It sounds paranoid, but keep in mind it had only been a few years since the controversy over Custer’s Revenge, an unlicensed third-party game for the Atari 2600 that is also one of the worst ideas in the history of Western civilization.
Tetris nes software#
Any unlicensed third-party software issued for the NES would simply fail to work. This keeps bootleg games from running, but more importantly, it gave Nintendo final authority on what it would allow to be published for the NES. The original NES has a lockout chip built into it, the 10NES, which authenticates any cartridges put inside the system. At the same time, Tengen was working behind the scenes to defeat Nintendo’s security measures, so the company could publish as many games in a year as they wanted. It incorporated Tengen at the end of 1987 to publish R.B.I. This allowed them to produce more games, while still working under Nintendo’s rules.Ītari took that one step further. Several developers at the time got around this by establishing a shell company to publish their extra titles, such as Konami (Ultra Games) and Acclaim (LJN). Combined with Nintendo’s stranglehold on cartridge manufacturing, this left third party companies in situations where they might actually lose money rather than see any profit on their releases. The 1989 Tengen Tetris looks a lot like, but isn’t, a port of the Atari arcade rev.īack in the 1980s, Nintendo had a licensing rule in place that no third-party company could publish more than five games a year for the NES.Īt the time, this was done in an effort to protect the public from bad games, and ensure that the NES was synonymous with great games and great experiences. The Long Version Part One: The Tengen Black Carts As is often the case, history is a bit stranger than fiction. Much like setting up a tall stack of tetrominos to clear away for a huge boost in points, there’s a lot of intricacies to this story that are needed to get a clear picture. Licensing rights are always strange things, and this one is among the strangest. To fully understand the story, one has to look at how the gaming landscape in the late ’80s was changing, and figure out exactly what was going on.
It was eventually merged into Time Warner Interactive in June of 1994 that company, in turn, was absorbed into Williams Entertainment in 1996.Īs is always the case however, the devil is in the details. While a lot of the other Tengen black carts are easy to find now and go for pennies on the dollar, the unlicensed version of Tetris is now considered a collector’s item.įrom here the story is pretty familiar, Tengen went on from the Tetris debacle to enjoy a short run as a publisher and developer in the 16-bit era. The hundred thousand copies of it that had reached circulation by that point ended up as the last ones that would ever be made. Shortly after the Tengen Tetris‘s release, Atari lost a court case against Nintendo over the trademark, and was forced to recall and destroy all remaining copies of the Tengen cart. Tengen’s Tetris is also much rarer, because it only ever spent about a month on the North American market.
Tetris nes full#
It’s easily the more robust of the two versions of the game, with features like full color graphics and several 2-player modes, including a competitive marathon setting that would appear again in later versions of the game.
According to its designer Ed Logg in a 1999 interview, he rebuilt the game from scratch for the NES. On the other hand Tengen’s Tetris, despite how it looks, isn’t a port of Atari’s arcade version of the game. Like the Tetris cart that was a pack-in with the original Game Boy, it features two 1-player modes, Type A and Type B, which might best be described as Endless and Score Attack by modern standards. Nintendo’s Tetris, produced by the late Gunpei Yokoi, is best-described as “no frills,” with a color scheme that looks like it’s been gently bleached. Hat tip to Adam David for this comparison photo.
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