nesdev.com

So I had this idea in mind to make this, but never got around to it until now. I know know if similar "memes" exist or not, but well here it is.

Oh and by the way I have to tell you something really funny. When the Playstation 1 first came out in the mid 90's I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade. I remember telling my friend about this new console and how I saw it at my local Toy's R Us. My friend then said "Playstation?, that sounds like a little kids toy". So here was my friend making fun of this new console and none of us really knew what type of impact this game console would have on the video game industry because it was brand new to us. I think when my friend heard the word playstation he was thinking of those metal and wood toys that you see in the waiting room at the doctors office that little kids play with. You know, the ones with the metal wires with wooden beads attached onto them.

Funny.

Think about it from Nintendo's perspective. Cartridges were very difficult to make illegal copies of...but CDs...by 1995 a CD burner was becoming a standard item for personal computers. I think they were worried about that.

Edit, also the previous CD systems (Sega Saturn, Phillips CDi , and Atari Jaguar CD) had poor sales.

And why did PlayStation succeed? They had more and better games. Games that used to be Nintendo exclusives became PlayStation exclusives... Final Fantasy... Castlevania ...Megaman X. A ton of fighting games. Tomb Raider.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

around the mid-90:s there was this guy, maybe 40 years old, who picked up orders from us kids in our village and forwarded them to taiwan for bootlegs. The kids got authentic cd-roms on christmas, their birthdays and so on, but ordered pirated software for their allowances / off their vacation work earnings. Personally, i never had the playstation and was still playing NES. I bet there was this one guy distroing bootlegs in about every village.

So i guess the fear wasn't unwarranted. Maybe just impractical in the end.

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http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

The issue was the contract said Sony gets all say and control of what games are released. Basically Sony wanted to get into the games industry and their plan was to steal the SNES. So instead of paying Nintendo and getting approval from Nintendo, you would pay and get permission from Sony for the SNES CD. Yamaguichi flipped the tea table

Sony's main worry was that Nintendo would just buy up all the launch PSX and put them in a warehouse, as it would have bankrupted Sony.

The CD format allowed Sony to be really nice to Publishers. Nintendo for the N64 wanted upfront order and payment for 1 million carts. Sony would do a run of 50,000 CDs for you. Hence the PS1 got things like Vib-Ribbon which would have been impossible on the N64 with its requirements.

Tell that to the Chinese pirates. It might be a developing country thing, where people don't have much money to spend on video games, but here in Brazil for example, it was very common for people to own mostly pirate cartridges.

Hardly anyone I knew back in the day owned original Atari 2600 cartridges. There were countless companies selling pirate cartridges back then, and they were pretty easy to make (just a PCB with an EPROM, basically). The types with two switches to select one of 4 games and the ones with tens of games cycled via reset were extremely common. Clone consoles were also very common.

In the NES days, all we had were clone consoles, so pirate carts were even more prominent. Some companies did import original hardware, but only the rich kids could afford that. Master System stuff wasn't commonly pirated, because TecToy did a good job releasing official stuff.

In the 16-bit days, some of my friends still had collections made exclusively of pirate carts, but original cartridges were more common.

In the PlayStation era, hardly anyone owned original games. I've personally never seen an original PlayStation CD. I've heard they are black. Nobody would buy an unmodded console. The same was true for the PS2, all collections I've seen we're 100% made of pirate DVDs.

I guess this sort of widespread copyright infringement has two causes. One is exchange rate imbalance, and that can only be improved over the years by productivity growth in producing goods for export. (Search the web for "Balassa-Samuelson effect" for how this plays out.) The other is protectionism to prefer domestic industry over imports. But one problem with protectionism is that excessive import tariffs make it harder for domestic industry to procure the materials that it needs, even for export.

One word - NTDEC. ^_^;; I have a collection of "unofficial official" NES compatible cartridges.

WOW!!
If I remember correctly NTDEC was even called the official Nintendo distribuitor on Brazil back in the day.

Some carts within the original board+chips+ROM; others were pirated.
This one is for Power Blade.

Thanks to retroscans.org, I've found the interview I was talking about on page 7 here. (It's all in portuguese)
The Dragon Chen talks about NTD (not NTDEC) and says that it's the Geniecom licencee in Brazil and will start producing portuguese and spanish translated games, targeted at the local south america market of the time.
So, I was almost correct!!
I think I remember at least seeing a translated Tale Spin back on the day, so probably there are other (pirated) titles.

I think I also had read at least another interview or article talking something about NTDEC, but since I just can't find it I'm probably misremembering again...

I think I have many NTDEC cartridges too, some of them seem to be sold by other company names, like Dynacom and CCE.
Basically it had different packages, sometimes also different cases and labels, but internally you saw NTDEC on the boards and sometimes even on the game's title screen.

That number seems awfully high to me. Nintendo has always had prohibitive up front publishing costs, but 1 million seems way out of scope even for them. (Source?)

I could see there being a case where there is an additional licensing fee after the first million, maybe? That's a lot different from paying for 1 million cartridges, though. (I could also see some frustrated publisher saying "a million" in an interview, in a hyperbolic sense.)

Sadly it was just sordid tales at Sony, and Sony's XX years parties.

When I joined I was a Nintendo man ( still am ) and was working "for the enemy" I was also in the UK. Nintendo are not popular in the UK/Eurozone, and the company I was at use to make Nintendo games. So whenever I would say "the N word", I would get some angry sentiment which would usually entail, the VHS from start to finish for QA, bad documentation oh and having to order a million carts upfront.

Thinking about it now though, they might be referring to $1 million rather than 1 million actual units. To which if the cart costs $40 to make that is only 25,000 carts. $30¹ to make, 33,333 carts. $20 is 50,000 Given the costs of Mask Rom tooling, board and label printing etc it doesn't seem unreasonable, kind of seems low.. Then if the order is NTSC and PAL versions then that is 2 sets of mask ROMS, multiple labels and half the units each territory, so imagine you have the cheap carts $20, you get 12,500 NTSC and 12,500 PAL for $1 million yeah ouch...

I mean compared to PSX's $2 per unit, its a lot more

Given we almost didn't get a wonder boy II because I was a so so game that only sold 3 million copies ( see The Untold History of Japanese Game Development 2 ) maybe even having 1 million carts to be worth it(again that could only be 500,000 per NTSC/PAL ), isn't that insane either...

1. https://archive.org/stream/NextGeneration24Dec1996/Next_Generation_24_Dec_1996#page/n75/mode/2up

That makes sense. I remember reading in the NES era, they would do an initial run of 50,000 units. Times $20, that would be a minimum 1 million $ to publish a game.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Yes $1 million as a manufacturing buy-in makes a lot more sense to me.


I'd have to see that in context because I can't take at face value that a SMS game that had sold 3 million copies in Japan was considered unviable, unless you mean its sales were initially so-so sales and eventually went on to sell 3 million worldwide?

Like something like GTAV where the budge was several hundred million, sure 3 million units would have been a dismal failure. Anything from the SMS era though? I can't really see it unless there's some other mitigating story to go along with it.

I think it was more, it only did 3 million, these did 5. No we not giving you money to make a sequel to a 3 million game when you could be making a sequel to a 5 million game. In that 3 million was so-so and a sequel has traditionally had less buy-in than the first making it less appealing.

Reading the books though paints a very different story, it really was low cost and massive profits back in the early days. Space Invaders caused a shortage of 100yen coins. These days a C64 game does 1250 sales and 96% of iOS devs are jealous