Fun fact: Atari and Tengen are both named after terms from the game of Go, the former describing a group of stones that can be captured [1], the latter the center point of the board [2].
And don't forget Sente Technologies, an arcade game company in the 1980s founded by ex-Atari employees. Sente is also a term from Go -- meaning to be in the strategic position where your opponent will have to respond to your attacks.
Modern consoles need to be connected to the internet to work. I remember that with the PS2 they only had to hack it once and it could run pirated games forever.
Now a lot of games have enough internet features (including things like leaderboards or hybrid features, eg Luigi’s Balloon World in Super Mario Odyssey) that often exploits require you stick to a certain OS version, locking you out of those features, regardless of if it’s a pirated copy or not.
Only the Xbox must be connected to the internet at least once to work - PS4&PS5 both work without ever connecting to the internet, if you stick to games off disc.
I'm not an expert: I've been looking at hwfly to expand the capabilities of the Switch. The system reminds me of the older style cracks that required a modchip to be soldered in. I cannot vouch for the system as I have zero first-hand knowledge. The ecosystem looks interesting. Hekate seems to be the popular bootloader though I may be using the incorrect term. https://github.com/CTCaer/hekate
The "voltage spike" method caused a cat-and-mouse game between Nintendo and the unlicensed game companies, where Nintendo would make a new NES board revision and then the companies had to figure out a way around their new current protection. Some companies even published directions in their game manuals for how to modify the NES console to get around the protection: https://files.catbox.moe/9t03p6.png
My father brought home unlicensed games from Hong Kong for my brother and I to play on the NES in the 80s. I recall after putting in the game and powering on the NES, the screen used to flash for a second, kind of like when the reset button was pressed. It's interesting to read that the negative voltage to evade the DRM may have caused that!
My favorite unlicensed are then Wisdom Tree games. I have the bright blue Bible Adventures cartridge in my collection. It sticks out so badly and is such a terrible, terrible game... That it is one of my favorite thrift store finds for the console :)
I was about to bring this up! I got one of these absolutely terrible games in the mid-90s (long after the NES was the hot thing and we had all loved to the SNES or even N64, I can’t remember the year) at the Christian book store when I was with my aunt and my grandmother, and even at that age (10 or 11), I knew it would be both terrible and also terrible in a truly wonderful way. It did not disappoint.
I can’t remember which one I had now (it might have been Bible Adventures but it might have been the one that was the Menace Beach clone), except that it exists in my parents basement somewhere along with my other oddities of childhood.
IIRC, Wisdom Tree was the first company to bypass the lockout chip, before even Tengen/Atari. I have to think the low market for those games, unlike Tengen which was for sale at Toys R Us like real games, probably prevented them for being caught up in some of the legal stuff.
Hah I remember trying to go into the casinos in one of these games would make you take damage. My friend was super Christian and we were allowed over to his house on Sunday but were only allowed to play these Bible games!
Another game they made was Spiritual Warfare-- and surprisingly, it's a fantastic game. It plays just like a sequel to the original Legend of Zelda, and I dare say is superior to it in some regards.
Was going to add this myself. It's too bad that the videos linked above only give a minute or so to Spiritual Warfare, because unlike Bible Adventures, Spiritual Warfare was actually good! I played the heck out of that game, knew the location of every fruit, and had pretty much the entire game map committed to memory.
When I was growing up I didn’t have legend of Zelda, I had this game. The trivia where you get the question right and the guy‘s bowtie spins, The pomegranate which functions like a boomerang, getting punished for going into a bar. All of it is awesome.
My personal favorite of theirs is Super 3D Noah's Ark. It's essentially Wolfenstein 3D -- they licensed the engine and everything -- but instead of shooting Nazis with guns until they die, you instead shoot food at animals with slingshots until they fall asleep from satiation.
(It was originally supposed to be a straight-up adaptation of the movie Hellraiser, but they decided this was insufficiently Christian after it became clear that it would look like a cheap knock-off of Doom, which was released during the game's early development.)
The whole thing reads like a tragic waste to me. Too bad you couldn't code assembly on a C64/Amiga out of the box properly either. Now with the Raspberry 4 we finally after 40 years of corporate shenanigans have something where kids could make their own games and instead they are playing mobile games.
I'm making an open 3D action MMO engine to sort this out. If your computer does not have a keyboard/mouse it's useless for eternity.
Even before the Raspberry, with the rise of open source programming languages and libraries (or even commercial toolkits that are cheap), there was the possibility to make some pretty complex games!
And indeed, some people made use of them. But for most people, it's easier to play games than to create them, just as for most people it's easier to read books than to write them.
But tool-wise, we've been living in paradise for a long time now. Whether we take advantage of that is up to us.
True, but the energy consumption is key: Raspberry 4 draws 1/3 of a C64 at 1000x perf, at 2Gflops/W not even the M1 (at 2.5Gflops/w) chip is hurting that stat with 5nm vs. 28nm for the Raspberry.
Tools are peaking and linux with TWM from the 1987 is winning! ;)
In any case, I was able to start programming my first games using a pirated copy of GW Basic on a PC XT. That's all you really needed.
Then I think around the 286 or 386 PC clones I discovered open source libraries like Allegro (a competitor of today's SDL), and it wasn't even pirated anymore! Really, all you need to program games.
> "Because, if you haven't noticed, we are running out of energy?"
Energy as an abstract concern is a very low priority for any hobbyist games creator. You care about building cool stuff. You only care about energy if it impacts your game.
> "Basic is not performant enough to make games that are interesting."
This is simply not true. There are even commercial BASICs that specialize in game creation.
> "If you could afford a 286/386 you are not really in the majority of the human population."
Nobody with an interest in videogame creation is. It was a very cheap 286 PC clone anyway; we couldn't afford a brand PC. But I acknowledge most people weren't programming at home back then.
My point: Raspberries aren't at all needed for programming. Any computer would do. You don't need a magic device.
Minecraft? Roblox? VR Chat? What about the thousands of independent games made by kids and young adults that are created and posted to Itch.io and Steam every day? Does that not count for anything?
>I'm making an open 3D action MMO engine to sort this out.
Yes, I'm sure this will be the Unity killer that everyone is waiting for. rolls eyes
"Flat" VR chat is perfectly fine for plenty of users, including large streamers and content creators. You get slightly more awkward manipulation but truth be told, VR chat doesn't use the VR for anything more than immersion.
VR blends perfectly fine with non-VR actually, and there are many games that let you play as VR in a non-VR lobby. Check out Paranormal Activity on steam. The game was designed as a normal mouse and keyboard video game, with awkward controls and a strong horror focus, but they added a VR option so if you want, you can feel fully immersed while being chased by evil ghosts and you can pee your pants in fear while your friends stuck with a normal screen are only moderately afraid.
For the two games in question, the non-VR client lets you play homemade games and chat with your friends or strangers who have VR or also happen to play the non-VR version of either. It's literally just a different control method, like using TrackIR in a racing sim.
On knowledge that is freely given to them that they can build on. Also, there's now an unbelievable wealth of knowledge available to forego any of those engines and develop everything from scratch if they so chose.
> they can't sell for real money without being exploited
Only... They can and they do sell for real money. No idea what "exploitation" you're talking about.
If your game is based on technology you dont understand you don't really own it until you can recreate that stack... this means litteraly nobody owns anything if applied to the extreme (OS + language) but if you use an engine that is semi closed you don't have control over your future.
> If your game is based on technology you dont understand you don't really own it until you can recreate that stack
This is entirely irrelevant to "I wish kids today created their own games". They do, and it's easier than ever to do so.
> you don't have control over your future
Let's see: people create and sell their own games, there's a veritable indie renaissance happening, young people can get into game development (or into programming in general) easier than ever, but... they somehow "don't control their future".
> For the exploitation part
So you want: everything to be free, but you also want people making games to earn "real" money (as opposed to fake money they are earning right now)?
Your original claim: " something where kids could make their own games and instead they are playing mobile games."
This is patently false, as it's easier than ever to create your own games, and kids are creating their own games.
> And you can only create new things if you control the fundamentals
This statement is as false as it is stupid. What you're basically saing is "kids should go ahead and learn how to make game engines from scratch before even knowing how to create a game" which is a huge barrier for entry for any kid. There's nothing wron with using abstractions first.
Additionally, once again, there's so much info on fundamentals now, too, that anyone can go ahead and "control the fundamentals".
> Good luck with money, it's going to get complicated soon.
Yeah, nebulous statement predicting future doom when original statement was the patently false "they can't sell for real money without being exploited"
I don’t know about the Amiga, but the C64, Atari, and TI computers of the era either booted into a BASIC prompt or you could get there with one or two key presses. Many of us spent a lot of our youth making games and sharing them with our friends.
Agreed with your overall point, but I have to mention that out-of-the-box C64 BASIC was so crippled, most game related I/O had to be done via POKE and PEEK, i.e. not really BASIC and as low level as it gets.
Nevertheless, it was my first programming language ever.
Kind of doubt that kids at the time would want to be programming EEPROMs for their games. Even if they had access to a 6502 assembler, the information on how to program a console game was esoteric and would be hard to find on bookstore shelves.
A lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8&t=1s).
There's another episode from Gaming Historian specifically for Tengen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLA_d9q6ySs
It talks about how Atari abuses the copyright system to gain access to Nintendo’s protection system source code.
Nope, while Nintendo definitely abused copyright law doesn't mean Atari/Tengen is in the clear. They specifically requested the lockout code fron the US Copyright Office under the pretense that they'll be suing Nintendo.
Quality is subjective. The value Nintendo was preserving with their cartridge licensing was the retail price. Too many low-cost games taking up shelf space in retail stores makes it harder to sell premium games. Games were sold for Nintendo consoles at remarkable prices, which encouraged studios to invest in high quality games. Chrono Trigger in 1995 was released for 11400yen (US$124.50 at the time).
But an app store doesn't have the limitation of inventory. No number of low-cost games will impair the ability to sell the premium titles. Not needing to worry about dilution, the store operator reverts to rent-seeking behavior and will approve the most number of games as they can. Or will create artificial scarcity by restricting access to popular titles.
When buying physical media, licensing balances the needs of the publisher, producer, and customer. But in the digital world there's almost no overlap.
If Nintendo invested more in curation, visibility, and filtering tools the shovelware wouldn't be such a problem for me. I only have so much time I'm willing to look at titles and if I see 90% crap I'm less likely to make purchases.
Netflix also has unlimited inventory space and they spend tons of engineering effort in optimizing the content they show people when they launch the app.
That is interesting, there is nothing stopping high budget games from being on phones, its just cultural. Genshin impact can be played on phones, but it is one of very few examples.
I think it comes more down to economics. There’s more money to be made from ad filled games and the freemium model than there is for high budget games (so much so for the matter that you see the freemium model creep into non-mobile gaming too).
I’m the early days of smart phone gaming there was a brief push for immersive 3D games like Deadspace. The games were good but not enough people were willing to pay for it when gamers generally already had better devices for gaming on.
Backtrack a few more years, before ads were prevalent on phones, and you had a massive library of Java based games for feature phones plus Windows CE / PocketPC ports of popular PC games (like Tomb Raider). In fact this market appeared to be growing so much that Nokia released a phone/ console hybrid device (the Nokia N-Gage).
So there was a culture of bringing quality titles to mobile phones and PDA but the economics wasn’t there.
You can't have a game be free on one platform and cost money on another either, at least I am not aware of any such games. So either it is free/cheap everywhere or you don't release it on phones.
Edit: And by high budget games I mean games with a high development budget, not games that costs a lot to buy. Genshin impact is a AAA game that runs on phones, they invested $100 million to make it, that is what I meant by it being a high budget game.
My point is that the discussion wasn't around "high budget", it was around "high price". Yes Genshin Impact is high budget, but it's free everywhere so it's not relevant to the phenomenon of there effectively being a cap on game prices on phones.
> You can't have a game be free on one platform and cost money on another either, at least I am not aware of any such games.
It's not totally unheard of. Among Us is paid on PC/console but free on mobile. PUBG was similar before it went free to play on all platforms earlier this year.
So how do we preserve an ecosystem and prevent what I think you are outlining is a bimodal distribution between a vast majority of cheap low cost games and a few high production value games, is that correct?
If you believe in the free market, the entire game ecosystem is free games with pay to unlock features. Or you believe in a curated market and let the curator of each market set rules.
There was a vast amount of shovelware on the NES as well, it's just been forgotten and the gems have persevered in everyone's memory. I have an NES mini and I put the entire NES library on it, and went through some of them with some friends-- the vast majority were garbage.
I am sure I shoveled a lot of garbage that I rented at the video rental store that was inside the grocery store into my NES, but that one just stood out.
> I find myself a lot more nuanced about walled gardens sometimes.
Getting the keys to your device's walled garden does not imply you're compelled to leave that garden. You can stick to the official store, that contains only high-quality games blessed and vetted by Nintendo.
Not that I like walled gardens, but I do think that once you open up the door, many quality titles will skip the store which otherwise would have listed. So the garden is now incomplete. You haven't just given access to the things you previously blocked. Now some users will need to venture outside to find apps that otherwise would have been in the app store.
>> On the estore specifically there’s a lot of low quality shovelware.
This hasn’t changed much since the NES days.
That AVGN made his career reviewing - to start - shitty NES games, indicates that the ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’, or it’s ‘curation’ - really didn’t matter much.
And it’s not like the NES was alone, even more recently, the Wii was the literal king of shovelware - if you haven’t heard the story of ‘Gingerbread Ninja’ and it’s related clones hilariously sold as different titles, you should check it out.
It’s always been this way. The walls of ‘Walled Gardens’ don’t seem to really hold up to any potential scammer with a ladder. The iOS App Store is filled with scammy garbage copies of legit apps.
My parents got me the Tengen version of Tetris back in the day. They didn't know the difference, of course, and neither did I. What I remember is that it looked different from my friends' version and it had two player. Pretty neat stuff. I don't know where all of my games went, unfortunately.
Yeah this finally clears up why I have memories of a completely different NES Tetris game than I could find any reference to online. I thought this was one of those Mandela effect situations.
TY so much for reminding me to play Tengen Super Sprint! Was searching for the next NES racing game to conquer after racking up some ridiculous personal highs in R.C. Pro AM. Just endless fun ;)
Love those kinds of games. Don’t miss [Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's] Super Off Road and its spiritual sequel (which I only just found out about the other day!), Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat.
We liked Tengen Tetris so much we "bought" it from Blockbuster by telling them we lost it and paying the fee. We couldn't find it to buy any other way, and now I know why! If they are rare and expensive now I guess that was a good move. I should call my parents and ask if they still have it.
Did a quick search and it seems unverified copies of Tengen Tetris in their custome case without the box or inserts are going between $55-$120 right now.
Wow, amazing research. I didn't even know I lived through a golden age of arcade games or home consoles (not sure which the author was referring to).
I was confused by "Klax", thinking it was a pirate version of old Colecovision platformer Zaxxon but it was actually quite different. I didn't experience NES until 1988. Up to that point (<5 years after early home consoles like 2600, Intellivision and Colecovision had petered out) people of my age cohort had hoped that the pre-Windows PC platforms like the Atari 800, Apple IIe, or the first Macintosh would provide good gaming experiences but we were mostly disappointed. There were a few bright spots like Dark Castle and Choplifter, but the chasm between those experiences and what you could find in the arcades were significant. The NES was a huge development.
Wow, Choplifter takes me back. There was also the excellent Rescue Raiders. Spy vs. Spy on the Apple II was pretty good for multi-player fun (using one computer and keyboard), as well.
I owned a pirated version of C64 Spy vs Spy (don't judge me: nobody owned legit versions of any C64 games in my country) and I never figured out what you were supposed to do.
I understood it was about setting traps for the other spy, but what the overall goal was eluded me. And I didn't even know it was based on some obscure comic or cartoon.
Yeah. Klax was great. I spent a lot of time playing it on the BBC Micro as a boy - possibly one of the last games released for the system. My high score was in the millions.
I was surprised to later find out just how many other end-of-life platforms it was ported to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klax_(video_game) - who even signed off on all of this nonsense?! In particular, I have no idea why they bothered with the Atari 2600 version... how much did they make from that? Though I'm glad they did, because it's actually surprisingly good.
(The ZX Spectrum version is decent too! You'd think it'd struggle, what with all those colours, but it's well done.)
I was a big sports fan in the late 1980's and RBI Baseball had the actual Major League Baseball names and stats along with a big instruction book showing even more stats including speed. I still play it a few times a year and it's still a lot of fun.
As the article said the Afterburner port was pretty good. The Gauntlet II port was far superior to the Gauntlet I version. The Gauntlet II game also supported the NES Satellite / Four Score attachments so you could have 4 players just like the arcade version.
I had it too (same shape) and it was definitely the hardest game, though I did beat it once with the wizard. While SMB 3, Zelda 2, and the Castlevanias were my favorites and clearly in another league, Gauntlet was outstanding to me at the time, especially the music.
Yeah Gauntlet holds a special place in my heart, which got me to buy the... remake? that came out on PC a few years ago. I respect a game that is savage and willing to stick to that. Though a fair bit of how insane it was may be tied to the arcade roots where they wanted you to keep feeding in quarters.
Anyone care to comment how hard it would have been for a third-party to reverse engineer the 10NES chip at the time rather then perform the 'easy' way and obtain the source code under questionable circumstances from the copyright office?
The games Nintendo didn't want you to play? Tengen didn't want to subject themselves to Nintendo's rules and quality control, and decided instead to work around Nintendo's lockout chip. Nintendo isn't really at fault here.
So it expects a series of numbers. If you record those numbers, you are violating Nintendos copyright. But asking for them from the copyright office to use in court and then productionize them is okay?
No, taking the code from the copyright office wasn't OK, but by the time the court cases were making progress the NES didn't really matter any more and they settled outside of court.
Also, recording the numbers doesn't necessarily work. The chip is essentially an algorithm.
I haven't dug through the source to understand the algorithm, but imagine a basic scenario where the algorithm is "challenge * 3"
If the challenge is "1 2 3" and you record a response of "3 6 9", that response won't work if the next challenge is "2 4 6". If you actually dig into the chip and copy their algorithm, that can be copyright infringement (yes there's clean room reverse engineering, but if the logic is convoluted enough that can be rather difficult and take time)
Clean room reverse engineering is for the case where you want to translate source code to source code and prove that you didn't just copy and paste it. (It's pretty easy for two people to generate the exact same bytes of source code for any given algorithm. The documentation around clean room reverse engineering is to prove that you independently came up with the same thing. The code is copyrightable, the idea isn't.)
If you open up some chip and look at it under the microscope and translate the transistors you see into C code, that's not copyright infringement. (But it might be patented. Patents are super weird in that if you come up with an idea completely independently of someone else, and the other person patents it, you're not allowed to use the idea!)
[1]: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Atari
[2]: https://senseis.xmp.net/?Tengen