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?
These legal battles because so frequent because the home
console market was a hot commodity and everybody wanted a piece of the
proverbial pie. After working so hard on
consoles and games, each company had to fight to keep their little niche they
carved out safe. A terrific example of
this is Sega Enterprises, Ltd. v. Accolade Inc.. Accolade decided to port some of their games
over to the Sega Genesis. After a few
successful ports, Sega introduced the Genesis III which had improved security
against unlicensed games. Successfully
bypassing this new security caused the Sega Logo to load on the screen while
the game was being powered up. Sega used
this fact to bring Accolade Inc. to court in hopes that it could keep them from
producing any more unlicensed titles.
While Sega ultimately lost, this case has been a long-standing example
of copyright infringement within the industry.
If this case were to be tried again today, the results would very likely
be different.
Another example of an early court case that shaped the
early video game era is the States of NY and MD v. Nintendo of America
case. Essentially, Nintendo claimed
there was a shortage of the ROM chips used in the Funicom and Nintendo
Entertainment System game cartridges.
The important claims of the accusers were that Nintendo was
overregulating its licenses and shutting out competitors. The reason this case is so important is
because it’s widely believed that this case aided in Nintendo’s decision to
allow its licensees to manufacture their own ROM cartridges. This in itself was a huge victory for the
video game industry as a whole. Not only
would shortages of games be a smaller issue, but also it created an opportunity
for game developers to work with other consoles.
Along with the major court battles, there were also a few
occurrences in which it was cheaper and easier to just turn a blind eye. Wisdom
Tree, a developer that catered towards violent free religious type games,
basically took the violence, blood, gore, and questionable content out of games
such as Castle Wolfenstein 3D for the
SNES and added animals or biblical trivia questions. Taking them to court would have cost Nintendo time and money. Considering it was the end of the 16-bit
generation and PC gaming was becoming more prevalent, Nintendo took the high
road and let the infraction go.
