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JazzB1987 said:


What does N64 have to do with the original seal of quality?  Third parties sued Nintendo so they could release as many games as they want etc.  N64 was at least 1 generation AFTER the seal had no meaning anymore.


You want do discuss the NES one? Dragon's Lair with broken controls, Silver Surfer with broken collisions and insane difficult. And X-men by LJN, where your forced AI partner wouldn't work at all randomly if you choose a character that could shoot (Cyclops, etc). All of them had the "seal", all of them were terribly broken and didn't had the slightest quality.

And let's talk about the peripherals: their own Power Glove, that didn't worked! The Speedboard, a ridiculous cash in with the seal of quality stamped on it!

They never were symbols of quality, protecting their consoles of bad games. As any company, they let anyone do what they want. What the seal means, specially in the light of the crash, it's some rules:

1) The game works on the console it says it should work.

2) Nintendo could refuse to publish the game if it wasn't following some of its rules about its content.

Exactly what Nintendo does today and what Sony and MS does and even Valve with Steam. What happened in the crash with Atari was a whole different situation:

Atari was the publisher for all Atari games. Some unsatisfied Atari programmers, that were paid just dimes for multi-million dollar games, left and started Activision: the world's first indepent publisher. They sued Atari for the right of being able to publish games on their own and won. After that, anyone could do the same. So it created a mass of games that didn't worked or games with sexual content (including rape, like Custer's Revenge). That made the public opinion hate Atari and was one of the things that resulted in the crash.

NES cartridges had a protection to avoid running homebrew games (just like any console has today). So Nintendo would block any game with sexual or improper content or games that didn't worked. Just that. So the families wouldn't be afraid of buying a console anymore for their kids. Sony and MS do the same thing, with different focus, but the same thing. You can see this in action with unlicesed games for NES like Action 52 or Super Noah Ark 3D for SNES. In both cases, the unlicensed cartridged had a slot in their top so you had to fit a licensed cartridge that would allow the unlicensed one to use its chip to circunvent the lock.

Nintendo rules about amount of games published and other things weren't about quality. They were about keeping 3rd parties small and weak so their games would be the big hits and 3rd parties would never have a way to influence them. 3rd parties' answer was to jump to the first newcomer and give them all the support and allowing it to dominate the market.