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The shady deeds in video game history?

C

charlequin

Banned
NintendosBooger said:
Give me a break with all this Nintendo mafioso BS. You all make it sound like they literally put a gun to the foreheads of every game company's CEO and threated to pull the trigger if things didn't work out their way. Fact of the matter is, they saved the industry back then when games like ****ing E.T. were allowed to be exposed to the public, and they're saving the Japanese market now. They instilled discipline to a chaotic industry. Almost all of everyone's favorite developers today owe a measure of gratitude to the Big N, back when they were all upstart nerds making games from their parent's garage or some office storage area, hoping that their titles would appear for free on a future issue of Nintendo Power. Nintendo created an industry template (e.g., licenses) that a lot of their rivals would follow and still do.
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Dude, lay off the cock hits from Nintendo's jock. Nothing you said in any way contradicts the fact that NES-era Nintendo were also the absolute worst console in videogame history in terms of censorship, poor developer relations, and questionable legal tactics.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
Yeah, NES-era Nintendo is legendary.

I'd say the EA-NFL deal is the dirtiest - and one of the worst for gamers - deals ever for the industry.
 
T

Tarazet

Member
GhaleonEB said:
Yeah, NES-era Nintendo is legendary.

I'd say the EA-NFL deal is the dirtiest - and one of the worst for gamers - deals ever for the industry.
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There's nothing dirty about it.. they had the money and they used it. It was many negative things, but it was still totally legal, just like Microsoft's decision to release IE for free and force Netscape to do the same.
 
N

NintendosBooger

Member
charlequin said:
Dude, lay off the cock hits from Nintendo's jock. Nothing you said in any way contradicts the fact that NES-era Nintendo were also the absolute worst console in videogame history in terms of censorship, poor developer relations, and questionable legal tactics.
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and that translated into my living room how? Were they harsh? Yes. Did they take advantage of their position? Absolutely. But in the end, did gamers of yesteryear and today benefit from it? Damn right.
 
Z

Zen

Banned
That does nothing to excuse their tactics back in the day. 'Take advantage of their position' you make it sound like what they were doing was ok simply because they were number 1. They brought order to the video game industry like the fricking Galactic Empire in Starwars.
 
C

colinp

Banned
Miroslav said:
I didnt know that the phantom ended up being just a... keyboard???

product1.jpg
Click to expand...

Oh but what a LAPBOARD! Hinge down for desktop use or hinge up at 22° for lap use!!!! WOOT!

22°!!!

Let's see your sixaxis or wiimote do that ****ers!
 
G

GhostSeed

Member
I wouldn't consider it shade but the early Retro Stuidos was a f**king mess.
It's still a miracle that Metroid Prime ever got finished and turned out as good as it did.
 
T

Tiktaalik

Member
sonarrat said:
There's nothing dirty about it.. they had the money and they used it. It was many negative things, but it was still totally legal, just like Microsoft's decision to release IE for free and force Netscape to do the same.
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Dubiously legal because it was very clearly anti-competitive behaviour, which is illegal. With regards to Microsoft and IE, they got lucky in the US. Personally I thought what they did was totally anti-competitive. Obviously Europe thought so as well.

edit: To be precise, one could argue that Microsoft was guilty of

Dumping: Products are sold into a market at a low price which renders competition impossible, in order to wipe out competitors.

and

Exclusive dealing: A retailer or wholesaler is ‘tied’ to purchase from a supplier.

whereas from what I've heard of the 80s, Nintendo would be guilty of Exclusive Dealing and

Barriers to entry: Barriers designed to avoid the competition that new entrants would bring.

(Definitions from Wikipedia)
 
J

jman2050

Member
Luckett_X said:
The mystery of how Ohshima, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog and SonicTeam creative force, was slowly pushed out of SEGA and fled to form Artoon, the mystery also linking to why Yasuhara, Director and genius level designer for the platformers Sonic 3 & Knuckles was also pushed out of the company, all linked directly to the ego of one man that also refused to share NiGHTS engine assets with the american sega branch making Sonic Extreme:

Yuji Naka.
Click to expand...

IAWTP
 
S

soundwave05

Member
Nintendo was also guilty of pressuring/bullying retailers and of "staggering" releases.

For instance Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in Japan in late 1988, but Nintendo would not release it in North America until spring 1990, because they wanted other titles to sell in the interim.

This caused an explosion of black market Mario 3 cartridges and the Japanese (yellow cart) version to show in North America.
 
L

Learn2read

Member
soundwave05 said:
Nintendo was also guilty of pressuring/bullying retailers and of "staggering" releases.

For instance Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in Japan in late 1988, but Nintendo would not release it in North America until spring 1990, because they wanted other titles to sell in the interim.

This caused an explosion of black market Mario 3 cartridges and the Japanese (yellow cart) version to show in North America.
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???

This I don't get, aren't publishers free to release their games whenever they wish? It has nothing to do with "bullying" anyone.
 
C

Cheerilee

Member
macysvu3.png


IIRC, around the time of the USA PSX and Saturn launches, right before the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, the famous Sonic balloon was found slashed at the bottom of a swimming pool with a bunch of "u r not (red)e" advertising items. Police questioned SCEA officials, but nothing ever came of it, and videogame magazines gushed about how awesome and cool Sony was.
 
S

soundwave05

Member
mamacint said:
???

This I don't get, aren't publishers free to release their games whenever they wish? It has nothing to do with "bullying" anyone.
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The bullying was for retailers. They also would purposely release certain games with low inventory to drive up demand. I think it was Sears or one of the major retailers that got into it with Nintendo and then Nintendo cut them off. After a while they came crawling back and agreed to Nintendo's terms.

Of course, the flipside to all this is, Yamauchi's "ironfist" is probably what the industry needed. If that hadn't happened the industry would not exist as it does right now.

Yamauchi pulled some other crazy stuff too ... with the design of the Famicom, Nintendo agreed with chip makers on a certain low cost. To get this low price on components, Nintendo promised the chip makers a gaurunteed order that was really large. At the last minute, Yamauchi insisted on a lower price and threatened to cancel orders. Well the chip suppliers couldn't do anything at that point because they were counting on the business from the Famicom/NES. So they had to bend over and take it from Nintendo :lol

I think Nintendo actually got too soft in the SNES/SFC era ... something like SF2 never should have showed up on the Genesis.
 
M

Marathon

Sony's DrGAKMAN
Back in the SNES era there was a medium size pc company I was working at that made their first console game for Nintendo's new system. The team worked hard to get the game ready for lot check. They were able to get the game sent off to Nintendo with plenty of time to make it through final testing and reach store shelves for the holiday sales season.

While waiting to get word back on pass/fail for the GM, the company learned that Nintendo decided to sit on the game and withhold final approval until after the new year. The game apparently was felt to be competing too closely with one of Nintendo's own holiday releases.

The pc company was so bitter about the incident that they have never done another console title again.
 
T

TheDuce22

Banned
Didnt the first run of playstation commercials have subliminal messages or something? I remember reading something about that somewhere.
 
G

Grayman

Member
TheDuce22 said:
Didnt the first run of playstation commercials have subliminal messages or something? I remember reading something about that somewhere.
Click to expand...
They might have just been refering to U R Not E or ENOS LIVES?
 
S

Somnid

Member
Wasn't Sony accused of holding back PS2s to artifically increase demand as well as purposely creating defects in the hardware to get people to buy extra units? I'm not sure if it ever amounted to much more than fanboy finger-pointing but many people honestly believed it to be the case.
 
R

Ryudo

My opinion? USED.
Zaxxon said:
Dubiously legal because it was very clearly anti-competitive behaviour, which is illegal. With regards to Microsoft and IE, they got lucky in the US. Personally I thought what they did was totally anti-competitive. Obviously Europe thought so as well.
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It wasnt anti-competitive at all as they were different products all together. People were going to buy windows anyway (netscape was windows only remember at this stage) whether IE was there or not and charging money for a HTML parser is and was ridiculous.

Microsoft knew HTML was the future and wanted to make sure that it could be parsed without having to buy extra software, hence why MS basically built alot of their software around html functionality.

Microsoft's worse crime was offering kickbacks to oems (like dell, gateway,compaq, hp etc) for using their software over other companies like BeOS or IBM's OS/2 (linux wasnt in the picture then).
 
L

Log4Girlz

Member
In recent history, MS released a shoddy console that over-heated easily and many broke down at the drop of a hat. Hopefully these issues have been resolved, but the first batch of 360's bordered on being lemons.
 
R

Ryudo

My opinion? USED.
Log4Girlz said:
In recent history, MS released a shoddy console that over-heated easily and many broke down at the drop of a hat. Hopefully these issues have been resolved, but the first batch of 360's bordered on being lemons.
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Yep they are shoddy alright, so much so that MS actually fix em for free ! oh wait !
 
N

NintendosBooger

Member
That Tetris biography was really something else. Brought back some memories from the Game Over novel, and reveals some disturbing trends from the past that are comparable with today's industry -- most notably the simple games (Tetris) vs. violent games.
 
T

TheDuce22

Banned
professor_t said:
Where did you hear about this subliminal messaging stuff? Is there a story somewhere? Sounds interesting . . .
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I vaguely remember reading about it in a game magazine. Now that I think about it, me and my brother used to tape Simpson episodes and we ran that commercial in slow motion to see for ourselves. It clearly said "sega sucks" during one of the flashes.
 
R

RumFore

Banned
Sega ****ing the US market by not releasing some of the best games ever made for the Saturn. I imported alot of them but to this day it still burns me how the kept so many arcade perfect SNK and Capcom fighters in Japan and limited other great titles like Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga to just a few thousand copies. Still burns me.
 
R

RumFore

Banned
Log4Girlz said:
In recent history, MS released a shoddy console that over-heated easily and many broke down at the drop of a hat. Hopefully these issues have been resolved, but the first batch of 360's bordered on being lemons.
Click to expand...


This also burns me. First system to ever die on me and I have nearly all of them. Twice none the less.
 
C

contaygious

Member
once again people fail to understand the ea nfl deal. nfl 2k was 20 bucks and hurting NFL Brand Value. The NFL hated dealing with 2k games anyway. They offered the exclusive deal to EA knowing that 2K couldn't afford to match the $. End of story.

imagine you are the NFL and your game is frikkin 20 bucks on shelves. Makes the brand value look pretty shitty.
 
T

tnw

Banned
_leech_ said:
Nintendo in the 80s was brutal. Screwing 3rd parties, handcuffing retailers...
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Yes Nintendo as a result of trying to create games that were worthwhile, did some bad things. But was Nintendo basically single handedly reviving the video game industry? Yes.

The reason they limited the number of games 3rd parties could make was because before that games like ET would come out, and destroy any kind of faith consumers might have in dropping money on a game when it might be crap.

It's easy to look back and demonize Nintendo. Yes they were slow to adapt, but it had only been such a short period of time.

People need to see what nintendo did in the grand scheme of things.

I also like how the movie studio that produced King Kong tried to sue nintendo over Donkey Kong for copyright infringement, when there never was a copywright on King Kong or it had expired anyway.
 
Z

Zombie James

Banned
tnw said:
The reason they limited the number of games 3rd parties could make was because before that games like ET would come out, and destroy any kind of faith consumers might have in dropping money on a game when it might be crap.
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:lol
 
R

Ryudo

My opinion? USED.
Log4Girlz said:
Did you enjoy shipping it back? Or does only god care....
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Nah he still doesnt care, and i still cant believe you are putting MS in the catagory of "shady" for them fixing things for free.
 
L

Log4Girlz

Member
Ryudo said:
Nah he still doesnt care.
Click to expand...

Of course not, he'd have to exist to care.

Ryudo said:
Nah he still doesnt care, and i still cant believe you are putting MS in the catagory of "shady" for them fixing things for free.
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LOL, right, putting out a lemon is a-ok as long as it gets fixed right? It shouldn't have been put out in the first goddamn place.
 
G

Gigglepoo

Member
contaygious said:
once again people fail to understand the ea nfl deal. nfl 2k was 20 bucks and hurting NFL Brand Value. The NFL hated dealing with 2k games anyway. They offered the exclusive deal to EA knowing that 2K couldn't afford to match the $. End of story.

imagine you are the NFL and your game is frikkin 20 bucks on shelves. Makes the brand value look pretty shitty.
Click to expand...

You are wrong. 2K had as much of a chance to buy the exclusive NFL license as EA did. The NFL only wanted one company to make the game, they didn't care who. Money talks and EA offered more cash. That's the only reason we're not playing NFL2K7 today. 2K games got very slight revenge by offering way too much for a semi-exclusive MLB deal. As far as the NBA goes, they feel that competition is a good thing. However, they have limited the number of arcade NBA games to one per year. That is why you have Street one year and Ballers the next.
 
R

Ryudo

My opinion? USED.
Log4Girlz said:
Of course not, he'd have to exist to care.

LOL, right, putting out a lemon is a-ok as long as it gets fixed right? It shouldn't have been put out in the first goddamn place.
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The 360 aint a lemon, sure there were problems - but all systems have teething problems. You are grasping too hard and making it sound like 99% of the 360's failed.
 
I

itsinmyveins

Gets to pilot the crappy patrol labors
No.1 said:
Yeah, surprised no one mentioned it earlier. They had the Mafia and everything.
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Well actually it has been. The Enzo-wreck on the first page? The picture of its owner is right there too. He was the "owner" of Gizmondo, I believe. His name is Stefan something.
 
G

GhaleonEB

Member
sonarrat said:
There's nothing dirty about it.. they had the money and they used it. It was many negative things, but it was still totally legal, just like Microsoft's decision to release IE for free and force Netscape to do the same.
Click to expand...
I suppose it depends on your definition of "dirty". I didn't take it to be strictly illegal. Rather, underhanded or otherwise just plain low. And deciding that you didn't want to compete on the merits of your game, and dumping a shitload of cash to secure an exclusive license to force your competitor out of that market is just plain dirty. The it's the easy way out of competing, and gamers lose.
 
A

argon

Member
While completely legal, I find EA's aggressive rampage of aquisitions over the past decade to be pretty shady, especially their apparent hostile takeover attempt of Ubisoft (they bought about 25% of the company IIRC).
 
L

Log4Girlz

Member
Ryudo said:
The 360 aint a lemon, sure there were problems - but all systems have teething problems. You are grasping too hard and making it sound like 99% of the 360's failed.
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No, not 99%, no company can survive with putting out broken product, but a high rate (relative to electronic equipement) of failure existed with early models. As I stated earlier I hope those problems are resolved, but there is no excuse for rushing out shoddy hardware, regardless of how quickly or efficiently you replace them.
 
U

unomas

Banned
contaygious said:
once again people fail to understand the ea nfl deal. nfl 2k was 20 bucks and hurting NFL Brand Value. The NFL hated dealing with 2k games anyway. They offered the exclusive deal to EA knowing that 2K couldn't afford to match the $. End of story.

imagine you are the NFL and your game is frikkin 20 bucks on shelves. Makes the brand value look pretty shitty.
Click to expand...

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/573/573241p1.html

"We (EA) have proposed exclusivity several times in the past, but this year, in the spring the NFL had an off-site meeting, and they decided to consider bids for exclusivity," Brown told IGN in an exclusive interview. "Several bids were submitted but they accepted EA's. I cannot tell you how much this cost, but exclusivity is expensive, we are paying a premium. It wasn't cheap. I can tell you this, though, all parties all happy with this agreement, and Wall Street seems happy with it too."
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Wrong, EA initially made an offer to the NFL and proposed exclusivity (IGN article at the time stated this), the NFL said NO to this exclusivity and offer at first. A few months later the NFL said they were looking to make it exclusive to one company. EA obviously won the bidding war, and started the ball rolling by asking the NFL to go exclusive when no mention of doing so was ever made anywhere before. EA got what they wanted and the rest is history, we've been stuck with two consecutive years of crap on next gen consoles because of this deal.

EA obviously proposed exclusivity to the NFL because NFL2K was seriously undercutting them at $19.99. EA profits I believe were down because they were forced to drop the price of Madden that year with NFL2K going over 1million sales. So instead of being undercut and facing competition EA eliminated the possibility of competition and football hasn't been the same since.
 
G

Grayman

Member
EA loves their exclusives to things that shouldn't be :D

I checked the wiki and no info on if and when the NFL deal ends. ESPN is 15 years though.

wow cancelling online servers for their games when new ones come out. This is the most depressing thing i've read.
 
Z

ZombieSupaStar

Member
Nintendo did help the industry, but like most business at the top, did things their way whether it hurt certain people or not.



for everything good they did, im also glad that genesis and sony was around to humble them a bit.


Competition = Good


if you think ANY of the 3 companies as a monopoly would be a good thing for the industry, well :lol @ you.
 
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