Nintendo

Leave luck to heaven.

Actually, it's about ethics in ... Video games

Cutscenes

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Nintendo (Japanese: 任天堂株式会社, Hepburn: Nintendō Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese multinational video game company, known for its gaming console hardware and their multitude of mascots whom they milk for what they're worth. While they started off in the late 19^th century as a publisher of hanafuda and later Western playing cards, they have since diversified and dabbled in industries such as novelty toys and even a taxi service,^[1] eventually culminating in their present business as a video game giant, producing seminal works such as Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and many others.

Because of their status and clout in the video gaming industry, they earned almost universal brand recognition rivalling that of Mickey Mouse, which led to the company being dubbed by some as the "Japanese Disney".^{[note 1]} And like Disney, they are no stranger to controversy either, mainly due to their use of censorship, ruthlessly incessant litigation and poor treatment of their fan base through cease-and-desist orders against fan games and even otherwise innocuous archiving efforts e.g. emulation and the like, business conservatism as well as the cult-like behaviour of their die-hard fans who white-knight the company despite their flagrantly dickish business practices.

A matter of morality[edit]

The Super Nintendo port of Mortal Kombat (top) fared poorly compared to the Sega Genesis conversion (bottom) thanks to Nintendo's puritanism.

Nintendo is known to pride itself as a family-friendly company (as compared to Sega, and later Microsoft and Sony, whose core audience is the so-called hardcore gamer crowd), most especially in its early years in the Western markets when they revitalised the video gaming industry following the video game crash of 1983. As such, it outlined a series of guidelines with which video game publishers in America had to comply^[2] in order to sell games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, including (but not limited to) the following:

• Religious symbolism (except for antiquarian beliefs such as Greek and Roman mythology) was forbidden. This led to explicit Christian iconography being omitted in the Western releases of Castlevania, among other titles.
• Graphic violence was to be limited in action games, so scenes of blood and gore had to be significantly toned down.
• References to hate and discrimination were not allowed, nor were political themes. This prompted id Software to strip Wolfenstein 3D of swastikas and portraits of Adolf Hitler having his moustache shaved in the SNES release.
• Pornography was forbidden, but this had also been true with the Japanese Famicom releases, as former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi felt that it would mar the company's reputation.^{[note 2]} There's little they could do about it in Japan, where H-games (hentai games) for the Famicom have existed anyway, thanks to the Famicom's lack of a lockout mechanism in contrast to its North American counterpart.
• Use and mention of psychoactive substances such as drugs and alcohol was a no-no. The boxer character Vodka Drunkenski in Punch-Out!! was bowdlerized to Soda Popkinski both to tone down on national stereotyping (which is part and parcel of the Punch-Out!! series) and on alcohol use.

So much for being non-sectarian (prototype image from The Legend of Zelda)

Even under the strict guidelines, exceptions occurred: Bionic Commando (though swastikas were eliminated in the US version), Smash TV, and Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode contain human violence, the latter also containing implied sexuality and tobacco use; River City Ransom and Taboo: The Sixth Sense contain nudity, and the latter also contains religious images, as do Castlevania II and III.

Nintendo's goody-two-shoes policy did backfire on them a couple of times, however, most notably with the console releases of Mortal Kombat. The gratuitous portrayal of violence in Mortal Kombat prompted a United States Senate hearing on video games (which also served as a convenient battleground between Nintendo and its erstwhile rival Sega). Both the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis^{[note 3]} received their conversions of Mortal Kombat, but the Sega Genesis version had a thinly-veiled blood and gore mode^{[note 4]} which could be unlocked with the cheat code "ABACABB" (a nod to the album Abacab by the band Genesis, who shared their name with the North American version of the console), compared to the far tamer sweat spewed out by characters on the SNES version.^{[note 5]} This resulted in the latter version outselling the SNES version by three to one.^[3] After the US Senate hearings resulted in the adoption of an industry-wide self-regulatory system known as the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), Nintendo eventually abandoned its own version of the Hays Code and allowed graphic violence on games published for their systems. Since then, a large number of mature titles with copious amounts of graphic violence have been released on Nintendo consoles, such as Doom, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil, Manhunt and many others. The kiddie toy stigma does remain to this day, however; even Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park knew of this and had the then-upcoming tie-in game for the Game Boy Color canceled out of concern for children who might have ended up getting their hands on a game based on a satirical adult cartoon.^[4]

Leap of faith[edit]

This is far more blasphemous as it lets you shoot goats instead of Nazis.

While Nintendo tried to be non-sectarian, especially in the West, in an effort to appeal to as broad an audience as possible and avert criticism of favouring one faith over another, some exceptions did slip through the cracks. Link in the original Legend of Zelda bore a shield with a cross on it (not to mention the concept art as shown above where Link is depicted praying in front of a crucifix).

A small company known as Color Dreams saw a loophole in Nintendo's heavy-handed approach against purveyors of unlicensed software for the NES by establishing a subsidiary called Wisdom Tree, whose main output is unoriginal rehashes of their existing shovelware library with a decidedly Christian slant to it. The best known of their titles is the now-infamous Super 3D Noah's Ark, a reskin of Wolfenstein 3-D loosely based on the Noah's Ark story. Most, if not all, of Color Dreams's staff, Dan Lawton included, are either atheists or agnostics, and they reportedly started the division mainly out of pragmatism as well as to give Nintendo a holy middle finger. Another account by Wisdom Tree owner Brenda Huff, however, states that one of Color Dreams' employees who moonlighted as a Sunday school teacher proposed the idea and that Huff and the rest of the sales and marketing team's Christian convictions made up for the programmers' irreligion.^[5] Because Christian book stores were exempt from Nintendo's bullying of retail outlets into not selling bootleg and unlicensed cartridges, the Wisdom Tree tactic worked, as Nintendo never threatened legal action against them, fearing retribution from the religious right who would likely have tarred Nintendo as anti-Christian or possibly satanic for trampling on a (quasi-)religious organisation.^[6]

Think of the children![edit]

Nintendo responded to a threat to children's online safety by discontinuing online exchange functionality in Swapnote and Flipnote Studio 3D following incidents where a pedophile allegedly shared inappropriate content with youngsters in Japan using the Nintendo 3DS's SpotPass feature.^[7]

Stomping goombas through litigation[edit]

Bootleg Famicom cartridges, a staple of many a 90s console gamer in developing countries.

Much like Christian Louboutin's doggedly proactive stance against those counterfeiting his stilettos and painting red soles on shoes other than his, Nintendo is known for its aggressive campaign against those who use even a scant part of their intellectual property. While it initially stemmed from the original arcade release of Donkey Kong (where a reworked Japan-only release by Falcon called Crazy Kong got exported to the States without Nintendo's blessing^[8]), it's a known fact that since the 1980s, Nintendo took a hard line towards bootleggers and unlicensed games. The North American version of the Famicom–rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System–utilised a lockout system called the Checking Integrated Circuit (CIC) in an effort to deter pirates and unsanctioned publishers from producing cartridges; the Asian-market Famicom lacked any such restrictions, making it free real estate for bootleg "10000000-in-1" multicarts, pornographic content (e.g. those from Hacker International such as AV Poker and Miss Peach World; also reworked and released by Wisdom Tree as Sunday Funday but with Christian imagery instead of smut) and hacked Mario games. A far simpler deterrent came in the form of the enforcement of the "Nintendo" trademark on both the Game Boy and Famicom Disk System, where bootleggers obfuscate or use different logos on their cartridges in hopes of making Nintendo turn a blind eye towards them.^[9] Various methods to circumvent the CIC were devised for the past few decades, ranging from the bonkers such as the negative voltage spike method by Wisdom Tree and many others^[10] to the more sensible such as the dongle approach where a player would have to insert a licensed cartridge on top of an unlicensed dongle cart, with the licensed cartridge's CIC chip being co-opted to trick the console's security. Atari Games^{[note 6]} through its Tengen subsidiary used a rather shady tactic of obtaining 10NES/CIC code from the U.S. Patent Office in order to reverse engineer the CIC, falsely claiming that the appropriated code was to be used for potential litigation against Nintendo. A lawsuit ensued which Nintendo won, unsurprisingly.^[11] It took over twenty years for the CIC to be finally cracked by the homebrew community,^[11] though funnily enough, while the CIC was a tough nut to crack, it was relatively easy to bypass as many owners cut off the CIC reset pin from their console as an essential modification to improve reliability (as even legitimate cartridges may end up not being authenticated), and certain unlicensed developers even handed out instructions on how to do so.^[12]

In a recent incident, Nintendo filed civil and criminal suits against members of a company known as Team Xecuter, whose products were commercially-distributed modchips for the Nintendo Switch among others. Canadian national Gary "GaryOPA" Bowser^{[note 7]} and French national Max "MAXiMiLiEN" Louarn were arrested for designing and selling "circumvention devices" for the Switch which allow the installation of pirated games; unlike most hacking groups who primarily consist of hobbyists and computer security professionals, Team Xecuter is driven more by profit from the distribution of warez and thus are more likely to be under the Big N's crosshairs which earned them a polarising reputation in the console modding and homebrew subculture.^[13] As if that wasn't enough, Bowser was later ordered to pay up Nintendo in legal damages for the rest of his life;^[14] while some most especially Nintendo fans gloated and opined that he truly deserved it, others felt that the lifetime settlement amounted to a cruel and unusual punishment with the punitive intent of deterring would-be bootleggers (or even good-faith homebrew modders for that matter), further opining that the financial damages aren't something that Nintendo actually needs for their bottom line anyway.^[15] This is similar to the numerous horror stories of the RIAA ordering (suspected) music pirates to pay up ungodly sums of money for their alleged copyright violations, and is also reflective of Japan's notoriously cruel justice system where the accused are guilty until proven guilty.

Also in 2023 was a DMCA complaint (allegedly) filed by Nintendo against a homebrew tool for the Switch called Locksmith, which extracts the keys required to dump ROM images from cartridges. Said complaints created a chilling effect where some projects such as the Skyline emulator for Android devices have announced that they're ceasing development due to legal fears owing to Nintendo's dogged crackdown on the homebrew community.^[16] In late February 2024 Nintendo somehow filed a copyright infringement suit against the open-source Switch emulator project Yuzu, alleging in their case filing that the emulator's authors are facilitating the practice of illicit distribution of copyrighted game software by instructing users to hack their consoles and obtain the required encryption keys, allegedly for said users to further traffic illicitly, and claimed "irreparable" damages from the project, demanding both financial compensation and the shutdown of Yuzu,^[17][18] all despite of previous precedent ruling emulation as perfectly legal. While it is understandable that a company has the right to protect its intellectual property from unauthorised use, Nintendo's reasoning that a relatively niche emulation software has done immeasurable harm to their financial standing is clearly bullshit considering how wildly successful the Switch and its games are, with the console selling over 130 million units worldwide, and the Mario franchise alone selling 200 million copies across all games on the platform.^[19] Some argued that Yuzu having a Patreon page isn't going to help their case as Nintendo clearly smelled blood on the water in the form of revenue earned through user donations, alongside game-specific patches apparently capitalising on the hype surrounding the game Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, though this may be moot point as both Bleem! and Connectix sold their respective PlayStation emulators as commercial products yet they won a pyrrhic victory over the corporate overlords who took offence at their existence.^[20] However, Yuzu caved in not long after and shuttered both their own project as well as its sister project Citra, an emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, as well as paying $2.4 million as part of a settlement in exchange for no longer making any Nintendo hardware-related projects.^[21]

Such litigious efforts to assert their copyright are quite understandable and well within their rights, but their dogged efforts against their perceived competition has alienated parts of the gaming community and painted a picture of them as scrooges not unlike Apple. A number of ROM trading sites have either been taken down or banned the distribution of Nintendo-published games on their sites; nonetheless, emulation and video game preservation advocates argue that Nintendo's continued aggression caused more harm than good on preserving cultural heritage, with video game historian Frank Cifaldi quoted as saying, “I am completely sympathetic to Nintendo’s need to protect its properties, but where it has crossed the line, is that by shutting down these sites, it’s asking the owners to give up all the ROMs, not just Nintendo ones,” opining that large parts of the NES back catalogue (or the library of any other retro console for that matter) became orphan works and thus are inaccessible by normal means other than expensive used copies.^[22] Ditto with fan games and ROM hacks, whom Nintendo also has a grudge with, taking down hundreds upon hundreds of fan-created work based off their IPs. Despite the late Satoru Iwata's assurances that they would not treat their fans like criminals, their Gestapo-ish approach left a sour taste in the mouths of many a gamer, comparing them unfavourably to the likes of Bethesda and Microsoft who laid out guidelines for fans to comply when using their content^[23] or with Sega^[24] whose relationship towards fan game authors have led to official games developed by community members such as Sonic Mania, and Valve owes a lot of its popularity to the mods it acquired and/or officially sanctioned such as Counter-Strike for the original Half-Life, which led to its own series,^[25] as well as the fan-made Half-Life remake Black Mesa, which Valve also gave their blessing to sell as a commercial product.^[26]

To be fair, many of the fan game projects taken down by Nintendo were monetised in some way, hence why the Dolphin emulator project outright refuses donations of any kind, instead relying on the contributors themselves to shoulder expenses such as server fees and whatnot; this is in contrast to the Wii U emulator Cemu whose developers run a Patreon page and is thus at risk of legal action for competing against Nintendo's offerings,^[27] as well as the aforementioned Yuzu emulator for the Switch whose donation page (particularly the revenue they earned from paywalling pre-release builds) drew the ire of Nintendo. Dolphin was however subject to controversy when their Steam store page was pre-emptively taken down due to objections from the Big N themselves. This was allegedly due to the presence of cryptographic keys in the emulator's source code, though some have viewed the complaint as being petty and litigious especially considering the price of original hardware on the secondary market and Nintendo's inability and/or stubborn unwillingness to make their legacy software easily accessible even to those who are willing to pay for the privilege.^[28] The Dolphin developers later clarified in a blog post in July 2023 that there was no DMCA complaint from Nintendo; what actually happened was that Valve sought Nintendo's opinion on the inclusion of Dolphin in the Steam store, but Nintendo unsurprisingly objected, thereby ending the emulator team's hopes of a Steam release.^[29] The Dolphin devs also allayed fears about the AES key which they noted as having become common knowledge since its discovery, and that they would not remove it regardless as they argued that the key's presence falls under a fair use exemption allowing for legitimate uses such as interoperability and reverse engineering after having consulted a lawyer.^[30]

The retro gamer's best friend is Nintendo's worst enemy.

Perhaps in an ironic twist, while Nintendo has demonised emulation of their hardware and painted a negative picture of it as a tool for facilitating piracy, often if not always playing the victim card regarding perceived "harm" to their business by emulators, this stance of theirs has been seen as hypocritical considering they have explicitly mentioned having relied on emulation technologies to power their re-releases of classic games,^[31] and ironically enough, the ROM image of the Virtual Console release of Super Mario Bros. is byte-for-byte identical to the ones previously circulating on the web, down to the iNES header used by unofficial emulators; whether this is proof that Nintendo hypocritically benefited from unofficial emulation or not is debatable.^[32] Nintendo previously threatened legal action against UltraHLE, a Nintendo 64 emulator which even garnered a mention on TIME Magazine for its ability to run N64 games at full speed on contemporary hardware,^{[note 8] [33]} something which understandably earned their ire as it could eat through their profits, but UltraHLE was discontinued shortly after release due to incessant demands placed on the authors and the aforementioned legal threat.^[34] It since became customary, if not an absolute necessity, to distribute emulators as open source software as a paralegal measure to prove to Nintendo that none of their code was being used, though they did force the likes of Microsoft to take down app listings for emulators on the Xbox Store^[35] and was able to scare off the Yuzu team into submission as stated above. Also ironic is the interesting side effect piracy has in further popularising Nintendo's franchises especially in countries where the company has had next to no formal presence, i.e. children who never owned a legitimate Nintendo product in their lives are already familiar with Mario and his adventures thanks to Famiclones and pirated releases of Nintendo software (as well as NES/Famicom games by third parties), case in point the Dendy line of Famiclones by Russia-based Steepler, whose affordability compared to a genuine Famicom^{[note 9][36]} led to it attaining a level of popularity roughly equal to Nintendo's offerings. Interestingly enough, Nintendo and Steepler came to an agreement where the latter received exclusive rights to distribute the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy consoles throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States.^[37]

Further complicating the issue are allegations of what amounts to either internet vigilantes and/or volunteer useful idiots filing fraudulent DMCA notices on behalf of the company either as a troll move or out of mindless loyalty to Nintendo. Such incidents aren't uncommon, and only serve to drive consternation towards both the Big N and their legion of zombie fanboys.^[38]

There is however an upshot to this behaviour by the Big N: the distribution rights to the pornographic Mario parodies Super Hornio Brothers and Super Hornio Brothers II were reportedly acquired by Nintendo to dissuade their redistribution; after all, who would want to make sleazy ripoffs of a media franchise catered largely towards children anyway? Nintendo's alleged legal action against now-washed up "rapper" Soulja Boy with his bootleg video game consoles also drew sympathy from those who did not take kindly to Soulja Boy reselling cheap Chinese knockoffs at extortionate prices;^[39] not helping matters was when he tried to play the race card even though most of the criticism towards his bootleg consoles have nothing to do with his ethinicity.^[40] And while Nintendo has not taken any formal legal action (mainly due to them being transformative parodies which is well within fair use and the First Amendment), they did issue statements voicing their displeasure towards PETA's satirical "parodies" of their properties, such as Mario Kills Tanooki^[41] and Pokémon Black & Blue.^[42]

Conservatism, Kyoto style[edit]

The Switch, Nintendo's current home console.^{[note 10]}

Perhaps much of these dick moves comes down to the Big N's conservative upper management, which is par for the course with most Kyoto-based companies or Japanese companies in general. Anecdotal accounts from gaijin who (used to) work for said companies have noted Japanese geezers holding on to old-school practices such as the use of fax machines and (irrational) concerns over emerging technologies like version control and cloud storage, under the belief that this could leave them vulnerable to cyberattacks. If anything, this is one such evidence of Japan's ageing population, where progress is held back by seniors who are increasingly out of touch with what's new and novel. A former Nintendo employee described Nintendo as paradoxical, making innovative games and hardware but at the same time releasing them with computing capabilities that are light-years behind their contemporaries^{[note 11]} and is also behind the times with social media and community relations especially in Western markets.^[43]

In fairness to Nintendo, their version of the blue ocean strategy–termed by game designer Gunpei Yokoi as "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考, "Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō")–did work in their favour such as in the Wii where its innovative motion controls more than made up for its anaemic computing capabilities compared to its contemporaries and managed to outsell them by a large margin (though this is mainly due to casual players, children and their families taking up a chunk of its audience; the Wii did get its share of mature titles but the lack of a Grand Theft Auto game and a glut of questionable shovelware gave the Wii a bit of a stigma amongst the hardcore crowd), and earlier still with the original Game Boy, whose battery life proved to be of significant advantage over its more capable yet power-hungry competitors despite only having a monochrome LCD screen.^[44] That being said, their use of underpowered hardware, while advantageous when done right as said with the Game Boy and Wii, also proved to be of equal frustration on both developers and the gaming public, as conversions of games originally developed for higher-end consoles and computers may present a challenge^[45] and end up becoming inferior^[46] or in some cases be "ported" as a cloud-based game, being rendered remotely from a central server due to limitations presented by the Switch,^{[note 12]} at the cost of not actually owning the game and the risk of being unable to play it in the future if and when the servers running it shut down.^[47]

Nintendo's acrimonious relationship towards fans also extends to streamers and internet users: their (now-discontinued) "YouTube Creators Program" proved to be disastrous to content creators as it basically laid out unreasonable rules on what (not) to do with their intellectual property,^[48][49] and their refusal to make their soundtracks available on music streaming services such as Spotify while filing DMCA notices to those unofficially uploading their music on the web made gamers even more leery towards the company, just as when other video game publishers have put up their soundtracks on YouTube for free as they could still profit off ad revenue generated from said uploads.^[50] They did went on to release the Nintendo Music app for mobile devices, which is fine and all, but it requires a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription (unlike Spotify which does offer a free, ad-supported tier), and to top it all off, use said soundtrack player app as a convenient excuse to further go scorched earth on unofficial uploads by fans or even on gameplay videos where said music can be heard (and in some cases such as the original Super Mario Bros., cannot be disabled outside of hacking the game, which in itself is a grave sin as far as Nintendo is concerned).^[51]

Also as infuriating is Nintendo's acerbic treatment of grassroots esports events like in the case of Super Smash Bros.^[52] where one such event was forced to use a specialised fork of the Dolphin emulator due to logistics difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (in particular, the lack of online modes in Melee; an in-person tournament would be outright suicide at the time for obvious reasons hence the need to use emulators) only for Nintendo to pre-emptively file a cease-and-desist due to their demonisation of emulators, which resulted in a lot of backlash from the community over perceived inconsiderate behavour by the company amidst the pandemic.^[53]

See also[edit]

• Pokémon, the highest grossing media franchise (though they only publish the games)
• Super Mario, another big franchise
• Apple, technology company with similarly cultish following and scummy business practices
• Disney, another family-friendly media and entertainment company obsessed with protecting its intellectual property.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]