of the significantly underpowered console in the marketplace.) The practical upshot of this legal wrangling is that the precedent had been set for a video game company to sue for damages over games they deemed too similar to their own properties.
If you liked that, try...
- Retro-Active: Alex Kidd
- Retro-Active: Super Pitfall
- Retro-Active: Dragon Warrior
- Retro-Active: Gauntlet (NES)
Comments are currently closed.
