Throughout the active history of the NES, Nintendo influenced the video game industry and video game developers in ways that most developers today would rather forget. To encourage participation by third-party developers, Nintendo developed the NES Seal of Quality system. How did it work? Wait and we’ll check.

Safety

Nintendo had a total monopoly on the physical production of the cartridges. They placed an authentication chip in each console (the 10NES authentication chip), and another was placed in each officially licensed cartridge that would carry the “Official NES Quality Seal.” The game would not load if the console did not recognize the authentication chip inside the cart.

This would allow Nintendo to impose really strict rules on its third-party developers, starting with the production of their games in the numbers that Nintendo deems appropriate. This had a huge impact on many developers as, no matter how high the demand for their game was, they were limited in the production that Nintendo would allow them to put out, so in fact it was Nintendo who decided how much profit they would make. allow the developer to do with this physical restriction.

Security violation

It wouldn’t be long before some shady companies wanted to break this security feature. The pirate market abroad was huge. Multicarts were everywhere, and some developers in America wanted to break free from the mold of the “seal of quality.” A company called Color Dreams discovered how to get around the lock chip in 1989; sending a voltage spike from the carriage to deactivate the lock chip. Color Dreams produced some games and through a loophole (by bypassing the chip, they weren’t infringing Nintendo’s patent copyright) they were allowed to do so. However, Nintendo was quietly threatening retailers not to distribute Color Dreams games, and they succeeded. Color Dreams changed its name to Wisdom Tree and began production of religious-themed games as a goad to Nintendo’s morality to rule the game production market.

Other pirate companies at the time used a dongle that was connected to a licensed game with the chip to use for the authentication process with the 10NES. Many imported pirate games worked this way in America.

Tengen, the renegade

Tengen, an Atari company, was the only official licensee to defect from Nintendo. As they did not want to risk being liable for damage to the NES consoles through the voltage spike method, they were able to access the patent for the lock chip and were able to replicate it in their own format: the Rabbit chip. Nintendo sued Tengen for copyright infringement and they won, however, Tengen’s antitrust claims against Nintendo were never decided to this day.

Either you are with us or against us

Nintendo also had a strict third-party developer policy for many years; If you developed a game for Nintendo, you only developed games for Nintendo. This policy was a killer for most of the companies that tried to break or shake Nintendo’s monopoly in the United States. This was the case with the Sega Master System, which never really took off in the United States while enjoying great popularity abroad, even surpassing the NES.

They also had a strict censorship policy for games they released in the United States with their license stamp. They censored all content from US releases, removing all questionable words or adult and semi-adult content. This was alienating to many game developers at the time.

When Nintendo finally relaxed its policies due to government pressure and the fact that developers were starting to defect to the competition, the market opened up a bit again and other companies had a chance to take a fair share of the pie with their systems. . When the NES console was reissued as the NES 2 in the 1990s, the 10NES chip was removed from the console, marking the end of the tightest control ever known over third-party developers in the entire history of video games.

Fortunately, no other video game company ever tried to control video game development for their system so tightly, and now we can enjoy masterpieces on any video game system of our choice.

The Nintendo NES is still quite a popular video game system, even if it’s just because of the fact that it was only this system that Americans were able to enjoy playing video games for years, which makes the element of nostalgia quite high in a game. high percentage of Americans. population that enjoys video games. Many NES games can still be found in the video game store, mainly on the web, where there is a web store specializing in video games for retro games, and a lot of information on where to find such games is available on many websites, including http: / /nintendo-entertainment-system.videogames-for-sale.com

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