Licensed by Nintendo?

[Preki]

We all know that Nintendo was one of the first, if not the first game console manufacturer to have control over games that are released for their system. What bugs me though is that games for the Famicom don't have the "Licensed by Nintendo/Nintendo of America" line that's present in the licensed NES games.



What's the reason for that?

[adori_12]

I think that's due to the fact that licensing terms in Japan were pretty lax compared to North American and European ones.

Japanese companies were able to publish as many games as they wanted to, and they could manufacture their own PCBs and cartridge shells for all their games. This liberty of Famicom game publishing lead to inexperienced developers releasing their own low quality games, which started to hurt the Famicom's reputation.

By 1985, fearing that their system would end up having the same fate as the Atari 2600, Nintendo introduced a heavy licensing agreement for all companies that wanted to published Famicom games outside of Japan, in which companies had to not only buy their PCBs and cartridge shells from Nintendo, but also were limited to only publishing 5 games per year.

An even crazier licensing agreement was introduced in Japan for the Famicom Disk System, since not only companies had to buy their disks from Nintendo, but also had to share 50% copyright ownership of every Disk System game!

As for Famicom carts, by the time both the NES and FDS were released, Nintendo no longer had any privileges for longtime developers, but other than that, licensing rules kept the same and were still not as severe as in the rest of the world, that including having to put Nintendo's name in the title screens for their games, something companies had no need to.

NES games on the other hand had to, since the whole "This game is licensed by Nintendo of America/Europe Inc." thing also served as a marketing tool for the NES, mainly because if a game got licensed by Nintendo that would allegedly mean they were quality releases, as represented by the old Nintendo quality seal (This seal is your assurance that Nintendo has evaluated and approved the quality of this product).

[VegaVegas]

I believe USA had stricter rules with licensing laws which caused this madness for all international releases. After all, you still see "all rights reserved" on the JP release which sounds more general. As mentioned earlier, another cause that goes alongside with it is "licensed by Nintendo" logo on all international products while Japanese releases don't use that even to this day (!). Another notable example is Bomberman where they completely rearranged the entire title screen just to fit a little more copyright text. Isn't that amazing

[adori_12]

Every third-party game released outside of Japan had to rearrange its title screen, and of course some did it better than others. I find funny how some games had to add so many text (like games whose original developers/publishers sublicensed the game to another company for an international release, which meant adding credits to the original developer, original year of release, new publisher, new year of release and the Licensed by Nintendo text all together!) that they had to program an extra title screen just for that text. Some examples are Abadox and Spy Vs. Spy.
The latter one amazes me at how they were able to add a Licensed by Nintendo screen before the actual title screen and change the copyright year, but not to fix that obvious typo. Even worse, that game got an European release as well, and they changed the Licensed by Nintendo screen and copyright year again, but they still left that typo!

[L___E___T]

At the risk of sounding stupid - what is the typo on Spy vs. Spy?  Is it on the images or something else?

[adori_12]

It's on the images. Look at the title screen: "MAD MAGAZINE'S OFFICAL".

[L___E___T]

I can't tell you how many times I read that and
and missed it!

[adori_12]

Huh, I guess that typo isn't that obvious after all.
Here's another example, present in Seicross and MagMax:

[P]

It's Pony Canyon?

[adori_12]

Yes. I'm not too sure about this, but  I think that misspelling has to do with the way that company's name is written in Japanese, doesn't it?

[P]

Yeah it's Ponii Kyanion in Japanese, so it's an understandable mistake.