Donkey Kong Forum
General Donkey Kong Discussion => General Donkey Kong Discussion => Topic started by: DiggingInNY on February 07, 2014, 03:13:22 pm
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I'm sure that this has been brought up before, but with all the popularity of emulation and releasing classic arcade titles for the various home consoles through compilation discs or online stores, it seems like Nintendo is only major company that has never bothered to release their library of arcade titles for home console use. What ends up getting released are the NES ports, which for the most part, do not come close to their arcade counterparts in terms of difficulty. I'm not a Wii owner, but it would be cool to see the arcade ports of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Donkey Kong 3, Mario Bros, Nintendo vs. System titles, etc. released for their Wii systems. I've heard that Nintendo does not own the code to these games. Is this true for every arcade title they've released or for a select few? Though I could care less, I think Nintendo can make good money on this.
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As far as I know, there are some legals issues specific to DK's code that are unknown, and it has to do with some sort of settlement over when Nintendo used and modified the DK code to make DKjr and got sued by the people who wrote DK's code.
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Interesting, any word regarding issues with their other titles, such as Punch Out!, Super Punch Out!, Mario Bros, etc? Of course I'm not including Popeye, because of licensing issues.
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I brought this issue up, and said it was a mistake for Nintendo not to port these, and a couple of people on Facebook who are not even involved in Nintendo said I was ignorant, and that doing so was not a money maker for them because porting would cost too much.
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Nintendo no longer has the rights to the arcade version of DK, and by extension, Junior (since much of Junior's code is borrowed from DK).
This was the final ruling after about 8 years of litigation by the ghost developer Ikegami Co., who sued Nintendo when they started making DK boards (instead of buying them from Ikegami like Nintendo agreed to) when the game took off.
Since Nintendo doesn't own DK arcade anymore, they can't and won't ever sell it again.
Sheriff, Radar Scope, and DK (and chunks of Junior) were all engineered by Ikegami. Their arcade stuff after that should all be fair game, since they had a different developer, but in the case of a compilation or something like that, Nintendo most likely just doesn't want to deal with questions about the absence of the game that made them, so I think they're just shrugging and moving on...
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So is this why Nintendo didn't go after D2K? Because it's really Ikegami's turf now? Even though Nintendo doesn't have the rights to the arcade code, I imagine they would still own rights to the visual aspects of the game...the characters and "look" of the game. Couldn't they just rewrite the game to look and play the same, but with different underlying code?
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I thought I read somewhere that Ikegami has moved on to being like a cellphone company or something completely unrelated to the gaming industry now. I don't think they care at all about whatever rights they do have to DK's code. I remember looking into this early on when I decided to make the DK manual.
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Considering how litigious Nintendo is, the fact that they looked the other way at D2K strongly suggests that it's because they had no power to do anything about it.
Nintendo knows that if push came to shove and they actually took it to court, any half decent defense lawyer would quickly find out how the ITC vs. Nintendo case ultimately came down, and Nintendo would lose because they have no claim to ownership of the code that Jeff remixed.