“Look for this seal of quality on Nintendo Game Paks and accessories,” said a Nintendo advertisement at the start of 1990. “It’s your guarantee that you’ll get the most for your videogame dollar. If it’s not there, it’s not approved by the super power — Nintendo.” The gold seal was printed on every licensed NES game box. To a child in a toy shop it was a promise. To the companies that made the games, it was the visible part of the strictest licence the American games business had seen.
Out of the crash
Nintendo launched the NES in the United States in 1985, two years after the 1983 crash had filled shops with cheap, unwanted cartridges. Anyone could make games for the Atari 2600, and dozens of companies had. Minoru Arakawa, who ran Nintendo of America, meant to stop that happening to his console. The NES had a lockout chip that only Nintendo could supply, and Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, was frank about what it was for. “It was our way of assuring consistent product quality and to keep the taste level high — no dirty games, no games with bugs or bad design,” he told David Sheff. As Compute!’s Gazette explained in 1990, “Since Nintendo is the only producer of this chip, it’s able to control the quality of the games produced for the NES.”
What the licence demanded
Arakawa and Nintendo of America’s lawyer Howard Lincoln wrote a licence for outside publishers, based on the one Nintendo used in Japan. Its terms were severe enough that Lincoln had the company’s New York lawyer, John Kirby, check that they were legal. Sheff describes what a publisher signed up to:
- Nintendo approved each game, its packaging, its artwork and its advertising, and could reject a game or parts of it.
- Nintendo made the cartridges in Kyoto and sold them to the publisher for $9 to $14 each, depending on memory, a price that included Nintendo’s royalty. The minimum order was 10,000 cartridges, and the publisher carried all the risk of unsold stock.
- A publisher could release no more than five NES games a year, and could not release them on any other system for two years. Retro Gamer’s later history of the NES gives the exclusivity period as five years.
“They couldn’t afford to make many mistakes because they only had five shots a year,” Lincoln said. In return, approved games carried the seal, could be sold from Nintendo’s displays in shops and could appear in Nintendo’s booth at trade shows. Sheff credits the idea of the seal to Ron Judy, one of Nintendo of America’s first salesmen.
What the seal meant
The seal certified that Nintendo had approved a product, not that the product was good. Nintendo’s own words stayed carefully on the side of approval and authenticity. An advertisement in Nintendo Power in 1989 told readers to “look for the Nintendo seal of quality on games, accessories, and a whole lot more”. When Nintendo announced its World of Nintendo shop departments that year, it said everything in them would be “Nintendo approved and carry either the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality or be licensed by Nintendo of America Inc. to assure consumers that they are getting the real thing.” By 1990 the seal was on licensed sweets and juice drinks as well as games.
Outsiders read it as a guarantee against another crash. Reporting from the summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1988, ANALOG Computing wrote that Nintendo was “quality checking every game available on their machine”, and that “seeing Nintendo’s gold seal on the box assures the buyer that their purchase is supported.” By 1991, Sheff writes, a hundred companies had the seal.
Games without the seal
Atari Games, which published NES games under its Tengen label, wanted to make its own cartridges. By August 1988 Atari Games was making NES cartridges with its own chip, which got round the lockout, and around the turn of 1989 Tengen began selling them without Nintendo’s approval and without the seal. Atari Games sued Nintendo, alleging a monopoly, and Nintendo sued back. Kirby wrote to Toys “R” Us in January 1989 warning that Nintendo would use “the full range of its legal remedies” against shops that sold infringing products.
The seal also turned up in the settlement of a separate case. In 1991 the Federal Trade Commission and several states accused Nintendo of keeping NES prices high by pressuring shops that discounted. Nintendo settled without admitting liability, and people who had bought an NES between June 1988 and the end of 1990 were sent a certificate worth $5. Nintendo Power reminded readers that it could be used only on “an NES Game Pak bearing the Nintendo Seal of Quality”.
Arakawa never apologised for the system. “The chip has done exactly what we intended it to do,” he told Sheff. “It is why we have been able to maintain such a strong list of games, and why consumers can trust the Nintendo quality seal.”
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 8, “Enter the Dragon” (the World of Nintendo displays and Ron Judy’s idea for the seal); chapter 10, “Game Masters” (Yamauchi on the lockout chip; the licence, Kirby’s advice, approval rights, the $9 to $14 price, the 10,000 minimum, five games a year and two years’ exclusivity, Lincoln’s “five shots a year”, the seal and the displays, “In 1985, however”); chapter 10 also gives a hundred companies with the seal by 1991; chapter 11, “The Big Sleep” (Tengen’s chip by August 1988 and its unlicensed sales from late December 1988 or early January 1989, the countersuit, the letter to Toys “R” Us); chapter 12, “Game Over” (the FTC settlement, the $5 coupon, Arakawa’s “The chip has done exactly what we intended it to do”).
- Compute!’s Gazette, April 1990, p. 10: the proprietary chip, Tengen and the lawsuit.
- Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, NES feature: Nintendo’s control of manufacture and release numbers; exclusivity “for five years”.
- Nintendo Power issue 4, January/February 1989: Nintendo advertisement, “Look for the Nintendo seal of quality on games, accessories, and a whole lot more”.
- Nintendo Power issue 6, May/June 1989, p. 92: the World of Nintendo announcement.
- Nintendo Power issue 10, January/February 1990: Nintendo advertisement, “If it’s not there, it’s not approved by the super power”.
- Nintendo Power issue 12, May/June 1990, p. 86: licensed snacks and juices carrying the seal.
- Nintendo Power issue 32, January 1992: the Instant Redemption Certificate.
- ANALOG Computing issue 65, October 1988: summer CES report, “Nintendo’s gold seal on the box”.