How Nintendo's Legal Team Destroyed Atari Games Through Courtroom Strategy (mit.edu) 36
Nintendo's lawyers systematically dismantled Atari Games in a landmark 1989 legal battle that reshaped the gaming industry, killing off the Tengen brand until its surprise resurrection recently.
When Atari Games (operating as Tengen) attempted to circumvent Nintendo's control by reverse-engineering the NES security system, Nintendo's legal team discovered a fatal flaw in their rival's approach: Atari had fraudulently obtained Nintendo's proprietary code from the Copyright Office by falsely claiming they were defendants in a nonexistent lawsuit.
Though courts ultimately established that reverse engineering was legal under fair use principles, Atari's deception proved catastrophic. The judge invoked the centuries-old "unclean hands" doctrine, ruling that Atari could not claim fair use protection after approaching the court in bad faith.
"As a result of its lawyers' filthy hands, Atari was barred from manufacturing games for the NES. Nintendo, with its stronger legal team, subsequently 'bled Atari to death,'" writes tech industry attorney Julien Mailland. The court ordered the recall of Tengen's "Tetris" version, now a rare collector's item.
After a 30-year absence, Tengen Games returned in July 2024 with "Zed and Zee" for the NES, finally achieving what its predecessor was legally prohibited from doing.
When Atari Games (operating as Tengen) attempted to circumvent Nintendo's control by reverse-engineering the NES security system, Nintendo's legal team discovered a fatal flaw in their rival's approach: Atari had fraudulently obtained Nintendo's proprietary code from the Copyright Office by falsely claiming they were defendants in a nonexistent lawsuit.
Though courts ultimately established that reverse engineering was legal under fair use principles, Atari's deception proved catastrophic. The judge invoked the centuries-old "unclean hands" doctrine, ruling that Atari could not claim fair use protection after approaching the court in bad faith.
"As a result of its lawyers' filthy hands, Atari was barred from manufacturing games for the NES. Nintendo, with its stronger legal team, subsequently 'bled Atari to death,'" writes tech industry attorney Julien Mailland. The court ordered the recall of Tengen's "Tetris" version, now a rare collector's item.
After a 30-year absence, Tengen Games returned in July 2024 with "Zed and Zee" for the NES, finally achieving what its predecessor was legally prohibited from doing.
Destroyed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tengen went on to release more games in the 90s, for other systems as well. IIRC they found a way around the Sega licencing system for the Megadrive too.
Other manufacturers released unofficial cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System too, but using a different technique that sent a voltage spike to the lockout chip that disabled it. It often took them a few attempts to boot as the spike didn't work every time.
The history of their evolving "security" chips is interesting. The original Famicom didn't have one, the European and US version (the NES) did and it was relatively sophisticated for the time. Meanwhile in Japan they also released the Famicom Disk System, which relied on having a physical Nintendo logo as part of the disk case, which the drive then had teeth that slotted into. Unfortunately for Nintendo, you could just have holes where the teeth were, without forming an actual Nintendo logo.
The Gameboy took it a step further, requiring a Nintendo logo graphic to be on the cartridge. The ROM code that checked it was part of the CPU, and took decades to extract. Of course anyone could put the image in their ROM, but it was copyright Nintendo, and caused a Nintendo copyright logo to be displayed on screen, so they could be sued. IIRC someone figured out how to put a different logo that passed the check in there, but again only decades later.
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And Amiga by 1991 could be hard for about $800 with a good quality color monitor
I want to say it was 1995, I was walking on the east side of Manhattan, and saw an Amiga 500 with monitor in the trash outside of some ritzy apartment building. Both in perfect working order. They were considered literal garbage by that point. I remember rap guys being absolutely amazed with the ease I could capture and sequence samples with a mod tracker. Like I owned some magic box from an ancient civilization, even though it was probably less than ten years old at the time.
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and he manipulated the election with the help of AI and gerrymandering maps preventing 7 millions democrat voters to vote
You have no idea what gerrymandering means. If you did you would know why it does not affect Presidential elections.
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I'd argue that the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act was defacto gerrymandering because it set the number of representatives hard-capped at 435, which in turn directly influences the total number of EVs.
This quantity was defined to avoid having to build yet another building for the House of Representatives.
The problem with this is that if the number of representatives was truly proportional then the high-population states would have much greater numbers of representatives, both in the House and in EVs. That
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I'd argue that the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act was defacto gerrymandering because it set the number of representatives hard-capped at 435, which in turn directly influences the total number of EVs.
This quantity was defined to avoid having to build yet another building for the House of Representatives.
The problem with this is that if the number of representatives was truly proportional then the high-population states would have much greater numbers of representatives, both in the House and in EVs. That's why it's effectively gerrymandering, agrarian states in the upper midwest and upper Rocky Mountains have disproportionately more representation in the electoral college than their populations would naturally call for.
While the original 30,000:1 ratio for representatives might not be supportable, something like 100,000:1 would work in a much larger hall. This would more naturally lead to proportional representation in the House and in the EC. It would also have downstream effects on states because states choose their districts for the House. If the ratio is 100,000:1 then it's much harder for states to gerrymander because the smaller the number of people for a given rep, the harder it is to mess with the boundaries to force districts that are just barely noncompetitive.
It's a bad argument and irrelevant to the notion that somehow Elon did it. Each state gets electors equal to the number of senators plus the number of house representatives. Each state gets 2 senators. The house representatives are based on population. Every argument about this fixates on the minimum 2 EV for the 2 senators, but this is the United STATES of America and every state has an interest in the Presidential election. California has 54 while multiple states only have 3. I'd argue that DC shou
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Which completely glosses-over that the House isn't truly proportional anymore since 435 artificially skews power to low-population states.
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Which completely glosses-over that the House isn't truly proportional anymore since 435 artificially skews power to low-population states.
The "low population states" are still states, and the minimum number of representatives is 1. Their population has a right to be represented too.
Re: Those of you who are (Score:2)
You saw an Amiga in the trash, and you knew it was working? So, you "salvaged" it from the trash?
By 1995, the Amiga trackers were stagnating for years, and the new development in the tracker scene was basically MSDOS-only.
Re: Those of you who are (Score:2)
There was no Soundtracker anymore in 1996. Protracker was 4-channel and has always been; Octamed gave you 8 channels if you were lucky. MSDOS trackers by 1995 allowed you at least 16 or even 32 channels.
Logo requirement in GB is legally ineffective (Score:2)
Of course anyone could put the image in their ROM, but it was copyright Nintendo, and caused a Nintendo copyright logo to be displayed on screen, so they could be sued. IIRC someone figured out how to put a different logo that passed the check in there, but again only decades later.
This was flawed in at least three ways, at least with respect to the law of Slashdot's home country. First, the logo in Game Boy and Game Boy Advance program headers is a picture of text, and typography is not copyrightable in the United States. Second, look at the packaging of Game Boy, Game Boy pocket, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance systems that don't include a bundled game. They typically show the boot screen with the Nintendo logo. This could lead a reasonable consumer to believe that the logo dis
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I think that's why Sega used the phrase "produced by or under licence from SEGA" on later machines, although then undermined their case by demonstrating that it was in fact possible to prevent that message being displayed if you knew how. Their lawyers seemed to think that the fact it could be disabled by wasn't was evidence of misrepresentation, but IIRC the court interpreted it as SEGA simply withholding information in order to force 3rd parties to display the message.
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IIRC they found a way around the Sega licencing system for the Megadrive too
That was Accolade. Basically what Sega did was two things. First they put in a 256-byte phantom boot ROM which displayed the "produced by or under license from SEGA" message, delayed for a moment, then started up the external cartridge ROM. The second thing was a watchdog timer that would reset the system a moment later if a new hardware register wasn't written with the 32-bit ASCII code for "SEGA".
Accolade's "workaround" was to literally copy the first few dozen bytes of the cartridge startup code from a
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I think that last part is what really swung it. The fact that it was forced, but SEGA knew of a way to prevent it being displayed, and actually demonstrated that to the court, meant they couldn't hold Accolade responsible for it.
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The thing is, the Sega protection was really just checking for "Sega" in a specific area of the ROM header. Sega figured that anyone putting that in there would be committing trademark infringement, but that didn't hold up in court.
The NES10 lockout chip had a few flaws - the voltage glitch being one of them. However, that was really an exploit and had to be updated because later NES10 chips were more immune to that attack. The Tengen was straight up infringement since they used the source code to basically
Sudden end of cart shortage caused Atari shock (Score:2)
The Great Videogame Crash of 1984 happened because people were producing tons of crap games for the Atari 2600 to the point where retailers stopped buying games because they were fed up of dealing with returns.
I've read a different take on what caused the Atari shock in a post by "Critical Kate" Willaert [bsky.app]. Consumer uncertainty about game quality was by no means biggest factor, as there were plenty of magazines that reviewed newly released video games. It turned out that in the months leading up to the crash, Atari had a manufacturing bottleneck, and it would routinely short retailers on their orders. To compensate, retailers got in the habit of over-ordering. Except one month, Atari suddenly resolved its manufactu
Title seems inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
"How Atari Games Destroyed Themselves By Committing Legal Fraud" seems more on point.
The more interesting one was Sega and EA (Score:2)
The thing is EA's lockout chip work around didn't actually work. If EA had gone forward with it and released the cartridges it would have lost a ton of money, maybe even gone out of bu
The best part: they didn't even need it (Score:2)
The chip that Tengen used is a completely different CPU from what Nintendo used, and can't run the same code. So it is likely that Tengen managed to reverse-engineer the chip on their own without it. It could have been just some legal intern who did this on his own.
How Atari were caught stealing code .. (Score:2)
More accuratly, how Atari was caught stealing Nintendo's propriarity code.
Reverse engineering the NES (Score:2)
I worked for a computer game company in the late 1980s that had an undercover project to reverse engineer the protection mechanism on NES cartridges so they or more likely one of their publishers could duplicate it without paying Nintendo large per cartridge licensing fees. There was enclosed office with a door that was always shut, a window they kept the blinds closed at all times, and lights turned down even when they finally let me in on what they were doing in there. Before that it was a secret proje
jailbreak! (Score:1)
Nintendo: an early enemy of all programmers (Score:4, Interesting)
Before I was a Microsoft-hater (I didn't start hating them until 1989 while getting fed up trying to use LIM EMS as a means of dealing with MS-DOS' limitations while jealously eyeing all the 68k machines' (Amiga/ST/Mac) flat memory), if asked who is the worst of the worst, I would have had to say Nintendo. Their efforts to prevent independent development on Nintendo hardware (both through technical and legal means) made them The Enemy of the day.
When I bitch about iOS being a video-game-console-inspired personal computer, such that mainstream users are limited to single source bottleneck for software, the saga behind TFA is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. It's disgusting and intolerable for hardware makers to limit what the user is allowed to do with the hardware they bought. And especially from a 1980s perspective, if you're a user, then there's also a reasonable chance you're a programmer, so you might want to program your computer.
Most egregious of all was the lockout chip. I see the beginning of so much evil, such as the concepts behind DMCA's 1201, as emerging from the industry's reaction to the video game crash of 1983. Nintendo's decision to do such a thing, has turned out to be one of the more important moments in computer history. They never should have been allowed to get away with this shit, and had we nipped it in the bud in the mid 1980s, we would be better off today.
My position used to be that it should be legal for manufacturers to do these dirty things, however wrong it is. Until the late 1990s, I thought DRM should be legal. I think the attacker generally has the advantage, so whatever technical means are used to prevent third-party development, it will be defeated and all the effort put into it, wasted. I thought the practice would go away because everyone's attitude would be that security-through-obscurity doesn't work, so they're just adding unnecessary expense and unreliability.
But with DMCA's passing (and now over a quarter century without repeal, WTF!?!) I no longer think that, since that moved the law from neutrality to favoring the monopolist. And so: the lockout chip, and all its modern descendants, should be forcefully outlawed, and any company caught using such things should have all their copyrights PDed and all their remaining assets seized and liquified and the proceeds given to EFF to be used to sue the next offender to death. Repeat avenging cycle until this particular evil is extinct. ;-)
Thanks for "radicalizing" me, Nintendo. You were my very first "oh, fuck those guys" and your 1980s actions helped form my 2025 opinions. And maybe I shouldn't, but I blame you for all of today's locked-down hardware, more accountable to manufacturers than to owners. Nintendo, you taught me early in life, before the iPhone even existed, that I will never buy an iPhone.
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Nintendo's return to grace was mostly having a US office for a time that understood the US market. So no stupid lawsuits, a focus on fun and inclusivity, and relatively reasonable pricing.
They axed Reggie Fils-Aime, the last of that era's American officials, six years ago, and now they're trying to figure out why their recent announcement of a Switch II that costs nearly double its predecessor's price and will have games in the $80-100 range has gone down like a lead balloon.
I'm a believer you can't really
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games in the $80-100 range
Come on, what? There's been one game announced for $100, and it's a limited edition of a third party title that comes with extra goodies. There's a price list here. [ign.com] I know that gamers are particularly prone to brand loyalty, and throwing around random bits of biggoted bullshit as though it were factual, but this is just stupid.
The Switch 1 came out in 2017 for $300. Go find an inflation calculator before you start claiming that the Switch 2 is overpriced. If you want to complain about the $80 pro control
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Oh wow, THREE games that are outside of that price range, truly I have been suckered by *checks notes* noting the well covered outrage [google.com].
And the three games that are outside that price range are two games for $70 and Street Fighter 94 for $60! Wow! What bargains! It's bizarre anyone would complain!
As far as the Switch 2 costing twice as much being justified by an "inflation calculator", I assume you're buying 16Gb SSDs for $200 these days, right? I mean, taking into account inflation that seems a reasonable p
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Maybe Nintendo should read the room here, as should you.
I mean, I did. I said, "I know that gamers are particularly prone to brand loyalty, and throwing around random bits of biggoted bullshit as though it were factual, but this is just stupid." That's you. I was talking about you there. The room. You.
And clearly I was right. Presented with evidence that your specific factual claim was bullshit, and that inflation... exists, your response is, "Grr! I no care about facts or inflation! Why not Nintendo use magic?" And you give a link to search results, and the
I briefly worked for Atari TenGen as a playtester (Score:2)
My first job in high school was working as a playtester for Atari TenGen games, at that time mostly games made for the Sega Genesis (this was 1991-ish). I had just gotten my driver's license and I would drive to Atari in Milpitas during one summer to work with the other temps who were mostly random people of all ages and backgrounds employed through a local temp agency. We'd play the games over and over, trying to break them and find bugs. The usual thing.
A friend who I had met through the Amiga scene