Electronic Gaming Monthly – May 1989 (Part One)

Let’s jump a while back in time, three years before to be exact, and look at the rumor mill from way back when! These rumors, and the ones in the parts to come, hail from May of 1989, from a very early issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Geez! Hasn’t Quartermann heard of paragraphs? (Well, technically he has, he just only uses them three times per page…) Well, let’s split it as best as we can.

The recent Tengen lawsuit against Nintendo will undoubtedly go down on record as the hottest gaming development of the year! In a move that will have far reaching repercussions, Tengen, the home software arm of Atari Games Corp. (the people who make Atari arcade games, NOT Atari home games) filed a $30,000,000 anti-trust suit that, among other things, claims that Nintendo has unfairly monopolized the NES game market. Nintendo, as you may know maintains strict control over all the compatible game carts that are made to work on their Nintendo Entertainment System…

Bing! First shot, right out of the cannon! Though Quartermann is not really reporting on a rumor, he is certainly right in that this was easily the single most important video gaming event of 1989. Nintendo of America, Inc. v. Tengen actually wound up being three different cases, one of which involved the rights to create and manufacture home versions of Tetris, but the other two involved Tengen’s anti-trust dispute with Nintendo. The short version: Tengen were not happy with Nintendo’s publishing limits throughout the 1980s, with manufacturers only allowed to release five games per year for the NES, and any games that appeared on NES had to be exclusive to that platform for two years.

…In another move associated with the Tengen lawsuit, the company has released their own line of game packs that will work on the NES. They have busted the security chip that allows the Nintendo games to work with the Nintendo game system and can now make games independent of Nintendo. This may very well mean that more Tengen games will become readily available…

To keep the developers “honest,” Nintendo’s 10NES lockout chip was designed to prevent unlicensed cartridges from working (which, in practice, didn’t stop some developers for very long). Tengen spent some time reverse-engineering the chip, ultimately getting the schematics for it from the United States Patent and Trade Office. So while Tengen were suing Nintendo over their monopoly, Nintendo wound up counter-suing Tengen for producing unlicensed cartridges, a case that Tengen ultimately lost. The Wikipedia article on the lawsuit and its proceedings is fairly in-depth and well-sourced, and they cover it far better than I could ever hope to.

MicroProse, the home computer software company with a forte for flight and battle simulations, has announced the pending introduction of a new arcade piece that is supposedly powered by a new technology that can paint realistic characters that are so detailed, the planes you may be fighting in future coin-op contests will streak by with such clarity that you’ll see the rivits (sic) on the wings!

From the “Strange but True” department, yes, computer flight sim magnate MicroProse – known primarily for the F-15 Strike Eagle series – actually did take a brief detour into designing cutting-edge arcade hardware! The so-named “MicroProse 3D” system, as was typical of such advanced arcade hardware, was actually four boards stacked on top of each other; one each for video, audio, 3D calculations, and the “host” board that tied them all together. The excellent System16.com has the full details of what kind of hardware was actually on these boards, but the results were highly impressive visually, even if the games ultimately weren’t any more interesting than what else was on the arcade market at the time. MicroProse Games, the MicroProse arcade division, only ever released two games using this hardware; the first was a somewhat-simplified (but much nicer-looking) version of F-15 Strike Eagle, while the other was B.O.T.S.S.: Battle of the Solar System, a first-person action game with giant robots. A third game, Battle Tank, was in development, but canceled when MicroProse Games was acquired by Jaleco.

Atari Games may get a jump on the Micro Prose flight simulator, however, with a new car game called “Hard Driver” that uses a similar technology. It has two tracks; a conventional oval and a “crazy” track that loops and shoots in the air…

The last rumor for now – I’m really wondering, at this point, how far post-dated this issue was, or if Quartermann’s column was written really far in advance. Atari Games’ Hard Drivin’ (not “Hard Driver”) was an ultra-realistic (for the time) car racing simulator that was released in February of 1989. System16 once again has the goods on the hardware specs, but the resulting flat-shaded 3D polygonal graphics are not altogether different from what MicroProse Games would come out with the following year, even down to both Hard Drivin’ and F-15 Strike Eagle running their games on the “medium resolution” arcade monitors at resolutions of 512×384. Hard Drivin’ was so realistic that it featured not only a proper manual stick shift (even, according to arcade-history.com, including a clutch pedal), it was also among the first racing games to feature force-feedback steering, an adjustable seat, and an ignition key that served as the “start” button. In a particularly nice touch, the player did not choose their track of choice from a menu, but rather, by actually driving in the proper direction on the road, following a street sign.

There’s more juicy rumors to come in the next few parts; watch this space for more, from console ports of computer RPGs, to mentions of bizarre and under-documented consoles, to licenses that never were.