When Atari nearly wiped out the gaming industry in 1983, Nintendo managed to regain the confidence of gamers by reviving interest in home entertainment. It was not a magic pill that helped the company, but tough conditions for developers. After 35 years, the Japanese company has retained its strict character, but now Nintendo’s tight knit has reached its own fans.
It may even seem to some gamers that the “Japanese” have gone crazy, handing out lawsuits to everyone who dares to take an extra step to the left. Others are very surprised at the “big N” pricing policy, which loves to play with the strongest feeling of gamers – nostalgia.
And yet, is it worth calling Nintendo the new “universal evil” of the gaming industry?
How it all started
Before entering the US market, Nintendo had entertained Japanese gamers with the Famicom for two years. The console was so popular that it caught the attention of pirates who made copies of the games, selling them bypassing the company. When the “big N” decided to conquer the USA with the NES console, it took care of protection from hackers who could spoil sales in an already dying market.
The first thing the engineers did was physical protection by developing a new design for the console. Now the Japanese cartridges did not fit the US version of the console, which prevented third-party sellers from buying games from pirates for the US market. The second line of defense was a special chip built into the console, which checked for the presence of a key on the cartridge and launched the game if it was there. This stopped not only pirates, but also third-party developers.
Still, Nintendo realized that exclusives alone would not get you far and decided to give out licenses to studios to make games for the NES.
Third-party developers happily agreed to release games for the “big N”, but the company has set tough conditions. First, the developers had to first make the game, the cover design and the ad to get approval or rejection. Secondly, the studios signed a contract that forbade the release of games on other consoles for two years, as well as create no more than five games for the NES per year.
Such methods helped Nintendo avoid massive piracy, but only for a while. As a result, large companies figured out how to bypass the security system, which led to a flood of pirate games. Since then, Nintendo has practically not climbed out of courtrooms due to patent infringements and piracy.
Still, this is standard practice for large gaming companies. Even Sony sometimes sues pirates. For example, in October, the company filed a lawsuit against a guy who was selling pre-built PlayStation 4 consoles.
Step left, step right – firing squad
In 2015, Big N closed the Super Mario 64 remake, which was being developed on the Unity engine by Roystan Ross. The guy decided that it would be fun to update the game with high resolution textures, but the lawyers of “big N” did not agree with him.
When the guy decided to show his creation to the community, he received praise, as well as a warning from Nintendo. Ross explained that he was doing the project for himself and creating the environment from scratch, using only some animations from Super Mario Galaxy, but they did not want to listen to him.
Nintendo closed the Metroid II: Return of Samus remake a year later. Back then, the players only had the GameBoy version, which looked very ancient. The developers also drew graphics from scratch using their own work, but Nintendo again sent lawyers. Then such actions were explained by the release of Metroid Prime: Federation Force, but fans called such a move “spitting in the face.” In the same year, the fan project of the Pokemon universe Pokemon Prism fell. We have been developing the game for eight years, but all our efforts were canceled out by yet another hello from Nintendo’s lawyers.
What unites these projects is their free nature. The developers of Pokemon Prism and the Metroid II: Return of Samus remake didn’t even plan to sell these games. They were made specifically for the community, which, incidentally, was delighted. At the same time, Nintendo is understandable because they were protecting their intellectual property. Just like 35 years ago, the company monitors the quality of projects that use the names of franchises and does not want amateur work to appear there.
But the case with the Pokemon Company is very difficult to understand (technically, this is a lawsuit from the Pokemon Company, but Nintendo owns this company). In 2015, Larkin Jones started fundraising on Gofundme. The guy asked for some $ 4 thousand, but not for a new fan project, but to pay a fine. The Pokemon Company lawyers accused the guy of copyright infringement for organizing a Pokemon-style party. The company did not like the fact that the poster depicted Pikachu and Snivy, and in the description of the event, the organizers talked about “Pokemon themed drinks, Smash Bros competitions with a cash prize, dancing and a cosplay competition.”
Perhaps the lawyers were embarrassed that the guy was selling tickets to the event, but in fact the party did not bring him income. Jones spent the $ 500 raised on a DJ, gift cards and jewelry, so the party was created purely for fun.
Non-pirated
There is another caste of players that Nintendo is constantly in conflict with. Since the early 2000s, game console emulators began to appear, which allowed players to run images of old games (roms) on their computers. The community is still debating whether launching ROMs on emulators is piracy, but Nintendo has already decided.
Beginning in the summer of 2018, the company began an active fight against sites that distribute classic games for the NES, SNES and other “big N” consoles. The first under the distribution were the resources LoveROMs and LoveRETRO, on which the archives of old games were stored. Nintendo demanded that the sites be removed, as well as $ 2 million for infringement of each trademark and $ 150,000 for each game.
The trial ended only recently. It turned out that the sites were owned by a married couple Jacob and Christian Mathias, who registered the sites for their own company, Mathias Designs. The court sided with Nintendo, which is now seeking $ 12 million in compensation.
On the one hand, the couple used someone else’s intellectual property, but on the other, these games are already 30 years old. The problem is that gamers who want to get acquainted with the classics have nowhere to get the games officially. A Switch Online subscription only gives you a tiny fraction of the projects, as does Virtual Console, which doesn’t even have Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Advance games. Even the popular NES Classic has only 30 titles, which is not even one percent of the entire library. In the end, all that remains is to buy the original NES on eBay or “pirate”.
In addition, it is a little hypocritical for Nintendo to scold the distributors of copies of old games. Frank Sifaldi proved at GDC 2016 that the company is selling a pirated version of Super Mario Bros. Sifaldi compared the source code of the online version of the game and that purchased from the Nintendo store.
In the official Super Mario Bros. found the code written by the programmer Marat Faizullin for one of the first versions of the NES emulator. This line is only present in the pirated version of Super Mario Bros. to reproduce the necessary hardware settings and run the pirated version of the game. The configuration parameters of the original NES console varied on a per-cartridge basis, so there should be no line found in the licensed copy.
A similar case happened with the PlayStation Classic. A journalist from Kotaku found out that the console runs on the free PCSX ReARMed emulator. That is, Sony offers gamers to give away $ 100 for a free emulator with rums that are in the public domain.
Hello greed old friend
Nintendo’s attitude to its users is also shown by the company’s pricing policy. For example, consider The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which was released in 2006 for the Gamecube and Wii, and in 2016 reached the Nintendo Wii U as an HD re-release. For the 10-year-old Twilight Princess with improved graphics, Nintendo asked for the same $ 50, which is comparable to the prices of large modern projects.
Interestingly, in 2015 Sony is releasing Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, a re-release of the first three games in the Uncharted series with improved graphics. The publication did not receive additional content, but the players were selling three improved games for $ 40. Three, Karl.
In fact, Nintendo is the only company that allows itself to sell re-released games to gamers at the price of new ones. Some studios generally give away improved versions for free if the player has a licensed digital copy of the original.
Some gamers are even furious that Nintendo is selling games from 30 years ago, but here they are wrong. The company does not upload bad projects to eShop, moreover, these games can still compete with releases from independent developers.
Finally
Nintendo’s policies are understandable but difficult to accept. The company takes care of its intellectual property, but does not give gamers a legal way to fully play their classic games. When fans show their love for certain franchises by creating free remakes for the community, Nintendo starts brandishing lawsuits. And at the same time, the company is not ashamed to sell old games at the price of new ones.
Now Nintendo looks more like a dictator who has been blinded by success and power than that “evil”. Gamers remember very well what the company has done to develop the industry, but that does not justify the “big N” policy in 2018. I would like to say that before Nintendo was different, but no – it just got tougher.
