Lost and Found: The Original Tengen logo?

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. 

Steve Ross

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. 

Left to right: Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Ron Gordon, Masaya Nakamura and Hideyuki Nakajima (1975)

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. 

The Japanese Namco Flyer for Breakout (1976)

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. 

Left to right: The Licensed versions of Gauntlet, Pac-Man and R.B.I. Baseball. The only games Tengen made as an official Nintendo licensee (1988)

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. 

The 10NES lockout chips in both an NES Cartridge and console

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. 

An Unlicensed Tengen cartridge and its "Rabbit" Lockout chip

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: 

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.

The Logopedia article for Tengen

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.

The timeline of events in Tengen's history

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!

How a classic novel inspired the design of Space Invaders

Hello its blogging time once again and this time  I'm going to talk about another interesting side note in video game history. 

BOOP BOOP BOOP BOOP!

There are many landmark titles in video game history Pong, Pacman, Wolfenstein 3D, and one of those titles is Space Invaders. Released in 1978, Space Invaders brought many innovative elements into the video game industry, introduced many game design legends to the field, and had popularized the idea of space shooters and zapping evil descending aliens in video games.

But did you know that they weren't originally supposed to be aliens? In fact it was one memory of a classic movie, based on a classic book that influenced the design and inclusion of aliens in the game. This is the story of How a classic novel inspired the design Space Invaders.

The story begins long before the invention of video games, all the way back in 1895 in the town of Woking Surrey, England, the then home of classic British science fiction novelist, H.G. Wells. 

H.G. Wells during his studies in London (Circa 1890)

Born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866, Wells grew up in a finically struggling family and as a result took his first job as a draper at the young age of 14. In 1884, He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, which became part of Imperial College London), where he studied biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. after earning a degree in Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Programme in 1890, he spent the next 3 years as a teacher. 

By 1895, Wells had married Catherine Robbins, one of his former students, and moved with her to Woking in Surrey. There, he would spend his mornings walking or cycling in the countryside, and his afternoons writing. During one of those morning walks with his brother, an idea emerged when pondering on what it might be like if alien beings were suddenly to descend on the scene. Wells took this concept and refined it into a story of an alien invasion told from an unnamed protagonist. The story was titled The War of the Worlds, and was first serialised in Pearson's Magazine in 1897, and pubblished as full hardcover novel by William Heinemann a year later in 1898. 

The first hardcover edition of The War of the Worlds (1898)

The story was an immediate success and did even better when published in hardcover. inspiring many similar alien invasion stories years afterward, providing many themes open to interpretation such as evolution, religion, and science, and even inspiring scientist Robert H. Goddard to develop both the liquid-fuelled rocket and multistage rocket, which resulted in the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

The story was eventually adapted into other forms. In 1938, it was adapted into a radio drama directed by Orson Welles, it was done in the style of a live news broadcast and was aired at night so people that tuned in late, thought it was real and caused a mass hysteria panic. 

Orson Welles rehearsing for “The Mercury Theater on the Air,” the radio show behind the “War of the Worlds” broadcast (1938)

Around the same time, atempts to bring the book to the silver screen were well under way. Paramount Pictures had purchased the film rights for the book from Welles in 1925, and assigned producer-director Cecil B. DeMille to film it. Roy Pomerey prepared an outline for DeMille, but the project was eventually shelved. In the late 30's,  Paramount assigned Sergei Eisenstein to direct an adaptation of the novel under his contract with the studio, but that failed as well.

It wasnt until 1951 that the film finally began moving into production when Paramount assigned the project to Hungarian American producer George Pal. 

George Pal in 1979

Pal was already working with Paramount on When Worlds Collide, which had already wrapped up production and was getting ready for its release that November, he agreed to the project, becoming its producer, and the directors chair was assigned to Byron Haskin. The film was released in theaters on April 3, 1953 in London, and in North America on August 26, 1953. 

The Original poster for War of the Worlds (1953)

The film makes many changes from the book. It changes the setting from 1898 England, to present day 1953 California, The Martians use hovering spacecrafts rather than the Tripod War machines, and instead of the protagonist searching for his wife after the invasion destroyed society, the protagonist meets and falls in love with a woman. Most of these changes, including the romantic subplot were requested by Paramount Pictures production head Don Hartman, which Pal agreed to do.

Despite the changes, the basic plot remains the same. The film centers around atomic scientist Clayton Forrester (played by Gene Barry), who witnesses  a meteorite crash along with USC library science instructor Sylvia Van Buren (played by Ann Robinson) and her uncle, Pastor Matthew Collins (played by Lewis Martin). It turns out the meteorite was actually an alien war machine emerges and begins killing at random, including Pastor Collins. The Marines are called in and attempt to intervene, but nothing seems to work. With the world at stake, It's up to Forrester and Van Buren to find the aliens weakness before its too late.

The films production quality is pretty top notch for the time. the martian war machines, while not the tripod deathray walkers from the book, do have a fantastic visual design insted of the cliched flying saucers. The film's also in color as opposed to most films in the 1950s which were in black and white. In fact the films poster proudly proclaims it was made in the classic Technicolor system. The sound effects are also great, they even sound a bit like video games lasers, long before games like that would even exist.

The film has some great suspense moments too, You rarely see the aliens, you only see a few glimpses and never see their whole body. 

Much like the book, the film was a commercial success as it grossed $2,000,000 at the box office as well as critical success both at the time of release and today. In fact today, it's considered to be one of the best science fiction films of the 1950s.

But this isn't the films only legacy. On September 1st, 1953 the film made it's way to Japan where it would be seen by a young boy named Tomohiro Nishikado. 

Tomohiro Nishikado (2011)

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1944, Nishikado grew up with a love for science and technology. When he was in junior high, he built radios and amplifiers in his spare time. After graduating from with an engineering degree from Tokyo Denki University in 1967, he look around various electronics companies for a job. He originally wanted to work at Sony, but failed the final round of the company's testing process. So he joined an audio engineering company called Takt, But after completing training, he wasn't put in the development department, so he quit and looked for a new job, eventually landing a job offer from a communications company. But before beginning, he met an old colleague at a train station who told him about the work he was doing at Taito, and were desperately searching for new engineers. Interested, Nishikado decided to turn down the job offer for the communications company, and joined Pacific Industries Ltd, a subsidiary of Taito, in 1968.

He began working on arcade electro-mechanical games, his first game was Sky Fighter, a aircraft shooting game in 1971. It used mirrors to project images of model planes in front of a moving sky-blue background from a film canister on a rotating drum. The game was a hit, being followed by a scaled-down version, Sky Fighter II, since it was too large for most locations. Sky Fighter II was also a hit, selling 3,000 units. 

Sky Fighter (1971)

In 1972, he began working on video games after Taito imported Atari's Pong and sold their own version in Japan known as ElePong. He spent months analyzing the game's circuit board to understand how it operated so he could make a similar game and in 1973, it payed off. He created his own pong like game called Soccer, Soccer was a ball-and-paddle game like Pong, but with a green background to simulate a soccer field, and had two buttons on the cabinet to adjust the size of the players paddles on screen. Nishikado considers Soccer to be Japan's first original domestically produced video game and it proved to be a big hit. There was also a 4 player version called Davis Cup. 

Soccer and Davis Cup (1973)

Nishikado would work on other games such as Speed Race (A racing game inspired by Kasco's Mini Drive EM racing game), Tv Basketball (A Pong like Basketball game with early human sprites), and Interceptor (a first-person combat flight simulator with early pseudo 3D). 

Left to right: Speed Race (1974) Tv Basketball (1974) Interceptor (1976)

But it was seeing a new game from Atari in 1976 that gave Nishikado the inspiration for his biggest breakthrough, and that game was Breakout. 

Breakout (1976)

he liked the progression mechanics where the game wouldn't advance until the entire row of blocks were cleared as well as how the games difficulty and speed increased as the game progresses. Inspired, he wanted to make a game with similar mechanics but with better visuals. He eventually settled on a shooting game, where the player would need to shoot targets one at a time similar to a carnival shooting gallery.

One big problem that came to Nishikado was what the enemies would be. He tried tanks, combat planes, and battleships, but was unsatisfied with the enemy movements and technical limitations made it difficult to simulate flying. He considered using humans, but felt that it would be too immoral and violent.

But inspiration came soon enough. Inspiration struck one day he looked at a magazine feature about Star Wars. Suddenly, a lightbulb went off, What if he gave the game a space theme and let the enemies be aliens?

With that idea, Nishikado thought of the designs for the aliens. Inspired by the 1953 War of the Worlds film from his childhood, and other illustrations of the aliens in the book, he made the aliens resemble undersea life such as crabs and squids. 

The original design sketches of the Space Invaders aliens

It took him 9 to 10 months to finish programing the game. He wanted to make the game run on a microprocessor instead of TTL logic. The influence for this was when he played Midways Gun Fight, a Microprocessor based version of his game Western Gun. While he though his version was better, he was impressed by Gun Fights better graphics and smoother animation. So, he adopted the hardware, translated the needed information, and built his own tools to develop the game.

                                   

Left: Wester Gun Right: Gun Fight (1975)

When the game was finished, he called his game, Space Monsters. But when he showed the game to management, they requested he change monsters to invaders. Nishikado agreed and the game was named Space Invaders. Space Invaders was released in April, 1978 in Japan, and November, 1978 in North America. The game was a critical commercial success. By the end of 1979, an estimated 750,000 Space Invaders machines were sold worldwide and became the arcade game industry's all-time best-seller. 

Space Invaders (1978)

The game made history as the first game to save the player's score, the first to introduce rounds, the first game where players were given multiple lives, the first where players had to repel hordes of enemies, take cover from enemy fire, and use destructible barriers, and the first game to use a continuous background soundtrack, with four simple diatonic descending bass notes repeating in a loop that changed pace during stages, like a heartbeat sound that increases pace as enemies approached. The game was also many game designers introduction to video games such as Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri, and Wolfenstein 3D and Doom creators John Romero and John Carmack. 

Today, the game is celebrated as one of the greatest games of all time and the aliens are video game icons, and it all traced back to a classic author and work that got adapted into a movie that inspired a game that sparked a video gaming revolution.