lost games #2 tengen tetris

Lost games #2

"Tengen" tetris
the second in a sort of occasional series on games that >nearly< existed (and a bonus boring bit about Nintendo controlling the video games industry in the eighties)
Right, after writing this ,the scenario as to why the hell "the best thing ever released on Nintendo" never actually was ,has turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would, to be honest if you dont like reading about "lock out chips" or people selling licences that they didnt actually own, then skip down to the last paragraph ,its got pictures and everything :)
Oh and I should also point out that the info here in is based on what I've read about the industry, from books like game-over , and "joystick nation", and from various fan-websites,I've never been lucky(?) enough to work in the games industy itself. In other words if theres any erronious info below let me know and I will gladly change it.
Now onward!!.......

Anyway theres two factors that led to the reason that this game was withdrawn,

Important Reason Number One

So..as I mentioned at the end of the last "lost games" , there was a "lost" verison of tetris realeased on the NES.
The fact that both these lost games feature Nintendo is a huge coincidence,
a bit of background:
As I hinted earlier the Big N , ruled their empire with a fist of steel in the 80's and 90's.
Unlike previous manafacturers consoles , the NES (the nintendo entertainment system) was designed in such a way that it only allowed licenced carts to work in it , via what was termed a "lock out chip".Even if a game was written and designed so that it would play in an NES , if there was no chip on the cart it wouldnt work.
This was partly to prevent piracy of carts, and partly to prevent "grey" imports of games (the equivilant of using Region 1 DVD's over here to watch movies yet to be released outside the US)
It also allowed Nintendo to completely control the manafacturing of games , only they could "make" carts that would work properly on the system.They allowed publishing companies to become "NES Licensees" and produce third party software for the system, but then Nintendo would actually create the games.This meant that N. got a percentage of profits from all games made.It also allowed some quality control ,i.e. if a game was shoddy, bugged,improper (Nintendo were famous for their prudishness compared to other gaming formats),or just plain bad it wouldnt get made.
It also probably allowed N. to favor some publishers over others, i.e. piss them off say by having dealings with say sega, and it was possible that the cart manafacturing plant would be "in use" coming up to the all important christmas rush.
( N. by the way apparantly had a similar setup with shops and distributors , i.e. piss them off and lines of some games would be "unavailable for a while)
Now does this make them bad people? thats open to debate , but it does make good business sense.Also because the income of money from carts is gauranted you can afford to let the console itself act as a loss leader,(i.e. even if it costs $100 to make , you can sell it for $50 as you'll make money back on the future purchases of games, almost risk free).This is a model thats been used by every console since.(and lately seems to be taken up by printer manafacturers, but thats another story)

Theres a book I mentioned earlier called "game over" by a guy called david sheff which provides
a lot of the info in what I've talked about so far.

Anyway Tengen (a subdivision of Atari games) were a loyal licencee for a while , but eventually decided to challenge the Big N in court, as basically they (N)were in all but name a monopoly , and in US business this is a "bad thing".
'Round about this time Tengen released the "black carts".
Now these played exactly the way a normal cart did ,and bar the colour were identical to a regular cartridge but they had one major difference they were made completely independantly of Nintendo Tengen had reverse engineered the lockout chip (i.e. they made a chip that did the same thing and made the NES think it was a kosher chip, but it was infact completely different).Now Hong kong game pirates had copied the chip to make pirate copies before , which was of course illeagal.But what Tengen did technically wasnt .
They just happened to make carts which just happened to have a chip that didnt copy anything nintendo had made, which just happened to allow you to run the game(they had made) on your NES
It wasnt piracy, it wasnt anything ileagal(yet) and it was the last thing Nintendo wanted.
This of course led to many exciting lawsuits and countersuits..(well exciting if you like that sort of thing)
anyway all this was the backdrop to :

Important Reason Number Two

Right, we all know that tetris came from Russia, a chap called Alexey Pazhitnov, created it on his own ,as a project.It spread to the west via a basic hungarian port to the c64 and apple II, as well as a russian made IBM version.
Now there was a bit of a scramble to get the rights to make the various ports,the full version of this is a bit like one of those "guess which cup is over the pea", only in cryllic and with more lawyers than usual.
So I'll give you a very brief and slightly vague synopsys : A chap called Robert Stein goes after and eventually gets the rights to produce tetris on "home computers".He doesnt, however, unknown to him , own the rights to produce it for consoles.He in turn sells the rights to the Maxwell backed Mirrorsoft, who subcontract it to Tengen,who go about making their tetris, which is a "black cartridge" (aha ..see it all starts to come together!!)version. Now while all this is going on Nintendo have snapped up the rights to the handheld version , and in turn assume they have the rights to make a console one.following so far?, good.They start work on these straightaway ,via licencee BPS. Now about halfway through ,both parties discover the other is making a version of the same game, lawyers are called , "cease and desists are sent", and at one point Maxwell apparantly talked to Goberchev.
Long story short, Tengens tetris is released in May, they lose the legal battle in june, and the game is withdrawn, and copies are pulled from the shelves and destoyed.
Nintendo go on to release the "Official" version , and between that and the Gameboy one make billions.

Go here for the detailed decription of what happened (and keep your eye on the cups at all times.. )

Finally the game bit:
The irony of all this is that the "Unofficial" version is much better than the BPS version(in my opinion anyway).
For a start it looks better than an 8bit verision should, with snooth colourful sprites and a slick design.
heres the BPS one

and the Tengen one

It has a 2 player co-op mode, a versus mode as well as a version against the computer.(the official one had a single player mode ...and er that was it if I remember rightly).
Musically it loses to the bps one , but if you're having a long session you'll be setting it to silence and putting on a cd anyway.
I've many happy memories of games of the 2 player vs mode going on into the night with my mates..
Before emulation the Tengen was a nightmare to get hold of in this part of the world.It did pop up on those 50 game compliation carts that would ship with NES clones from time to time ,my mate had a NES knockoff refered to by all as the TEXET, (who were probably the manafacturer..we think:), this had a copy of tengen tetris which was used on the gaming nights I mentioned earlier .
Anyway these days you can enjoy it via the wonders of the EMU
Go to www.zophar.net -)NES for emulators
I think the rom is available here
(I'm not sure exactly what the legality of downloading a rom of a game you cant actually buy though so bear that in mind;) )