And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.

This is the Harvard text book example of "let the adults handle it."

This all laid the seeds for their subsequent implosion... Epic rise, epic fall. I wish someone would make a movie about that story.

It was a different era.

I worked in a mall arcade in the early 90s, and because we purchased arcade games, I had access to the trade shows and various promotional events. For instance, E3 invited me to come out for their first event.

The size of the teams in the early 90s was TINY; I met the dudes who made Mortal Kombat at the AMOA convention, and the entire team was less than ten people. The main programmer had so little experience, he was largely known for doing the voice of "Rudy" in the pinball game "Funhouse."

Basically, the tech community was tiny and the gaming community was a tiny subdomain of the tech community.

Atari's big innovation may have simply been that it was founded in the right location (Silicon Valley.) If it wasn't for that, Steve Jobs wouldn't have worked at Atari. (And Wozniak wouldn't have moonlighted at Atari.)

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/steve-jobs-atari-empl...

I'm doing this from memory, but IIRC:

Atari was the only major gaming company based out of Silicon Valley

A lot of the games of the time were basically just Japanese games that were licensed by US distributors. Pac Man came from Namco in Japan and was distributed in the US by Chicago's Midway, Space Invaders was made by Taito in Japan and licensed in the US. (Also by Midway, IIRC.) "Defender" was one of the first 'homegrown' games in the US that wasn't coming out of Atari in Silicon Valley. (Defender was made by Eugene Jarvis in Chicago for Williams, who later merged with Midway.)

Although Nintendo was NOT based in Silicon Valley, they had the dumb luck of locating just up the hill from Microsoft. If you've seen "King of Kong," the dude from the documentary basically lives halfway between Microsoft in Redmond and Nintendo in Snoqualmie: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_North_Bend

Sega WAS based in Silicon Valley, but their slow decline was arguably due to a political tug-of-war between Sega of America (based in Silicon Valley) and Sega (based in Japan.)

The 10NES chip was a bit more complicated than that. Basically the way it worked was that there was a chip in every NES, and another chip in every cartridge. On reset, the chip in the NES randomly picks 1 of 16 bitstreams, and tells the chip in the cartridge which bitstream it chose. Each chip then starts continuously sending the chosen bitstream to the other chip. If the chip in the NES sees a discrepancy between the generated bitstream and the bitstream it received, it will reset the NES. This is the cause of the famous NES "blinking red light".

> Also, why was there a copy of the code at the United States Copyright Office?

If a copyright holder registers their copyright, it amplifies their rights (such as granting them a higher amount of damages in an infringement lawsuit). Registering the copyright for a piece of software involves submitting the first 25 pages and last 25 pages of the source code, or the entire code, whatever's smaller. The 10NES chip used an extremely simple 4-bit microcontroller with only 512 bytes of ROM, so the copyright office has the entire source code.

Prior to this, only OEMs made games for their consoles. That court case opened the floodgates for 3rd party game companies to exist. Arguably one of the most important lawsuits in the history of gaming.

The dude who invented LED light bulbs got a bonus of something like $50 for his invention

He later left his employer to go work for Cree, who was making LED lightbulbs. His former employer sued him.