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Comment by MattPearce | Hacker News Reader

As a developer (and one who has worked with Nintendo as a third party), I have nothing but respect for the man.

You are right in comparing him to Jobs:

" In 1986, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noted that "Atari collapsed because they gave too much freedom to third-party developers and the market was swamped with rubbish games." In response, Nintendo limited the number of titles that third-party developers could release for their system each year, and promoted its "Seal of Quality", which it allowed to be used on games and peripherals by publishers that met Nintendo's quality standards." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

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What Nintendo platform did you develop for? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshi_Yamauchi#Nintendo_64

"Yamauchi admitted at the 2001 Nintendo Space World event that he had intentionally ordered the Nintendo 64 to be difficult to program games for. The idea was to repel untalented third-party developers from the console, and hence tighten the quality of third-party games. However, his plan backfired and merely increased the number of poorly developed games for the console. As a result of this, the Nintendo Gamecube was to take a step in the other direction, and provide an easy, smooth and intuitive programming environment for game developers.[6][9]"

It would have been interesting to see Yamauchi-san carry on through the Wii and Wii U/3DS eras -- what would he have done differently than Iwata? (On a side-note about the Crash, E.T. gets shit on a lot when it's arguably not so bad a game and ahead of its time in many respects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NgL5H2RdI4 with fixes for common complaints: http://www.neocomputer.org)/projects/et/)

I worked on a title for the 3DS. I don't have experience with the N64, so I can't speak for their policies around that time.

As a child I used to wonder about that "Seal of Quality" because it was on every Nintendo game you could find. Every game had this seal.

Either it was a Nintendo gimmick or the market didn't offer games that didn't have the seal.

edit: lost myself in a double negation

The seal was basically the same as saying "this game is licensed by Nintendo." There were some games without the seal, but they were unauthorized and typically Nintendo sued them.

You couldn't get a game on a standard Nintendo cartridge without being licensed, so these games were actually put on reverse-engineered, custom manufactured cartridges[1] that overloaded the piracy detection circuit[2] on the NES.

Interestingly, when Nintendo built the Game Boy, they came up with a novel way of protecting it from unlicensed games: They made the system check that the console had a bitmap of the Nintendo logo at a specific part of the cartridge memory, and refused to boot if it was not there. Unlicensed cartridge manufacturers could then be sued for trademark infringement.[3] This logo was actually the one displayed when the console booted up, which is why if you booted the console without a cartridge inserted, you would see a black rectangle in the place where the Nintendo logo normally appeared.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_(Atari)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

[3] http://fantranslation.org/ja/node/16

The trademark infringement strategy is great and super scary at the same time

My understanding is that Sega v. Accolade[1] made it moot, so trademark infringement can no longer be claimed in such a manner (it's now considered fair use).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

The market tried, I can't find a link at the moment and I'm unsure if this was NES, SuperNES or even on a Sega console, but there was a legal battle around making a game on un-licensed cartridge. You didn't see any, because Nintendo succeeded in being in control of what could be released.

It was the NES, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10NES

They eventually lost I believe, and some developers worked around it by making cartridges that would pass through the chip from an existing game.

Super Noah's Ark 3D was an unlicensed SNES cartridge that needed an official cartridge "pass through" to work.

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/1/14684/383841-...

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