After Nintendo’s explosion as the "King of Video
Gaming", many legal battles began to pop up. Why do you think these legal
battles became so frequent and did any of the decisions affect the companies
involved in a negative way?
When you are the
king of the hill you are going to have a great deal of people wanting you to
fall from that hill. And Nintendo was that king in the late 80’s early 90’s. It
seemed like Nintendo was in a legal battle every other month. One of their
first big battles happened after Hideyuki Nakajima bought Atari Games in 1987.
On the SNES Nintendo had developed a security chip that would read their games
and if the game didn’t have a chip it wouldn’t get read. That way Nintendo
could control their games and only allow developers that have signed their
terms make games. Nakajima agreed to terms with Nintendo that was just a front
so that he could figure out their security chip on the SNES. Even going through
the trouble of illegally obtaining a reproduction of the 10NES program by
signing a false affidavit. Signing the false affidavit would come back to haunt
Atari in future cases. After creating three licensed games and figuring out the
security Atari filed a suite against Nintendo. (The Ultimate History of Video
Games, pg373). In The end Nintendo won the suite based on the fact there were
other ways around the security that didn’t involve illegally obtaining
reproductions.
The Big battle
of the two companies came over the game Tetris. Through a series of misinformation
exchanged a man named Robert Stein had thought he had the rights and then
started selling them to executives. One of them being Atari who began to work
on their SNES version. Little did they know Nintendo Agreed to terms with the
Soviets on the actual rights to the game. Nintendo then also made a version of
Tetris. Once again the two companies found their way at court over the
copyright of the game. Even though most of everyone agreed Ataris Version was
better Nintendo won the case and Atari had to recall all of their games. Atari
ended up having to just put all of their copies in storage while Nintendo made
millions. “You could look in the back of any gaming magazine and find people
willing to pay 300$ for the Atari version.”(Hoff, Ted. Pg380)
Nintendo trying
to push their power around then filed against Lewos Galoob Toys. LGT got the
rights to a device that allowed players to use codes to help them easily beat
games on the SNES. This was on of the first times that Nintendo went on the
attack, but unfortunately they lost the case and had to pay 15 million dollars
for lost sales. It is important to know that when you are at the top everyone
will want to see you fall. (The Ultimate History of Video Games, pg392)
