No Such Thing as Nintendo

Discussion of programming and development for the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color.
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tepples
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No Such Thing as Nintendo

Post by tepples »

cw: Joke project, to an extent
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In 1990, Nintendo placed print ads clarifying how to refer to its products by their trademarks. For example, it's not accurate to call the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) a "Nintendo". The ad's headline was "There's no such thing as a Nintendo."

Fast-forward to the late 2010s, when the Internet meme community rediscovered this ad and made parodies titled "There's no such thing as Nintendo." These were meant to jokingly imply that Nintendo and its products never existed in the first place, and anyone who believes otherwise must be a victim of Mandela Effect-style mass delusion.

The original poster
The memes: There's N o Entertainment System; Please repress all memories; This is all a dream

This 1K tech demo for Game Boy displays "There's no such thing as Nintendo" with Mario drawn as a shadow. Should Nintendo's legal department start to attack fan-made content even more intensely than it did in the 2010s, the demo can represent a farewell to the homebrew scene. It has a second purpose that I plan to explain later.
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aa-dav
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Re: No Such Thing as Nintendo

Post by aa-dav »

Lol!
USSR cloned Nintendo Game & Watch series adapted it to local cartoons and so on.
Almost noone of soviet children knew origins of these devices, so I merged some image and subj logo:
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tepples
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Re: No Such Thing as Nintendo

Post by tepples »

This interests me for two reasons.

First, a rabbit raising chickens matches a pun-laced Easter ministry story that I've had in my head. I'd be interested to see the source material. Is it Nu, pogodi!?

Second, the "Elektronika" branding of this Game & Watch clone calls to mind a bit of double standard.
  • 1984: Alexey Pajitnov prototypes Tetris on an Elektronika 60, a clone of Digital's PDP-11.
  • 2000s and 2010s: The Tetris Company vigorously uses the legal system against fans' clones of its product, right up there with Nintendo and Square Enix.
Speaking of which, for another company up there with Nintendo and Tetris for unhealthy relationship with creative fans:

There's no Enix, and Square is a payment processing company. There's no Dragon Quest. There's no Chrono Trigger. There's no Final Fantasy, and even if there were, it'd be a logical contradiction to have well over a dozen of them.
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aa-dav
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Re: No Such Thing as Nintendo

Post by aa-dav »

tepples wrote: Thu Nov 05, 2020 8:09 am Is it Nu, pogodi!?
It's really 'Nu pogodi!' main characters.
However roots of chikens, eggs and goal of Wolf are not clear for me. (There is episode with chikens in one of the cartoon, but it is not relevant)
Second, the "Elektronika" branding of this Game & Watch clone calls to mind a bit of double standard.
I think ideologically USSR didn't respect 'capitalistic property' beginning with 'tools of production' and Brand is one of these tools. So there was no question 'should there be brand of Nintendo?' at all. Communistic ideolory rejects idea of brand as 'tool of income' at all. Every tool of production must be property of society, - this is main idea of Marxism and so on. As I see it.
For example brand 'Electronica' was used by many dozens of factories in dozens of hundreds (if not thousands) of devices.
So 'it's complicated'. On global market USSR have no choice, but on the scale of own production force it just didn't even think about 'copyright'.
And inertion was very strong. Even after USSR destruction illegal famiclones was only significant market on Russian market and almost nobody feels bad about it.
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Bregalad
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Re: No Such Thing as Nintendo

Post by Bregalad »

You could make a variant "There's no such thing as Nitendo".

For the first few years I knew about the company and their consoles when grewing up, everyone in the french-speaking world was pronuncing it "Nitendo" because "Nintendo" is hard to pronunce for french natives. I really tought the brand was "Nitendo", and was blown away to figure I was missing that additional N all the time.

This happens all the time so maybe it's a problem with myself though. I figured only 6 month ago the english word "business" was not spelled "buisness". And the old timers of this forum perhaps remember my early nesdev years and my "mirroiting" :)
Useless, lumbering half-wits don't scare us.
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