Back then, Atari Games was the arcade division of Atari Corp, which handled the Atari consoles and computers. While Atari Corp was owned by Jack Tramiel of Commodore, Atari Games was owned mostly by Bandai-Namco. AG wanted to publish more games for the NES than Nintendo would allow per year, so they went the same route that Konami and Acclaim did by forming shell company subsidiaries (e.g Ultra Games, Flying Edge). But Atari Games went too far by getting a copy of the NES10 lockout program from the Library of Congress to reverse engineer it. Once they did and released black cartridges designed to look like Atari 5200 carts, it was like a thumb in the eye to Nintendo. What's weird is Namco kept acquiring more shares of Atari Games as the spectacle carried on only to sell them divest after Atari Games got acquired and became Time-Warner Interactive who had a licensing deal with Bally/Williams/Midway. TWI would later sell Atari Games to Hasbro, and the development studio ended up being bought by THQ Nordic. Under THQ Nordic, they developed and published a WWE game that was a sequel and spiritual successor to Midway's WWF WrestleMania - Sal DaVita was the head of the studio and he was most famous for NBA Jam and portraying many Mortal Kombat characters such as Nightwolf. So to see Tengen return in any form is hilarious and good rib on Nintendo ...
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Re: Random: Homebrew Dev Acquires 'Tengen' Brand, Launches Unlicensed NES Game
Back then, Atari Games was the arcade division of Atari Corp, which handled the Atari consoles and computers. While Atari Corp was owned by Jack Tramiel of Commodore, Atari Games was owned mostly by Bandai-Namco. AG wanted to publish more games for the NES than Nintendo would allow per year, so they went the same route that Konami and Acclaim did by forming shell company subsidiaries (e.g Ultra Games, Flying Edge). But Atari Games went too far by getting a copy of the NES10 lockout program from the Library of Congress to reverse engineer it. Once they did and released black cartridges designed to look like Atari 5200 carts, it was like a thumb in the eye to Nintendo. What's weird is Namco kept acquiring more shares of Atari Games as the spectacle carried on only to sell them divest after Atari Games got acquired and became Time-Warner Interactive who had a licensing deal with Bally/Williams/Midway. TWI would later sell Atari Games to Hasbro, and the development studio ended up being bought by THQ Nordic. Under THQ Nordic, they developed and published a WWE game that was a sequel and spiritual successor to Midway's WWF WrestleMania - Sal DaVita was the head of the studio and he was most famous for NBA Jam and portraying many Mortal Kombat characters such as Nightwolf. So to see Tengen return in any form is hilarious and good rib on Nintendo ...