— David Crane, the co-founder of Activision, discussing with Gamasutra the challenges Atari created for Activision upon its 1979 launch. Activision was formed by a group of Atari developers who felt the latter company didn't give them enough credit for their work. Atari spent years in legal battles with Activision, but failed to get the company to shut down. This move was good for Activision, which is still with us, but led to a glut of game developers for the Atari 2600—many of whom didn't know that the hell they were doing. The lack of quality control in the industry led to the video game crash of 1983."We were the first ever third-party developer of video game cartridges, and we knew that we were opening up a whole new business. And it wasn't just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. We built the necessary technologies, fought the lawsuits, and battled through Atari's attempts to close off the retail channels to our product."
The story of Tengen, the Atari-owned Nintendo licensee that broke the rules every which way but downAtari's corporate history is pretty messy, and took a lot of left turns and dumb, dark roads.The company and its spinoffs made a lot of mistakes over the years. Perhaps its biggest involved its poor handling of a controversial licensing policy put in place by Nintendo, a company that learned a whole lot of lessons from Atari's failings with the 2600.
— Norman Caruso, the creator of The Gaming Historian, explaining to The Register the impact of Tengen's antitrust battle with Nintendo over licensing rights. Even though Tengen lost big and was effectively barred from creating games for the NES, Nintendo's practices were put on notice, and it ultimately changed its licensing standards down the line."This was one of the first big cases where a licensee was challenging Nintendo, and it had a snowball effect. … Atari sued Nintendo for the same thing, the FTC investigated Nintendo, [and] it really caused Nintendo to ease their licensing restrictions."
With respect to the video game programs contained in Accolade's game cartridges, there is no evidence in the record that Accolade sought to avoid performing its own creative work. Indeed, most of the games that Accolade released for use with the Genesis console were originally developed for other hardware systems. Moreover, with respect to the interface procedures for the Genesis console, Accolade did not seek to avoid paying a customarily charged fee for use of those procedures, nor did it simply copy Sega's code; rather, it wrote its own procedures based on what it had learned through disassembly. Taken together, these facts indicate that although Accolade's ultimate purpose was the release of Genesis-compatible games for sale, its direct purpose in copying Sega's code, and thus its direct use of the copyrighted material, was simply to study the functional requirements for Genesis compatibility so that it could modify existing games and make them usable with the Genesis console.
These days, third-party game developers hold much of the power in the video game sector—to the point where their existence on a platform can make or break a console—but these two cases are a pretty good reminder that it wasn't always that way.The Atari Games case, as corrupted as it was by the underhanded use of the U.S. Copyright Office to reverse-engineer its own lockout chip, likely would have favored Atari Games had the company not, you know, committed fraud.Fortunately, it wasn't the only case tackling the issue at the time. It would have been a pretty rough state of affairs if it were. As The End of Ownership notes, the Accolade case had a significant impact on legislation in general, creating a rules-of-the-road for digital rights management through two laws, the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).And while neither Accolade nor Atari Games are with us anymore, there was another Genesis developer who did exactly the same thing that Accolade did: A onetime PC games-maker that reverse-engineered Sega's platform, then turned its success with the Genesis into a bargaining chip, which earned the developer the kind of sweetheart deal that it never would have if it were working with Nintendo.That company is Electronic Arts—a firm that very much has not faded into the night.