
Codemasters History: The NES’ Best Unlicensed Developer - shortformblog
https://tedium.co/2018/06/15/codemasters-history-nes-nintendo/
======
superflyguy
Nintendo sued them for bypassing their protection. Often people caved;
Nintendo/Sega controlled how many games a developer could get published; the
genre etc. Codemasters was like "yeah, right" and reversed engineered it, and
got sued. Apparently they thought they were going to lose and agreed with
Codemasters to call off the lawsuit as long as Codemasters maintained publicly
that they had done a deal with Nintendo to end the case.

Source: common knowledge in the small West England game dev community.

~~~
teuobk
Nintendo also sued Galoob over the Game Genie, which Galoob had licensed
(purchased?) from Codemasters. Nintendo lost, and then they lost again on
appeal. The issue was whether the Game Genie created derivative works.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nintendo_of_America,_Inc).

~~~
stordoff
FWIW, Hacker News appears to interpreted the last . in the link as a full
stop, so if it doesn't work for anyone else you need to add a . at the end.

------
degenerate
A little more reading on the making/history of Micro Machines if you are
interested:

[http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/05/feature_the_making_...](http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2017/05/feature_the_making_of_micro_machines_the_best_racer_on_the_nes)

------
caio1982
"The original A/B testing" picture was definitely worth it already, I just had
to stop reading it to share this treasure!

------
puzzle
The original Codemasters was one of a kind. Rock Star Ate My Hamster was a lot
of juvenile fun.

~~~
bencollier49
"Bad news, boss!"

I remember the joy of accidentally having your band endorse a campaign to
euthanise OAPs. Fun times.

------
laumars
Dizzy was one of my all time favourite series on the CPC. I replayed one of
them recently and it's has aged pretty well all things considered.

------
bluedino
I always wondered what the exposed connector was on the back of the cartridge
after I rented that game

