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Did Konami really create Ultra Games to bypass Nintendo's 5 game limit during the NES era? Did the limit really exist? Is it an urban legend?
- Thread starter ReyVGM
- Start date
Generally speaking, if Nintendo was accused of doing something shitty (during their most successful years), then they probably did it. Now it is less about them doing shitty things and more about them doing creatively incompetent things (though that is a whole lot more lovable).
OP
OP
Thanks.
Yeah, I check parish's content all the time, but it doesn't go over that.
It's pretty widely known and accepted that yes, there was a limit that resulted in shell publishers like Ultra. "Coincidentally", the practice pretty much stopped entirely around the time of the FTC investigation that occurred between Tengen and Nintendo back in the early 90s, but the damage and/or implications of the practice weren't very significant, other than how it effected Electronic Arts' investment moves into console publishing.
This.
There's a YouTube channel that you might like OP. The Gaming Historian.
I'm actually not familiar with American prices, because I'm Canadian. the cartridge prices in Canada were insane. $60 dollars was the bare minimum for new release NES carts. But games could easily hit $100.00 Canadian in price, especially RPG's. I still have memories of paying $120.00CND for Chrono Trigger on the SNES back when the game was brand new on retailer store shelves. I bought my copy from a Zellers department store. Final fantasy 3 was another one.
Generally speaking, Genesis games were on average $10 dollars cheaper than their SNES counterparts, which was one of the reasons why I was more drawn to that console. I could get more titles for less. But there were also discounted game catridges for both Nintendo and Sega consoles. Nintendo also initiated the "Players Choice" line up of games back then, which was a response to the criticisms of the high cartridge prices. Players Choice titles were generally million plus sellers discounter down to the $39.99 or $49.99 price tag.
This wasn't a Hoax.
Nintendo did have a limit and also a monopoly position. They could set the rules. Konami used Palcom in PAL regions and Ultra elsewhere, they were bonafide Konami games. Probotector/Contra was released under the Ultra/Palcom label I think.
Acclaim did the same thing, and they also released a lot of games. I believe they used Flying Edge and Arena. But Flying Edge was only for Sega systems I think? Perhaps Nintendo also cockblocked Sega? I think this practice folded with the SNES. MK1 was by Arena on Genesis and Acclaim on SNES but MK2 etc were identical. In 1994 Arena was scrapped (and I think you wouldn't see Palcom etc anymore either by then) so that must've been when the limit was lifted.
Nintendo did have a limit and also a monopoly position. They could set the rules. Konami used Palcom in PAL regions and Ultra elsewhere, they were bonafide Konami games. Probotector/Contra was released under the Ultra/Palcom label I think.
Acclaim did the same thing, and they also released a lot of games. I believe they used Flying Edge and Arena. But Flying Edge was only for Sega systems I think? Perhaps Nintendo also cockblocked Sega? I think this practice folded with the SNES. MK1 was by Arena on Genesis and Acclaim on SNES but MK2 etc were identical. In 1994 Arena was scrapped (and I think you wouldn't see Palcom etc anymore either by then) so that must've been when the limit was lifted.
Not originally. But Acclaim did end up buying the LJN label. But both Acclaim and LJN still had their own sub labels.
The Retronauts discussed this a bit a few weeks ago in their TMNT episode. They claim that Ultra was created for 2 reasons, and speculated on a third.
1st was the 5 games a year issue.
2nd was that America was still a bit xenophobic in the 80's, so a game coming from a company named Ultra would be seen as more acceptable than one coming from a Japanese sounding company like Konami.
3rd(Speculation) was that Konami didn't want to sully their track record with games that might not be as good as Contra/Castlevania/Gradius/all the other silver box games, so they released games they were less sure of under the name "Ultra".
1st was the 5 games a year issue.
2nd was that America was still a bit xenophobic in the 80's, so a game coming from a company named Ultra would be seen as more acceptable than one coming from a Japanese sounding company like Konami.
3rd(Speculation) was that Konami didn't want to sully their track record with games that might not be as good as Contra/Castlevania/Gradius/all the other silver box games, so they released games they were less sure of under the name "Ultra".
Those actually were ported and published by Sega though. It also stopped when Capcom started doing their own MD ports with SF2 SCE.
Namco also had their namcot branch
The limit of games was not the only problème 3rd party had. They had exclusivity contracte preventing them to release games On others plateforms
This is why namco used namcot to release games on pc engine for exemple
The limit was real, but Nintendo must have been more lenient with certain third party publishers until the limit was removed.
There is a reason Sega had to do the ports themselves. Probably the same reason Konami had "TMNT Turtles in Time" for SNES and "TMNT Hyperstone Heist" for MD/Genesis, despite the games being 90% identical.
OP
OP
That's because Sega actually made those games, not Capcom.
90%? You crazy. The game was pretty different even if it shared some graphics with Turtles in Time.
Well yes, because of Nintendo's monopoly practices overseas. But Capcom really just licensed those games, reprogrammed by Sega wasn't just a cover and they did it with other 3rd parties too (Falcom, Tecmo, etc).
1st parties licensing and porting 3rd party games wasn't really anything new either, even Nintendo did it back then (Kung Fu, 10 Yard Fight, Qix, Tetris, Sim City, etc).
90%+ US marketshare was probably why. No console since NES ever managed that, not even PS2.
According to that video from 1991, Nintendo games made up 25% of Toy's 'R Us's profits. Which is a quarter. That is huge for a single product. Nintendo had the retailers at their mercy. If you wanted to make big money in the home console market, you had to put up with Nintendo's shit.
Another book with a take on this, from Stephen Kent:
The above link quotes NoA's President at the time, Minoru Arakawa, about how he worked out a deal with both Konami and Acclaim so that they could put out more games without breaking the rules as set by Nintendo's Japanese offices. Hence, we got Ultra and LJN, respectively. ("The other licensees did not like it," Arakawa says about this workaround to let certain top-selling publishers bend Nintendo's five-games-a-year rules.)
The above link quotes NoA's President at the time, Minoru Arakawa, about how he worked out a deal with both Konami and Acclaim so that they could put out more games without breaking the rules as set by Nintendo's Japanese offices. Hence, we got Ultra and LJN, respectively. ("The other licensees did not like it," Arakawa says about this workaround to let certain top-selling publishers bend Nintendo's five-games-a-year rules.)
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Either way, I don't think Namco/Namcot is related to this... I'm pretty sure they were using that name on MSX and PC games too. I think it was just something to do with arcade vs home console releases of stuff (and then later they kept using the name for stuff on Game Gear).
I don't think he's done a video but this r'nauts micro he did is kind of about the subject https://retronauts.com/article/122/retronauts-micro-013-ultra-games
Yea, early Famicom games were under Namcot, and that was back when Nintendo couldn't even stop third parties if they wanted to.
Fun fact: Rare was an exception to this rule. When the Stamper Bros. decided to move on from the ZX Spectrum to make games for consoles, they reverse engineered the NES. Nintendo was so impressed, they not only allowed them to develop games for the system, but also didn't put a limit on how many they can release. That's why they were able to push out 47 games in the system's lifetime, which is quite impressive considering there were very few people employed there at the time.
Ahaha nhaaa... it's just that the famicom was built before the video game crash...
When the crash happened, they had to limit... but the famicom was done already (july 83 famicom released, september for the crash) :)
It was lovely that it was done and released before the crash, so we could get better sound expansion on famicom, poor pins got used by the lockout chips communication in western countries.
I liked that konami released stuff in europe they didn't bother in the US through palcom label, experiments like Crackout, which was a good breakout style game, a lil richer than Revenge of DoH.
What are you talking about? Rare never published a game on NES or Famicom. And it made games for a crapton of publishers on both of those consoles (including both Acclaim and its phantom NES-publishing arm LJN). I don't know the exact timeline on if/when Nintendo loosened its five-game limit for publishers, but Rare wasn't a publisher, so.
$60 seems a little high by most standards, but $40-50 were the norm.
A good catalogue from the time (89 or 90, not sure which)
I found one of my old copies of Game Over. Here are some quotes:
"Licensees could only make up to five Nintendo games a year and they could not release them to play on any other video-game system for two years from the time they were introduced."
"In 1987, Konami convinced Arakawa to break the rules and allow it to form a new company, Ultra, in order to get a second license; it could then release five more NES games a year."
I think there's somewhere in the book that mentions the five game limit being lifted if the games were deemed high enough quality but it's hard for me to search through a paper book.
The theory that bad games cause a "crash" has been debunked many times since but it was a good excuse for Nintendo to gain as much control as they could over third parties.
"Licensees could only make up to five Nintendo games a year and they could not release them to play on any other video-game system for two years from the time they were introduced."
"In 1987, Konami convinced Arakawa to break the rules and allow it to form a new company, Ultra, in order to get a second license; it could then release five more NES games a year."
I think there's somewhere in the book that mentions the five game limit being lifted if the games were deemed high enough quality but it's hard for me to search through a paper book.
The theory that bad games cause a "crash" has been debunked many times since but it was a good excuse for Nintendo to gain as much control as they could over third parties.
The golden era of video games was so great to live through. NES everywhere. From clothes to cereal to games.
Yeah, but I was still just working from David Sheff's findings. I don't claim any first-hand research here.
I think there's a bit of a hang-up about the number five here. I have no reason not to think claims of an annual limit were wrong, since the claim has never been refuted by anyone who worked with NOA during the NES era. But it's possible the claim that it was specifically 5 games per year may have been mistaken. Also possible: There could have been a tier system based on Nintendo's relationship with different publishers, and key partners were given some clearance to publish a few additional games each year mroe than lower-tier pubs were.
In any case, it looks like Konami was using Ultra for "extra" releases of JP releases like Metal Gear, Quarth, and Nemesis through 1990, at which point it began to shift to using the label for games specifically targeted to the U.S. market. Beginning in '90, it was lots of JP-developed games that never saw release in Japan (Snake's Revenge, Skate of Die Bad 'N Rad) and ports of western-developed arcade/PC titles (Q*Bert, Defender of the Crown, Pirates!)
Another quote from Game Over, closer to the SNES era:
"There was no longer an exclusivity clause (in part, at least, because of the FTC and the antitrust cases pending). Instead Nintendo would allow licensees to make three games a year. But it also built in a strong motivation for companies to make excellent games: games that earned thirty or more points in the Nintendo rating system didn't count as one of the three games. Also, a more objective method for choosing what games would be covered in Nintendo Power was initiated: only those games with thirty or more points would be featured."
"There was no longer an exclusivity clause (in part, at least, because of the FTC and the antitrust cases pending). Instead Nintendo would allow licensees to make three games a year. But it also built in a strong motivation for companies to make excellent games: games that earned thirty or more points in the Nintendo rating system didn't count as one of the three games. Also, a more objective method for choosing what games would be covered in Nintendo Power was initiated: only those games with thirty or more points would be featured."
Did the crash even affect Japan?
As far as I know the great mighty crash that everyone always talks about was limited to just the US and didn't concern the rest of the world.
Canada, too, but the whole thing has been overblown to mythical proportions given that console-like computers back then were doing fine; they just weren't listed under "video" games sales figures.
All the british youtubers I've seen claim that the crash was meaningless for Europe because the real gaming war was between microcomputers.
#2 sounds more like speculation that #3 does. The late '80's to early '90's was the height of the Japanese product craze for both electronics and cars. This was a time when you had American companies using Japanese names... like Atari. Konami was already a recognizable name in the gaming industry. And to top it all off, these were games being made for a system called "Nintendo."
Wasn't ULTRA Games the reason Nintendo rebranded the Ultra 64 to the Nintendo 64? Or was it a different Ultra?
The 1983 console crash was really only a North American thing, it had no real affect worldwide. The 1983 crash was really the result of retailers in North America rejecting video games, because at that point, the quality control was low, there were many bad games that flooded retail that would go unsold, or end up being discounted.
When Atari released the VCS or 2600 in 1977, the idea of third party developers didn't exist. When four of Atari's top developers left Atari to found Activision, they realized that they didn't have to set up any deals with Atari to make games for their console. By law, it is not illegal to make a game that is compatible with any hardware and sell it on the same shelves as Atari's products. Which is what Activision did. Atari tried to stop them multiple times with court cases, but were ruled against.
This opened up the market for many other unlicensed publishers to come in and make their own games without dealing with Atari. Companies like Parker Bros., Mattel, Coleco, 20th Century Fox, Imagic, Sega (yeah, Sega released unlicensed games), and all sorts of other random publishers jumped on board. Third party 2600 cartridges are all radically different from each other because there were no set standards or guidelines. Third parties would just find factories to make their own carts, and sell them in retail outlets that stock VCS 2600's.
Atari never made any money off these companies, and it caused them to pump out lower quality games with high marketing budgets to meet deadlines and stay competitive with the likes of Activision. They would also force retailers to buy large inventory stocks of games like ET or Pac-Man, which would mostly go unsold, or returned for refunds. these are some of the games that flooded landfills. Atari couldn't deal with storing them in warehouses, so they had them all crushed and buried in the desert. Retailers were just fed up with home consoles and dumped them. They still sold home computers though, which is what Atari transitioned too after the console market was removed from under their feet.
When Nintendo jumped into the market, they had a lot of groundwork to do to win the trust of retail outlets that selling another game console was a good idea. Nintendo went pretty hard on creating a control system around retail that would block unlicensed games that would be sold alongside Nintendo third party licensed games. The "Seal of Quality" sticker was part of this system, if Nintendo found a retailer who stocked games without this sticker, or games that plagiarized it, would have their license to sell NES products removed by Nintendo. Nintendo would manufacture ever cartridge, first or third, from their own factories in Japan. They would do this to keep lock out algorithms a secret, which were required to bypass the NES10 lockout chip in the NES. Nintendo put restrictions on how many cartridges third parties can make per year, in order to keep the market from flooding. Nintendo also had a two-year exclusive on all games published for the NES. So third parties were not allowed to make games for competing consoles.
That was just a rumour, according to Nintendo which said they just wanted to change the name. See EGM April 1996 -
It had less to do with the game limit and more to do with cartage limits. Big publishers could get 10+ games on the market (especially later in the NES lifespan), but Nintendo kept a tight reign on the number of carts they would sell to each, in addition to the share they kept for themselves, because they had production limitations. Ultra was considered a separate publisher by Nintendo and got their own disbursement of carts, allowing Konami to get more physical carts on the market (which meant more money in Konami's coffers).