Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Mar 18th, 2009
Just in case I haven’t made it clear in past reviews, Nintendo of America during the ’80s was not exactly the Mr. Nice Guy of the gaming world. Oh, the NES was inextricably important to the fabric of my generation, I’m not disputing that… but during the height of the NES’s reign as the King of Consoles, the company itself engaged in monopolistic business practices the likes of which could turn their Washington State neighbors, a little company I like to call Microsoft, green with envy. In particular, their Draconian licensing agreements with third-party developers, which (among many other things) set themselves up as the sole entity capable of manufacturing NES cartridges, thus forcing everyone else to submit to their will if they wanted to get their games onto store shelves. Nintendo also locked its licensees into strait jacket-like exclusivity clauses, forbidding them from developing for any non-Nintendo game console and also prohibiting any game written for the NES from appearing anywhere else.
That last one is in very large part responsible for killing Sega’s Master System in the US, and also helps to explain why certain NES translations of popular arcade titles (which did appear elsewhere) differ so greatly from their source material.
Case in point: The NES version of Gauntlet, today’s Retro-Active subject. Tengen, a subsidiary of Atari Games (and like its corporate parent, named for a Go term; tengen refers to the centermost star point on a Go board), evidently wanted to bring the classic four-player maze shooter to the NES as a straight port of the coin-op, until they signed their licensing deal with the N and discovered all those “Gotchas” in the contract. The main problem, naturally, was that Gauntlet was such a popular arcade title at the time, and Atari was leery of hurting its profits by restricting one of its main cash cows to just one platform, no matter how dominant — and a competitor’s platform at that. (Atari, don’t forget, was still in the console wars during this period, with the 7800 having just hit the streets and the handheld later known as the Lynx in the pipeline.)
Their way around these legal roadblocks was interesting to say the least… and is today emblematic of how developers chose to combat Nintendo’s anti-competitive policies of the time. (It also may have played a huge role in Tengen’s decision to crack Nintendo’s “lockout chip” and strike out on their own, but that’s just speculative on my part.)
The review proper begins on the next page…
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