I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

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Sumez
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by Sumez »

I'd say anything published by an established game company doesn't count as "homebrew", since homebrew implies some sort of hobby project. It might be more misleading than helpful to introduce such rules, though.
Tengen releases definitely aren't "homebrew", but you could make homebrew releases in the 80s and early 90s why not. I remember when the GBA was coming out and everyone was anxious to start creating homebrew for it right off the bat.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by tepples »

Sumez wrote:I'd say anything published by an established game company doesn't count as "homebrew", since homebrew implies some sort of hobby project. It might be more misleading than helpful to introduce such rules, though.
The inclusion criteria of BootlegGames Wiki distinguish unlicensed games, which are in scope, from homebrew games, which are out of scope, as follows:
Homebrew games are technically unlicensed games and some are even sold as carts. The general difference between these and the unlicensed games documented on this wiki is that the former is made as a hobby and usually don't have a full-time development team behind them.
On the surface, this would appear to exclude Haunted: Halloween '85, its sequel, and their Japanese-language localizations, because I programmed those part-time at home on a 1099 (self-employment) basis alongside my part-time day job in an office. But these were produced by Retrotainment Games, a developer owned by a used video game retailer with brick-and-mortar locations in Pennsylvania that I assume had been around for years before choosing to branch out into game development.

The "established game company" criterion you mention would be misleading as well, as you recognize. If "established" equals a corporation or LLC, then anything published by RetroUSB or INL is "unlicensed". If, on the other hand, "established" instead means "relevant industry experience and financial stability", as Nintendo of America's developer qualifications prior to July 2016 defined it, then a studio's first published game is "homebrew" if it is on a console and unlicensed. For example, Baby Boomer would have been considered "homebrew" because it was Color Dreams' 1989 debut.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by FrankenGraphics »

It's hard to draw a line. But i agree that an element of hobbyism, for example in the form of bedroom coding, or "one/a few people does it all" is a criterium.
That doesn't necessarily exlude paid work, and definitely not exlude that there's work involved, paid or not.

I think it's comparable to an independent musician/artist vs one employed or contracted by the music industry.

We have
1)Independend artists (self managed; self released or coop released)
2)Independent labels (akin to retrotainment)
3)the industry (which presently is solely focusing on immaterial re-releases as far as NES software goes).
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by gauauu »

Any definition is going to fall short somewhere (I personally agree that retrotainment's games ARE homebrew, and tengen's aren't, but how do you draw that line?)

I think a more important question is: why do need a pure definition? What purpose does this delineation serve?

Separating homebrews from pirates is helpful to make sure people don't get ripped off by pirated work. Beyond that, I'm not sure that finding a perfect definition is useful.
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Sumez
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by Sumez »

Based on what I know about the project, I honestly wouldn't consider Haunted: Halloween '85 homebrew. It's paid work through and through - conceived and produced as a part of a business venture. Games released via RetroUSB are much more borderline - I'd say most of them are probably created as hobby projects. Proceeding to sell them via a company profile afterwards doesn't change how they were created.
It's all soft definitions anyway.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by tepples »

gauauu wrote:I think a more important question is: why do need a pure definition? What purpose does this delineation serve?
It at least helps justify creation of a separate wiki alongside BootlegGames Wiki describing those unlicensed noninfringing cart releases that lie outside BootlegGames Wiki's scope. It could also help order releases by their legitimacy to include in a cart collection.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by Punch »

gauauu wrote:Any definition is going to fall short somewhere (I personally agree that retrotainment's games ARE homebrew, and tengen's aren't, but how do you draw that line?)
Homebrew for me is any project that isn't expected to have enough sales profit to have a sustainable company. Retrotainment paid tepples to do a game, yes, but let's be honest, that was a vanity project for his (Retrotainment guy's) own satisfaction, that's not moving enough mass produced copies for me to consider it a "non-homebrew" game.

But that's not really important, the real important thing for a healthy homebrew community is to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR distinction between a 100% new game vs. commercial game hacks vs. plain old bootlegs. Don't call those garbage "reproductions" please, we should admonish any BOOTLEGS, they're often very low effort and only done to make some cheap $$$. If we keep on using softer words to describe them (much like people use "replica" when dealing with bootleg watches and handbags) this will only hurt our legitimacy in the eyes of most casual gamers.

A little while ago I was interested in doing Colecovision programming, imagine my disappointment when 99% of the Coleco homebrews were basically illegal ports of MSX games into a peripheral they called "Super Game Module", which is simply something that makes the Coleco msx-ready. Even the scant few non-MSX games are fan ports of commercial arcade games! This turned me off immediately, I mean, why bother? Same with the NES, I don't want my games getting mixed up with pirated copies of famicom fantranslations and OMG R4R3$$$ bootlegs.

ImageImageImage

Good luck having your vanilla, original Coleco game getting noticed when literally all of those are listed for sale as "homebrew" and no one minds.
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gauauu
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by gauauu »

Punch wrote: But that's not really important, the real important thing for a healthy homebrew community is to have a CRYSTAL CLEAR distinction between a 100% new game vs. commercial game hacks vs. plain old bootlegs.
I agree with this completely.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by FrankenGraphics »

Do we need a new seal of... honest homebrew? Or even a guild?

And ought NA separate its homebrew subforum? A lot of romhacks etc end up there.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by calima »

Punch wrote:Homebrew for me is any project that isn't expected to have enough sales profit to have a sustainable company. Retrotainment paid tepples to do a game, yes, but let's be honest, that was a vanity project for his (Retrotainment guy's) own satisfaction, that's not moving enough mass produced copies for me to consider it a "non-homebrew" game.
From watching on the sidelines, I very much belive HH and its ports to other platforms are quite profitable.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by Great Hierophant »

I don't recall if anyone mentioned the "Pirate Originals" like Somari or Street Fighter II-## for the NES. These are games that contain original code but graphics and audio assets unashamedly pilfered from original IP rights holders.

I find the "Reproduction" label rather curious. "Reproduction" has been used to describe releases of prototypes of unreleased games, beta versions of a retail game and localizations of games never released for a particular region or in a particular language.

In my definitions, when it comes to unlicensed games I make a distinction between commercial games made during the system's lifetime and homebrew games. The first has benefit of a finite number, the latter can be infinite. The unlicensed NES producers included players comparatively large (Tengen, an Atari Games label, Codemasters) and small (Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree, Active Enterprises). Their products had, or tried to have a real retail presence in the big box retailers and mom & pop stores of the time. These ventures were for-profit and could support cartridge runs into the 100,000 units. When the NES was discontinued, most of these companies had folded or moved on to newer systems.

The Super Game Module was originally intended to support MSX-conversions to the ColecoVision, but there may be more recent original releases for the peripheral. It adds 32KB of RAM and an AY-3-8910 chip to the system.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by tepples »

Great Hierophant wrote:I don't recall if anyone mentioned the "Pirate Originals" like Somari or Street Fighter II-## for the NES. These are games that contain original code but graphics and audio assets unashamedly pilfered from original IP rights holders.
Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might Uniracers/Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
Great Hierophant wrote:In my definitions, when it comes to unlicensed games I make a distinction between commercial games made during the system's lifetime and homebrew games.
For this, I have used terms to the effect "pre-1997". But I was trying to avoid this because the commercial famiclone market continued longer in less-developed countries.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by FrankenGraphics »

"Reproduction" has been used to describe releases of prototypes of unreleased games, beta versions of a retail game and localizations of games never released for a particular region or in a particular language.
I think this stems from a simpler time when all a repro was was just about any copy made from an original source. Such as sending your painstakingly hand-glued layout original for a magazine to a repro company somewhere around the globe, or from a master tape to a copy or backup tape. Any print shop or factory sample based on your original might be called a repro. So i guess that meaning would be carried over to any test carts and the like.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by Great Hierophant »

tepples wrote: Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might Uniracers/Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
With Tengen Tetris and Uniracers/Unirally, the developers had an apparently legitimate claim to the property that did not hold up in court. At least for Uniracers and modern Tetris clones, another court could have or could make a different decision. Your pirate original developer or game hacker has not even a hint of legitimacy in the use of their original property.
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Re: I think I found some pirate carts at a local store...

Post by gauauu »

Great Hierophant wrote:
tepples wrote: Tetяis by Tengen would arguably fall into this category, as the arcade rights that Tengen's parent Atari Games had licensed from Elorg through Andromeda and Mirrorsoft turned out not to apply to consoles. So might Uniracers/Unirally, as a Disney subsidiary appears to own copyright in the concept of a CGI autonomous unicycle. So might Ryoga's Game Boy block game project, as well as a bunch of Mega Man fan games that I hear about fairly often in the FamiTracker users' Discord server.
With Tengen Tetris and Uniracers/Unirally, the developers had an apparently legitimate claim to the property that did not hold up in court. At least for Uniracers and modern Tetris clones, another court could have or could make a different decision. Your pirate original developer or game hacker has not even a hint of legitimacy in the use of their original property.

Exactly. These are two completely different situations, an shouldn't be conflated. I could make a new homebrew game with a character that looks too much like Mario. Nintendo could sue and possibly win, but that doesn't make it any less a homebrew game, or any more a pirate reproduction.
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