by kmeisthax | 2025-04-16 20:04:32+00:00
"Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft." - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed.

Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market.

Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures.

There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals.

If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway.

You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you".

[0] Japanese domestic market

[1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes!

[2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple.

[3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.