This Week in Gaming History

On the gaming buffet this week in history, you'll find several helpings of lawsuits, a deathmatch or two, and a cult classic RPG.

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Quite a memorable week.
Planescape Torment was always due a lot of respect in my mind, despite me not playing very far into it.
I never knew about the Atari/Nintendo trouble that much. I'm suprised they both came out of it in once piece after hearing that.

And DOOM. Oh Doom, such an impacting game to the industry. I remember playing it through so much, though I never really enjoyed it as much as some other titles of the time.

One interesting side story and addition to the Atari vs. Nintendo battles - Tetris. Atari had licensed the game for arcades, while Nintendo licensed it for consoles. Considering the NES the same thing, Atari made a version of the game for the NES under the Tengen brand. Nintendo, on the other hand, made their own version of the game for the NES. A legal battle ensued, with Atari losing in the end, and Tengen's Tetris was pulled from store shelves.

The sad thing? The Tengen version of the game was a far better port than the Nintendo-created version.

December 10, 1994 is also the day I turned 18. I thought that was pretty cool, so I Googled it; two resources, however, say Doom was released on December 10, 1993 (those would be Gamespot and Wikipedia).

Virgil:
One interesting side story and addition to the Atari vs. Nintendo battles - Tetris. Atari had licensed the game for arcades, while Nintendo licensed it for consoles. Considering the NES the same thing, Atari made a version of the game for the NES under the Tengen brand. Nintendo, on the other hand, made their own version of the game for the NES. A legal battle ensued, with Atari losing in the end, and Tengen's Tetris was pulled from store shelves.

The sad thing? The Tengen version of the game was a far better port than the Nintendo-created version.

I actually had this in the original version of the article, and ended up cutting it for space. There are so many cool side stories that go along with the column sometimes, I just had to go for the overview this time. Thanks for bringing it back up though.

no_relation: I went with http://www.idsoftware.com/business/history/ on this one, as I figured they of all people ought to know. :) I've discovered that the internet serves as a bit of an echo chamber for date references, with Wikipedia being a rather common culprit in encouraging this phenomena.

Varchild: I know! It was definitely a 'wild west' sort of feel back then, with all sorts of amazing stories. :)