Games that Atari sued over

[Gregory DG]

Atari sued Sega and settled out of court for using DB9 conectors on their controllers, Thats where Atari got the money to finace the Jag. What a great way to spend your last dollar Tremil

I remember there was some kind of suit about the controller ports. But for the one you're thinking of (where Atari got the $50 million from Sega) the Jaguar had already been in development.

 

One of the things Atari did that was smart was to patent everything! One suit was about (I think Nintendo) using some of Atari's scrolling technology. Then they sued Nintendo for monopolistic practices (that might have been Atari Games though.) I think Atari even owns patents on certain hologram technology and I had heard (rumors of course) that every company that made a hologram had to pay a fee to Atari. I doubt that's true, but it's fun to speculate.

 

It'd be nice to have a list of all these suits somewhere. Sounds like an article for TAT...

Edited December 1, 2006 by Gregory DG

[Retro Rogue]

TIA is a custom chip with no generic equivalent like ECG or NS so Atari could have patented and copyrighted it. I guess Atari missed something and both Mattel and Coleco took advantage of it.

 

 

Coleco and company reversed engineered it, and since there's no bios there was nothing proprietary used. But they were settled out of court (because Atari had deeper pockets and could have kept tying things up), and I believe Coleco was paying a royalty for every 2600 adapter and Gemini sold.

[Retro Rogue]

The source is the "Ultimate History of Video Games" which I just began reading. It seems to be researched and footnoted well with all sources.

 

 

Take that book with a grain of salt, there's a ton of factual errors in it and stories that are just not true.

[supercat]

I may be wrong, but couldn't Atari have patented the TIA, or at least some of the "tricks" they built into it?

 

They could have, but the 2600 wasn't intended to be the world's greatest gaming platform. It was designed to hold Atari's place in the market while they developed a "real" game machine. Atari probably expected that by the time the patents would be filed, the machine would be sufficiently obsolete that either nobody would want to copy it, or else that Atari would have moved on to such bigger and better things that it wouldn't care if they did.

 

Actually, their prediction was not unreasonable. The Atari 2600 was obsolete by 1981. But then Activision came along and unlocked so many new capabilities that the machine got a new lease on life. Atari in 1977 had no way of predicting that would happen, and would have prevented it if they could have.