The "Tetris Screwjob" started on the 2600

[NovaXpress]

Just some reflection of gaming history here . . .

 

Everyone knows about how Tengen thought they had the rights to Tetris, even releasing the game, yet it turns out that all the "I's weren't dotted" and so Nintendo grabbed the actual rights and forced Tengen out. Most also know about the conflict between Coleco and Atari over the Adam version of Donkey Kong.

 

But it seems the first such incidents happened earlier. The first one I know of occurred when Coleco announced four Centuri games (Phoenix, Vanguard, Challenger and Round-Up) in the very first Colecovision ads. But when spring hit, Electronic Games announced that Coleco hadn't secured the rights as well as they thought and so Atari was able to snipe it away. They probably never intended to release Challenger and Round-Up (dammit cause I liked Challenger a lot more than the other Centuri games) but wanted to screw Coleco out of some hot releases.

 

Now we've discovered that Fox's "Fall Guy" was going to be another Sirius PC port, namely "Squish Em." Yet the game never arrived and Squish Em was released for the Coleco and Intellivision by Interphase. I notice that Fox stopped licensing Sirius games after their first releases (Turmoil was in their second release wave). Apparently a conflict developed between Sirius and Fox, forcing Fox to scrap what might have been a completed 2600 game.

 

So this sort of thing has been going on since the beginning. I'm sure we haven't seen the last of it.

[Vic George 2K3]

Considering Fox's shoddy use of a movie license -- Thorn/EMI's 1980 Flash Gordon -- to sell a conversion of Sirius' Spider City, I'd say we were better off without another movie-or-TV-show-slapped-onto-an-existing-game-to-sell-it kind of deal.

[alienblue]

um...FALL GUY WAS released

for the CV, or at least on tape

for the Adam. And its not

a bad game to boot <: