
Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell) - danso
http://www.filfre.net/2017/01/a-time-of-endings-part-3-mediagenic-or-the-patent-from-hell/
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acemarke
Spent the last couple weeks binging on the archives for this blog. It was a
fantastic read. The author does a great job of researching primary and
secondary sources, and has a real talent for clear writing that digs into the
details of people, games, and technologies. Totally recommended.

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pavlov
Seconded! Jimmy Maher is one of the writers that I'm extremely happy to
support with Patreon's "blind" model, where the author gets paid $X for
publishing an item regardless of its content.

I don't read everything he writes (recently there was a series about WWI
fighter aces that I didn't have the patience for)... Yet I feel it's
absolutely proper to pay for anything he chooses to publish. That's the only
way an author can have the freedom to pick his topics without having to think
about its short-term commercial viability in terms of clicks/shares/donations.

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danso
If you make it through the ~7000 words, there's a fascinating footnote at the
bottom which speculates that Phillips lawsuit against Nintendo explains why
Legend of Zelda was licensed for Phillips CD-i console. And possibly that the
Nintendo settlement meant that Nintendo couldn't make a CD-based product,
which led to Sony creating the PlayStation.

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riffraff
The nintendo settlement theory makes sense, but I wonder, shouldn't SEGA also
have been sued by Phillips for the Mega Drive/Genesis? The Mega CD[0] came out
in '91.

[0]
[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Mega_CD](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Mega_CD)

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wonko1
The title here omits the name of the series this was published in "A time of
endings".

The article is really about the death and re-birth of Activision. It covers
the role the Baer patent played in this, rather beautifully.

I was really impressed by this great long read, will have to go back and read
the rest of these articles. We so often focus on success, it's interesting to
read detailed accounts of how things fail.

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ScottBurson
(It's "Philips", BTW, not "Phillips".)

