We interrupt our regular blogging schedule for an interesting post! Yes, Hello, and today I'm doing quite an unexpected post today because I've think I might have found something that no one else knows about. And as you can tell from the title, that thing I've discovered is possibly the very first logo for the video game company Tengen.
Now who's Tengen? I hear asking, Well if you dont know them, dont feel bad. They were only around from about 1987 to 1994. But they were important in video game history when it comes to copyright law and Nintendo's licensing policies.
The story of Tengen begins with another video game giant, Atari. In 1984, the company was in trouble. The North American Video Game Crash of 1983, resulted from a overflow consoles and poorly made games (Many of them from Atari themselves and for their system), devastated the company. By the end of the year, Atari lost $539 million dollars, 700 employees were laid off, Business deals got cancelled, and Entire divisions were closed or consolidated.
As a result of this, Steve Ross, the president of Warner Communications, who owned Atari, made the decision to split the company and sell them for as much as possible to recuperate whatever losses he could.
Atari was split into two different companies: Atari Corporation and Atari Games. Atari Corporation handled consumer products, such as their line of personal computers and video game consoles, and Atari Games handled arcade games.
By February 4, 1985, both companies had a buyer. While he majority of Atari Corporation was sold to Jack Tramiel, the founder and former CEO of Commodore, The Buyer for Atari Games was somewhat of surprise. It was a Japanese man named Masaya Nakamura, The founder and president of Namco.
While Atari was no stranger to Namco, as they already had licensed their hit arcade games such as Pacman, Dig Dug, and Pole Position for home consoles, Namco actually had quite a special connection and relationship with the company. In 1973, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, The founders and heads of Atari, were trying to take the distribution of Atari products internationally, Forming Atari Japan soon afterwards. However, the move ended in disaster as Atari Japan struggled to find distributions for their arcade games. So they turned to Namco for help. General manager Hideyuki Nakajima asked Masaya Nakamura to help distribute the games in exchange for a cut of the profit, to which Nakamura agreed.
In 1974, after a year of major losses, Atari was looking to sell their Japanesse Subsidiary. Initially, Sega offered Atari $50,000 to take over Atari Japan, but Nakamura saw this as a opportunity to get into video games and offered $800,000. Atari agreed and Namco gained the rights to distribute Atari games throughout Japan.
Nakajima was able to keep kept his job and within a few years, Namco would utilize the resources it gained from the transaction to become one of the biggest video game companies in Japan. In 1978, with business doing well, Nakajima convinced Nakamura to open a subsidiary company over in the United States. He agreed, forming Namco America, located a few blocks away from the old Atari offices in Sunnyvale, California, With Nakajima heading the company.
In 1987, Nakajima and Nakamura came to an agreement: Nakajima, along with several employees and Warner Communications, would purchase 20% of the company from Nakamura. Nakajima would become the president of Atari Games, and resign from his position at Namco America. After getting Atari Games financially sound, He soon started looking at the home console market. With the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, The console market started to see a resurgence. At the time, Sega was not licensing games for their Master System, And the Atari 7800 was barely selling at all. So the NES was the way to go. However Atari Games couldn't actually publish games under the Atari name, as Atari Corporation own the rights to the consumer division. To get around this, On December 21, 1987, Atari Games formed a new subsidiary, called Tengen. The name "Tengen" came from a similar fashion as Bushnell came up with Atari. Bushnell and Dabney named Atari after a term used in the Japanese game Go. The word "Atari" is used in the same way someone would say "check" while playing chess. the word "Tengen" represents the center of a Go board, translating to "the origin of Heaven."
Becoming a licensee for Nintendo back in the late 80s, wasn't easy for a publisher. Nintendo were incredibly strict when it came to their licensing policies, You first had to submit your games for approval. Nintendo had the right to make changes such as removing blood or religious symbols. Once approved, you had to purchase your cartridges directly from Nintendo costing anywhere from $9 to $14, With a minimum order of 10,000 cartridges. Companies were only allowed to make five games per year, and be exclusive to the NES for two years. Despite not being a fan of the licensing agreement and upset he couldn't get a better deal, Nakajima reluctantly agreed to the liscening deal and on January 18, 1988, Tengen officially became a Nintendo licensee and their first three games were announced that same year at the June Consumer Electronics Show: Gauntlet, Pac-Man and R.B.I. Baseball. With all 3 being available on the shelves by October.
However, behind the scenes, skullduggery was a foot, as Tengen was working hard to make their own cartridges for the NES without going through Nintendo. But this was easier said than done because of the way how The NES worked. You see, Nintendo used lockout chip technology in their console, which prevented unlicensed games from even playing on the system. Both the console and the game cartridge contained a security chip, that spoke to each other with a program called "10NES". If they could communicate successfully, the game would play.
While numerous manufacturers managed to override the chip by zapping it with a voltage spike, Tengen engineers feared this could potentially damage NES consoles. Not only that, Nintendo made frequent modifications to the NES to prevent this technique from working. So, Tengen chose to reverse engineer the chip and decipher the code required to unlock it. However, the engineers were unable to do so.
So, Tengen turned to the United States Copyright Office. Its lawyers contacted the government office to request a copy of the Nintendo lock-out program, claiming that the company needed it for potential litigation against Nintendo. Once obtained, it used the program to create its own chip that would unlock the NES. They called their chip "Rabbit" and announced that they were going to release their own cartridges in December 1988, with the first unlicensed cart, Tetris (Which also happens to be one of the rarest NES games by the way), being released in May 1989.
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When Tengen launched the unlicensed versions of its games, Nintendo immediately sued Tengen for copyright and patent infringement. This began a series of lawsuits between the companies which would not be settled until 1994 and by that point, Time Warner reacquired a controlling stake in Atari Games, with Tengen being consolidated into Time Warner Interactive, Officially shutting down the company on June 28, 1994.
However, fast forward to July 13, 2023, Just 2 days ago. I'm just looking at flyers for the Japanese Namco version of Atari's Gauntlet online and while searching in Google images, I come across this:
This is an ad for Tengen's versions of Gauntlet and R.B.I. Baseball from the Feb-Mar 1988 Issue of Nintendo Fun Club News, a bimonthly fanclub newsletter from Nintendo that ran from December 1987 to July 1988, when it was replaced by Nintendo Power. This caught my attention for 2 reasons. 1, The issue it comes from is dated February to March 1988 and if you remember, Tengen became a Nintendo licensee in January 1988, And 2, The logo Is completely different to any logo you would find on any of their cartridges. In the ad the logo looks like this:
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And normally in most ads and releases, the logo looks like this:
So completely different, And on top of that, Logopedia, A wiki dedicated to company logos, list this more common logo as their first logo.
So could this have been the companies first logo? Well, lets look at this in more detail. First the established, I've previously said that Tengen was founded on December 21, 1987, They became a Nintendo licensee on January 18, 1988, The 1988 Summer CES show occured from June 4 to June 6 (With Tengen's 3 game linup announcement occuring sometime in between then), According to the June 1988 edition of Computer Entertainer, R.B.I. Baseball was first sold in limited numbers sometime before CES in June 1988, Gauntlet was released around July 1988, Pacman was released in October 1988, Tengen Annoced their unlicensed carts in December 1988, and their first unlicensed cart, Tetris, was released sometime in May 1989. And the ad from which this unseen logo comes from is dated Feb-Mar 1988, a month or two after the licensing agreement with Nintendo, 2 or 3 months after the company was founded, and 3 to 4 months before any of their games would hit store shelves.
And being that I cant find anything else from Tengen with a logo prior to this date, I think it is safe to say that this is the very first logo for the company. So what happened to everybody else involved? Tengen shut down in 1994 as previously mentioned but before then had shifted to other systems mostly the Sega Genesis, which was gaining ground in the market share, The case helped establish the legality of reverse engineering and reformed how the copyright office gave access to copyrighted material. Atari Games anti-trust Lawsuit also got the attention of other companies. Tramiel's Atari Corporation also sued Nintendo for $250 million for violation of anti-trust laws in 1989. Tramiel claimed Nintendo's practice of console exclusivity for two years, prevented Atari from getting good games. with the case ultimately being dismissed. In December of 1989, Rep. Dennis Eckhardt of Ohio urged the Justice Department's anti-trust division to investigate Nintendo resulting in an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission in 1990, which after Nintendo announced they had decided to ease their licensing restrictions including the two-year exclusivity rule, with the whole case being settled in 1991. Nintendo dealers were also allowed to sell games, cartridges and accessories at any price they chose.
In 1989, Namco had to renew their initial licensing agreement with Nintendo, which originally gave them special provisions for being one of the first licensees. But when Masaya Nakamura met with Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi to discuss the new terms, Yamauchi refused to give Nakamura the special treatment he once had. Nakamura was furious, and spoke out publicly against Nintendo's monopolistic practices. He also declared that Namco would begin development of games for Sega's latest console: the Mega Drive. Namco would continue publishing games until they merged with fellow Japanesse video game company Bandai to become Bandai Namco in 2006, who continue to publish games today with Nakamura continuing to be part of the company until his death on January 22, 2017, at the age of 91.
Atari Corporation continued on selling computers and consoles until 1995, when (Due to the failure of their last console, the Jaguar), was sold disk-drive manufacturer Jugi Tandon Storage in a reverse merger deal. The newly merged company was named JTS Corporation, and Tramiel joined the JTS board. In 1998 The Atari name was purchased by Hasbro Interactive, who made remakes of Atari's older IPs. In 2001, Hasbro sold their division to French developer Infogrames, who merged to become Atari Interactive who still publish games today. Tramiel retired in 1996 and moved to Monte Sereno, California, where he lived until he died of heart failure on April 8, 2012 at the age of 83.
Hideyuki Nakajima ran Atari Games into the 90's before Time Warner decided to fold both Atari Games and Tengen into Time Warner Interactive. Around the same time, Nakajima announced he was changing his role within the company due to a battle with lung cancer, and sadly died 1 month later in Tokyo on July 11, 1994. Time Warner Interactive would continue to make arcade games until they were Sold to WMS Industries in 1996, Who split of into Midway Games in 1998. Midway Games would continue to publish arcade games until it filed for Bankrupcy and shut down in 2010, with most of their assets being sold to Warner Bros Interactive.
This concludes my unexpected Blog post for today, Thanks for reading and i'll see you next time!
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