Tengen (company)

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Tengen was a video game publisher and developer that was created by arcade game manufacturer Atari Games. After Nintendo nearly single-handedly revived the market in the United States, Atari Games realized that there was still money to be made in home video games after all. Since the Atari Corporation was already involved in the home video game market with the 2600, 7800, and XEGS game consoles, Atari Games chose to create a new brand name to market their games under. They also chose to make games for the market-leading Nintendo Entertainment System rather than introduce a new home console of their own. The new subsidiary was dubbed "Tengen", which in the Japanese game Go refers to the central point of the board (the word "Atari" comes from the same game).

Tengen unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with Nintendo for a less restrictive license (Nintendo restricted their licensees to releasing only five games per year, and required their games to be NES-exclusive for two years). Nintendo was not interested, so Tengen agreed to their standard license in December 1987. In 1988, Tengen released their first (and only) three cartridges licensed through Nintendo - RBI Baseball, Pac-Man and Gauntlet. Meanwhile, Tengen secretly worked to bypass Nintendo's lock-out chip called 10NES that gave them control over which games were published for the NES. While numerous manufacturers managed to override this chip by zapping it with a voltage spike, Tengen engineers feared this could potentially damage NES consoles and expose them to unnecessary liability. Instead they chose to reverse engineer the chip and decipher the code required to unlock it. However, the engineers were unable to do so, and the launch date for their first batch of games was rapidly approaching.

In desperation, Tengen turned to the United States Copyright Office. Their lawyers contacted the government office to request a copy of the Nintendo lock-out program, claiming they needed it for potential litigation against Nintendo. Once obtained, they used the program to create their own chip that would unlock the NES. When Tengen launched the unlicensed versions of their games, Nintendo immediately sued Tengen for copyright and patent infringement. In the initial phases of trial, the court sided with Nintendo, but the sides settled before the matter was fully resolved.

Tengen faced another court challenge with Nintendo in 1989 in copyright controversy over Tetris. Tengen lost this suit as well and was forced to recall what was estimated to be hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges (having sold only about 50,000). (See Tetris for more.)

Despite their problems with Nintendo, Tengen went on to produce games for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, Sega CD, and NEC Turbo Grafx-16. In 1993, after Time Warner bought a controlling stake in Atari Games, the Tengen name was discontinued and home games were now released under the "Time Warner Interactive" (TWI) brand.

[edit] NES games

This is a list of the unlicensed games made by Tengen for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Three games were manufactured as both licensed and unlicensed, as indicated below.

Tengen's unlicensed NES game cartridges do not come in the universally recognizable semi-square grey shape regular Nintendo licensed games come in, but instead are rounded and matte-black, more resembling the original Atari cartridges.