Arcade ports on different systems?

[godzillajoe]

How did Atari manage a Donkey Kong license when Coleco had it?

 

Also how did GCE/Vectrex get Pole Position and Berzerk but some games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders were exclusive to Atari and resulted in numerous knock off games?

 

Just curious as I fired up the ol' Vectrex for a bit today and wondered how, if companies were snapping up rights to arcade titles for home conversion what the deal was with these.

 

Also, any other games like this that were licensed to multiple companies?

Edited January 11, 2011 by godzillajoe

[tz101]

Also, any other games like this that were licensed to multiple companies?

 

Zaxxon was released by Coleco on the Colecovision, Intellivision, and VCS, while Sega (the developer) released it to 5200 and 8-bit computers.

 

 

Atari actually gained rights to many of the Coleco and Parker Bros. ports later in the life of the VCS. I do not know how, but they re-released games like Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Venture and such in red-label variants.

[Feralstorm]

It all depends on the licensing contract between the owner of the original game property, and whoever ports it to whatever system(s). It wasn't uncommon for one publisher to have home game console rights, and another to have home computer rights to the same game. Maybe even different publishers for disk vs. cartridge versions. I think GCE was able to license a few games Atari had sewn up on home systems because the Vectrex was a self-contained game system, as opposed to one that hooked up to a television, which may have been a contractual loophole for some games.