I wonder if you have played "Final Fantasy 7"? What I am talking about is not Square's widely acclaimed Final Fantasy 7, but the FC version of Final Fantasy 7 launched by Shenzhen Nanjing Technology in 2005. After deleting a large amount of content and adapting the picture in 2D, this "pirated" work actually reproduces the gameplay and story of the original work to a certain extent.
"Final Fantasy 7" by Nanjing Technology
When it comes to pirated games, the concept formed in our minds is roughly the act of cracking, copying, and redistributing a game. However, Nanjing Technology's approach is obviously different, and it is not entirely cloning the original work 1:1.
After Nintendo introduced the premium system in the early 1980s, there was even more "original" content, which may also be classified as piracy. In order to make a little distinction, they are often called "unauthorized games". Most of the "copy games" like FC version of "Final Fantasy 7" also belong to this category.
They largely represent a deformed market that grew up under the iron curtain. The vitality of this market is so tenacious that it has not disappeared to this day.
anti-Ren Pioneer Atari
Why is original pirated? In fact, it is related to the policies formulated by FC Times Nintendo for third-party developers. There is no problem with the premium system - the developer (distributor) submits his works, accepts the platform's quality review for sales, and then divides the sales according to the agreed proportion. The current host manufacturers have followed this approach.
The key is that Nintendo has strict restrictions on the number of third-party games, and the cartridge itself must be produced by the official assembly line. This has affected the revenue of some companies, so some people have a bad idea to make their own games without bypassing the overlord terms, and lay the cassettes into the hands of retailers in a silent manner.
Nintendo is certainly guarded against this behavior. In 1985, they designed a 10NES system for the NES (US version FC) game released by Europe and the United States, which means installing inspection integrated circuits (CICs) into the cassette, resulting in the third-party homemade cassettes not being able to run.
" Tetris " cartridge
10NES system is to prevent events like the "Great Depression of the American Game Industry". Former Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi mentioned: "Atari went bankrupt because they gave third-party developers too much freedom, and the market was full of garbage games."
But the old man of Yamauchi may not have noticed that Atari was not theoretically finished at that time. It split into two companies, Atari Corporation and Atari Games, and was jealous of Nintendo's success.
Atari Games (hereinafter referred to as Atari) did not have the trademark use rights of its own IP in the hosting field, so in 1987, he brought in a group of Japanese people and established the "Tengen" department in California. Their initial business was mainly distribution, responsible for bringing Namco and Sunsoft's FC games to the European and American markets, and was still a regular company at this time.
But this company called Tianyuan can then be said to be the starting point of all chaos.
Tianyuan originally wanted to be a "good person". They first tried to obtain a less restrictive authorization from Nintendo, but they were rejected. Lao Ren offered the condition that he could only release 5 games per year, and he would be exclusive to NES for two years for a limited time, and he would like to sign or not. Under the power of tyranny, Tianyuan naturally "smiles on his face, but he is so mentally buying skin." While they humiliated, they wrote down their names and released "R.B.I. Baseball", "Gauntlet" and " Pac-Man " in 1988, while also studying how to crack the 10NES chip.
I have to say that the locking chip has stumped a large number of people with bad intentions.Many third-party manufacturers try to solve the problem in physical ways, such as instantly increasing the voltage, but Tianyuan engineers felt that doing so might damage the player's NES, which would be less than worth the cost, so they chose reverse engineering. However, since Nintendo frequently modifies the NES system, it is difficult to solve the soft-breaking method.
Then the magic happened. Tianyuan had a sudden inspiration and asked the US Copyright Office for help on the charge of "Nintendo's suspected monopoly." Their team of lawyers contacted the government office and requested a copy of the 10NES lock-in system, claiming to use this to sue. Unexpectedly, with the intervention of the government, Arakawa Mi (Yamauchi Hiroshi) who was then the president of Nintendo, failed to figure it out and handed out the program documents stupidly.
Tianyuan's plan was a great success, and they were able to develop pirated 10NES chips. The market for red and white machine unlicensed games has been officially opened since then. It is said that Arakawa was affected by this incident and gradually lost the trust of Yamauchi Hiroshi within Nintendo. In search of new developments, by 2005, he and Tetris inventor Alexei Pakitnov formed a new company.
Arakawa Mikami
After that, he offended the strongest legal department in the Eastern Hemisphere, and his life after Tianyuan was actually very difficult. When they launched cracked cassettes at the end of 1988, Nintendo took the opportunity to sue it for patent infringement. The biggest possibility is the copyright dispute in Tetris, which once forced Tianyuan to recall hundreds of thousands of unsold NES cassettes, which were later circulated to the illegal market.
After a period of time after losing the case, Tianyuan also made games for platforms such as Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear and PC Engine, and obtained the official license of Sega and Hudson. They even participated in the development of the Nangong Meng arcade game "Tinkle Pit" (Prince of Singdang), and the brand disappeared completely until it was acquired by Time Warner in 1994.
The infringing party sued the copyright owner
No matter what, although Tianyuan's "storm to the tower" was reckless, it created new opportunities for a group of European and American colleagues. Among them, the most arrogant one is a company called American Video Entertainment (AVE, American Video Entertainment).
AVE's life experience is very interesting. Its mother is Macronix, a chip manufacturer in Taiwan. She once recommended herself as a Nintendo supplier and wanted to provide NES ROM chips. After being turned away, he used this chip to make a compatible system called NINA and applied for a patent. In addition, Richard Frick, one of the founders of AVE, is a former employee of Tianyuan. A batch of games released by
AVE
AVE at that time, in addition to selling unauthorized games, AVE also did a particularly weird thing, that is, they opened a telephone hotline to specifically guide players to change the machine to bypass the obstacles of 10NES. This was not enough. By 1991, they simply jumped to Lao Ren's face and claimed $105 million on the grounds that Nintendo's lock-up chip was suspected of monopoly, making their pirated cassettes unable to run.
This lawsuit ended in private settlement, and I don’t know what conditions the two parties raised. But AVE has an employee's daughter, who is good friends with Mi Arakawa's granddaughter Masayo Arakawa (sound: Masayo Arakawa), and perhaps this relationship plays a reconciliation role in it.
From the game development level, even if you compare the private unauthorized manufacturers horizontally, AVE is the worst, and the typical tone is greater than strength. Their original intention was to provide "cheaper Nintendo games", but the cheap price is often poor quality of the work.
Part of AVE's business is to issue unauthorized games from overseas colleagues, and they sometimes produce OEM for butter manufacturers like Panesian.For example, Taiwan's C&E (Quanwei Information) debut "Sichuan Province of the Warring States Period" was launched in the United States by AVE's vest, which was replaced by "Tiles of Fate" (Tiles of Fate) and was played based on the Lianlian of Mahjong, and the English localization was extremely poor.
Tiles of Fate
They also wanted to enter the European market for a time, but they had no money to advertise at the time, and most games were not optimized, and they could not even run smoothly on the European version of NES. Because of the urgent R&D capabilities, the company died naturally after handling the lawsuit with Nintendo. Wanghong Electronics later lived a good life and even realized its dream for a while, providing memory and flash memory to 3DS and Switch.
Compared with the decline of Tianyuan and AVE, it is more representative of the United States in the unauthorized game market. It is a company called Color Dreams. In a sense, they have survived to this day. Their solid technical skills can be said to be guaranteed. Because over the years, Nintendo's legal department has been helpless with Color Dreams because they did not crack it, but used physical current to interfere with the operation of the 10NES system. Color Dreams also tried to implant additional processors in past cassettes to modify the maps in RAM to enhance the picture.
But a batch of early games developed by Color Dreams didn't sell well, including Baby Boomer, Captain Comic, Crystal Mines, and Robodemons. The reason is not that the quality is not good, but that Lao Ren threatened the supply and prevented retailers from entering their cassettes.
So Color Dreams immediately opened two sub-brands to cover up their eyes, namely Bunch Games, which sells small-scale games and Wisdom Tree, which is famous for publishing Christian-themed games.
Wisdom Tree's performance should be described as excellent. First of all, it is to sell products through Christian bookstores in a different way. Nintendo's authority is difficult to affect these places. Secondly, he actively learns from the gameplay of Nintendo, such as imitating "Bible Adventures" that imitates "Super Mario Brothers 2", using platform jumps to show three stories of Noah collecting animals, saving the baby Moses, and fighting with David and Goliath, which sold a total of 350,000 copies. In addition, they have launched "Spiritual Warfare", an action-adventure game with a similar style to " Legend of Zelda ".
Bible Adventure
So much so that when the parent company Color Dreams divested its electronic game business in the mid-1990s and turned its focus to digital cameras and surveillance devices, the Wisdom Tree brand was bought by their former sales representative Brenda Huff, and subsequently launched a computer 3D game called Heaven Bound.
In 2016, Wisdom Tree launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, raising funds for US$26,000 from 341 supporters, and made a NES box containing 7 classic games in Taiwan. The company is still very active.
Wisdom Tree's box The Arkade
centered on Taiwan
You may have noticed that I have mentioned Taiwan more than once in the previous article. That's because for the distorted market of unlicensed games, Taiwan developers have made too great a "contribution". Just count the first wave of Taiwanese manufacturers involved in this business and can list a large list: Bit Corp, Joy Van, Sachen, C&E, Crystal, and Idea-Tek and NTDEC, who were active between 1986 and 1995.
Puze Company should be the one with the strongest self-developed capabilities among this group of Taiwanese manufacturers. As early as the early 1980s, it produced many original Atari games and sold them to the European and American markets. The more well-known ones are "Open, Sesame!" and "Bobby is Going Home". Since Atari does not require authorization, these games are all regular products with copyright declarations printed.
As for why we should first attack the European and American markets, the book "Nintendo's Corporate Strategy" published by Times Culture mentioned:
"As early as 1981, Puze, which produced Atari games, repeatedly emphasized: developing a game is like making a movie, requiring the cooperation of three departments of character design, director and programming. With Puze's own experience, each game takes about three to six months of development time, and the production cost is 50 About NT$10,000. Taiwan’s technology and design level are not a problem at present. In fact, the company has already produced products. However, due to the chaos in the market order in Taiwan, they do not plan to launch it for the time being and are planning to start with exports. As for the content of the game, national themes are not considered for the time being, because the sales target is Europe and the United States, and emphasizing ethnic games may limit the market. "
At the time of developing the game, Puze has also developed many compatible machines. For example, the Creator50 (Dina 2 in one) that supports ColecoVision and SG-1000 games is quite popular in Europe and the United States, and is one of the few machines that can run ColecoVision cartridges. The Creator70, which was launched in 1987, looks a bit like Sega's Master System, but is actually a FC.
Dina 2 in one
In the era of red and white machines, since it is difficult for small and medium-sized manufacturers to get preferential policies from Nintendo, Puze is more willing to sell unauthorized games in Taiwan, where the sky is far away, because the product packaging uses plastic materials, and the workmanship of the cassettes is more refined than that of their peers. Although they have taken the evil path, the player's reputation has always been very good because of their serious attitude.
On the other hand, Jiehui, which has a close cooperation with Puze, can be said to be the Whampoa Military Academy in Taiwan's unauthorized game market. Although the survival time was only 1988-1989 in just one year, a total of 11 games were launched during the period, with amazing efficiency. Jiehui later merged with Saint-Chen, and Frank Sifaldi, director of the Video Game History Foundation, also persuaded Saint-Chen to launch an unauthorized game collection called "Huge Insect", which was very valuable because it only released about 30 copies.
As for the group of people who were born and did not want to go to Shengqian, Idea-Tek was established in the future, which is the publisher of "Sichuan Province of the Warring States Period" in Taiwan. Idea-Tek was eventually acquired by Crystal Technology Co., Ltd. (TXC) and made the well-known Micro Genius game console.
Little Genius Game Machine
This kind of relationship like a doll radiates to the global market with Little Genius Game Machine as the center. In Poland, the little genius is called Pegasus. After landing in Russia, its name was Dendy. And in Latin America around Colombia, it became Nichi-Man again. From 1983 to 1993, Jingji's capital volume soared from NT$3.1 million to NT$473 million. Now Jingji has opened two quartz component processing plants in Chongqing and Ningbo. For more details, I can move to another article in my article, and I will not repeat it here.
One of the more interesting Taiwanese counterfeit companies is called "Nintendo Electronics Co., Ltd." (NTDEC). But this Nintendo is not the other Nintendo, and NTDEC's main business is to produce unauthorized FC cassettes. This name is probably to confuse the audience. Because they are accustomed to plagiarizing products from local competitors, such as cloning Huang Xinwei from the arcade game "Brush Roller" and modifying the image to name the work "Bookyman". Labeling Nintendo will naturally attract more consumers.
"Nintendo Electronics Co., Ltd." (NTDEC) game cartridge
In order to avoid people to a certain extent, most of the games of NTDEC can only be obtained through mail order. However, in 1991, Lao Ren couldn't stand them using his trademark and caught two employees of the company's sales of products in the United States and filed a legal lawsuit on the grounds of infringement. The lawsuit ended for more than two years and the court finally ruled that Nintendo received $24 million in damages.
Since then, NTDEC has shown itself as Asder and later developed "Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Fighting for Heroes", a fighting game based on "Samurai Soul", which has made a lot of screen sacrifices in order to be able to run on FC. And after making a "educational" cassette in 1995, Ades's business began to turn to toys. By 2016, they also built a factory for the production of cosmetics in Dongguan.
"Make a yellow" across the sea
Based on Taiwan's FC unlicensed games, two manufacturers with adult content as their selling points emerged from the 1980s to the 1990s. The more legendary one is Hacker International, after all, this is a company that dares to commit crimes under Nintendo's nose.
Hacker International did not develop games in the early days, but instead represented (or copied) the works of the above-mentioned Taiwanese developers, and added the naked Japanese-style beautiful girl scene before being pushed to the Japanese market. The theme of "Sichuan Province of the Warring States Period" under Quanwei Information was originally "Using Lianlian to Unify the country", but it became "Idol Sichuan Mahjong" in their hands, and could take off the girl's clothes if she wins. Later, Quan Wei cooperated with him to develop the match-three game "Soap Panic", which also took the same path of "the more you beat girls, the less clothes you have."
However, Hacker International was not so chaotic at the beginning. The opportunity for the founder Satoru Hagiwara to enter the game industry was mainly because the personal computer boom broke out in Japan in the mid-1980s. He thought it was profitable, so he consulted friends who were engaged in publishing business and then published a magazine called "Hacker", which was a completely regular business.
Unexpectedly, the name "Hacker" attracted many developers and writers who are interested in Dump, cracking, and reverse engineering. It just so happened that Hachiwara Akira had a lot of negative emotions about the "collusion" between consoles and game publishers and private agreements. Then he founded Hacker International, intending to promote the ideas of some authors and completely embark on the road of blackening.
After setting the development direction, they initially chose to make FC-compatible machine - Hacker Junior, which provides composite video output and continuous sending handle. This was naturally sued by Nintendo and ended in an out-of-court settlement. Hagiwara revealed in a column interview with Game Labo magazine in 2005 that the machine had been shut down for a long time when the lawsuit was initiated because the project took a lot of effort but the profit was insufficient.
What really makes Nintendo's headache may be the unauthorized adult game of Hacker International. Hiroshi Yamauchi personally strongly opposed these contents, believing that it would damage the company's reputation. However, Hagiwara Akira's way of selling card tapes is mainly mailed. As the saying goes, there is no middlemen to make a difference. "Old sex critics" will attract each other and pass on word of mouth. The method of Nintendo putting pressure on retailers is not so easy to use.
A episode of this is that Family Computer magazine once published an advertisement for Hacker International. As the publisher, Tokuma Bookstore, fearing that Nintendo will hold him accountable, five executives personally came to the door to apologize to Hiroshi Yamauchi. In contrast, NEC and Hudson are more tolerant of the adult content that Hacker International (branded by Games Express) on PCE, and thank them for driving the sales of console games. The company also once licensed from PlayStation and released 15 games.
It was not until 2001 that Hagiwara Akira closed the company because of his loss of interest in the gaming industry that he still left many "legacy". For example, the "Saori Incident" that led to the Japanese game rating system, the company F&C (formerly known as MIMI-Pro), which is located in the center of the event, and the "Dark Bible" developer Active (some of the talents come from Super PIG), seem to have close ties to Hacker International. It is rumored that MIMI-Pro and Super PIG are both sub-brands of Hacker International, and at least they have a cooperative relationship.
The incident was caused by a male high school student stealing the adult game "Saori - The Precious Girls' Mansion" from the store, which triggered a public opinion storm in Japanese society
In addition, Panesian, headquartered in Taiwan, is responsible for selling adult content to the United States. From the perspective of business logic, they are similar to Hacker International, except that when they change their magical games, they replaced the exposed Japanese girl with Western girls, and only released three games in their lifetime, namely "Bubble Bath Babes", "Hot Slots" and "Peek-A-Boo Poker". Since the company's cartridges are very rare nowadays, empty cards can be sold for $500, and the box says it's up to $1,000 or more.
The post-day talk from the mainland
When FC entered the end of its life cycle in the late 1990s, most of the early Taiwanese unauthorized manufacturers were about to go bankrupt, and there were not many transformations that entered the new millennium. The Hummer group was quite famous in the later stages, with a considerable number of members inheriting from Quanwei and not closing down until 2010. Their most famous work is probably "Somari", a game that replaces Sonic with skins into Mario.
Many players in China have also experienced "Somari"
At that time, this circle had a hobby, which was to forcibly port the content of 16-bit or even 32-bit machines to FC. Generally speaking, the effect after forced transplantation is extremely poor: the characters are so small that they can't be seen clearly, the scattered boards are common, and the music is difficult to listen to, the AI has also made a lot of simplifications, and the handle layout of the two buttons is far from enough.
But there are exceptions, the most famous ones are "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" released by Super Game. These pirated versions are far better than the FC version officially released by Virgin Interactive. First of all, the button response is faster (although there is a slight delay in jumping). In addition, although the graphics have been streamlined, they refer to the MD version after all, and the official transplantation is based on GameBoy, which is a clear judgment.
Super Game Aladdin
Hunk Alien Technology from Fuzhou has also made the FC simplified version of "Street Fighter II". The optional characters have been reduced to only Long, Chunli, Gu Li and Sen Jilf, and the Street Fighter II engine provided by the Hummer group (which has been used to create the copycat versions of "Mortal Kombat 2" and "Iron Fist 2"). The more impressive feature of this company is probably that it provides many Chinese games. It is said that it was copied from the strategy book produced in Taiwan, and it is considered to be the enlightenment of Chinese games for many domestic players.
In 1995, Taiwan’s Dunhuang Technology joined Unhua Electronics to launch a 16-bit home computer called Super A'Can. Later, due to the high price, too few games, unclear positioning, and insufficient competitiveness, some core development members finally flowed into alien technology. They have not yet gone bankrupt and are still producing Wii-shaped copycat game consoles and educational software.
Shenzhen Nanjing Technology, born in 2002, is also one of the last emperors in the field of unauthorized gaming. They are best at adapting based on popular works. The FC version of "Final Fantasy 7" mentioned in the beginning was even translated into English by foreigners. In addition, there are many complaints about "World of Warcraft Demon Hunter", "Golden Sun", "Pokemon Diamond/Pearl" and "Tomb Raider". You can even see the name of "Stone Age"... This company is living well now, and the official website can be accessed. The website displays a group of handheld machines that look like PSPs.
World of Warcraft-Demon Hunter
Even that FC has been discontinued for many years, unauthorized games have not completely disappeared. Now they prefer to show themselves in the form of Nintendo-on-a-Clone, that is, to compress the original CPU, PPU and RAM onto a chip to create copycat game consoles of different shapes. The "Wii" of alien technology and the "PSP" of Nanjing are probably the same.
There are more stories about unauthorized game manufacturers, such as Gluk Video in Spain, HES in Australia, and Milmar and CCE in Brazil. The relationship behind this gray industry that has been preserved for 30 years is too complicated. Taking advantage of a brief history, looking back at the monster son born by Atari, it makes people sigh.
Reference:
Hacker International’s head speaks
BootlegGames Wiki
The story of Puzhe Company: Atari 2600s
The Source for Many Unlicensed NES/Famicom Games
