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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The other piece of intellectual property that Nintendo protected was the song the security chips “sang,” the computer code, which was known as the 10NES and was registered at the U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright protects original works—songs, literary works, computer programs—as opposed to inventions or formulas, which are covered by the Patent Office. Initially Nintendo had no plans to register the copyright because the code itself would have to be placed in the Copyright Office’s unpublished-works storage facility, in Landover, Maryland, but an attorney specializing in copyright law advised Howard Lincoln that the code would be secure. Although individuals could examine files in the Copyright Office, no one was allowed to remove anything; even note-taking was prohibited. Reassured, Lincoln decided to submit the program, so the entire computer-generated code, indecipherable incantations to anyone who didn’t speak computer language, was locked away in a file inside a storage vault in

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  (Nintendo had hired the lobbyist to push legislation through the Senate that would outlaw the rental of video games.)

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The other piece of intellectual property that Nintendo protected was the song the security chips “sang,” the computer code, which was known as the 10NES and was registered at the U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright protects original works—songs, literary works, computer programs—as opposed to inventions or formulas, which are covered by the Patent Office. Initially Nintendo had no plans to register the copyright because the code itself would have to be placed in the Copyright Office’s unpublished-works storage facility, in Landover, Maryland, but an attorney specializing in copyright law advised Howard Lincoln that the code would be secure. Although individuals could examine files in the Copyright Office, no one was allowed to remove anything; even note-taking was prohibited. Reassured, Lincoln decided to submit the program, so the entire computer-generated code, indecipherable incantations to anyone who didn’t speak computer language, was locked away in a file inside a storage vault in

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The head of one software firm told The American Lawyer that he had been “at numerous meetings of conspirators” who wanted to get around Nintendo’s system and that they all “chickened out.” The reason: “You don’t fuck with a nine-hundred-pound gorilla.”

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Atari had a fund for “unwanted pregnancies” and another to bail staffers out of jail. The average age of the staff was so low that when Bushnell decided to get group health insurance, the rates for extraordinary benefits were dirt-cheap—“until everyone started getting braces,” he remembers. “Not for their kids, for themselves!”

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Syzygy (from a word meaning the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system—for example, the sun, the moon, and the earth).

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Nintendo encouraged customers to send in warranty cards with contests to win game cartridges. U.S. contest laws soon made it too complicated, so a new incentive was developed: anyone who sent in a warranty card became a member of the Fun Club, whose members got a four-, eight- and eventually a thirty-two-page newsletter.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Nintendo announced a new policy: no returns. Once a game cartridge was opened, a refund was out of the question. Pandemonium followed. One of the largest retailers in the country threatened to stop carrying Nintendo Systems and products. Nintendo refused to change the policy and the retailer refused the products. The retailer held out for three months; after that it crawled back and agreed to Nintendo’s terms.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Atari built and then bulldozed almost 6 million “ET: The Extraterrestrial” games.

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  • 
    Javier Arce

    Atari video game burial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

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  • 
    Javier Arce

    Five Million E.T. Pieces: http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  R&D 3, nicknamed “Rumania,” was isolated from the other groups. Its motto was grand: “There are no limitations, no boundaries; since we are on our own, there is nothing we cannot do; when you start with nothing you can do everything.”

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The competition to acquire games rivaled that for tickets to Michael Jackson’s last concert tour. Ultimately more product was sold. A kid who was absolutely dying to get “Link” would arrive at a store, only to find it sold out. Maybe he would try a few other stores without success, but then he would buy another Nintendo game, so that his parents would end up paying $30, $40, or $50 for a second or third choice. Then, a week or month later, a new supply of “Link” would come in. The kid wanted “Link” more than ever then, and unless his were the most iron-willed of parents, they would succumb.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  There was something bordering on the insidious about Nintendo Power. Kids paid $15 for twelve monthly issues, which covered most of the costs of the magazine. The other costs, including mailing charges, were paid through the marketing budget. From the original mailing, 1.5 million people sent in $15 to subscribe. It was an audience that experts in the magazine business had almost written off: they didn’t read and they had a million better things to do with $15. Nonetheless, Nintendo Power became the largest-circulation magazine for kids in America by the end of its first year.

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    Javier Arce

    1st issue of Nintendo Power (1988) — http://scribd.com/doc/8501/Nintendo-Power-Issue-1-1988-JulAug

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  “The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply,” says Gunpei Yokoi.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  in 1907, when Nintendo became the first Japanese company to manufacture Western-style playing cards,

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Yamauchi arrayed his chiefs directly below him, each of them in charge of his own group: R&D 1, 2, and 3.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  It wasn’t always easy working with Disney, however: the Disney people had to approve every aspect of games based on their characters. Importantly, Mickey could never die; players lost “tries,” not “lives.”

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Banks and investment bankers declined to put up money because of rumors that Atari was connected to the Mafia. Also, they were worried about an inherent flaw in the whole idea of video games: people would steal the TVs from the consoles.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The information about consumers—not from dated market research studies but from the daily input of diehard customers—gave Nintendo a living, breathing line to its customers every day, seven days a week, twelve hours a day.

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Meiji 22 (1889), to produce and sell the handmade cards. The kanji characters he chose to make up the name of his new company—nin-ten-do—could be understood as “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Deep in the mind we have to do whatever we have to do.” The most common reading of it was “Work hard, but in the end it is in heaven’s hands.”

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    Javier Arce

    From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda: "In 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai for the purposes of producing and selling hand-crafted Hanafuda cards painted on mulberry tree bark. Though it took a while to catch on, soon the Yakuza began using Hanafuda cards in their gambling parlors, and card games became popular in Japan again."

    1 month ago
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  Javier Arce highlighted

  The United States’ surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, issued a statement indicting video games for producing “aberrations in childhood behavior” and causing users to become addicted “body and soul.”

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    Javier Arce

    A newspaper article from 1982 that reflects the views of Mr. Everett Koop: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=266&dat=19821111&id=3yAvAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZtwFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2720,1376979

    1 month ago
  • 
    Javier Arce

    An statement from Mr. Everett Koop clarifying his opinion on the matter: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/QQBBCF.pdf

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  Javier Arce highlighted

  Yamauchi cut out all extraneous devices to save money, but he told the engineers to include, for a trivial added cost, circuitry and a connector that could send or receive an unmodified signal to the central processor. The connector could pave the way for expansion—the addition of anything from a modem to a keyboard. It was why the machine would later be called Yamauchi’s Trojan Horse: It slipped into living rooms with nothing but a pair of controllers, innocently toylike, yet it included the capability to do far more than play games.

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