LOGOS IN DISGUISE

The gaming industry wasn't always the unwavering behemoth that it is today. During the 1980s, its future was far from certain. New companies were constantly springing up to get a slice of the action and software came thick and fast. 

However, there were a lot less people playing games some forty years ago. The market wasn't expanding as quickly as some would hope and something had to give. In 1983, it did. 

The USA market was massively oversaturated, which culminated in an abrupt crash. The Europeans were largely sheltered from this disaster due to their bustling micro computing industry. Japan also remained relatively unscathed, but it was clear that they laid the blame firmly at the Americans, even coining the term 'Atari Shock' to describe the catastrophe.

In July of 1983, Nintendo released the Famicom System in their home territory of Japan. It was a huge success. They were looking to grow, but the collapse of the industry in North America played a huge part in their global strategy. 

The console saw a worldwide release (as the Nintendo Entertainment System) but it took over two years to break out of Japan. Launching in 1985 in the USA, just as the home market was showing signs of recovery. Europeans had to wait until 1986. Nintendo were ready to take on the world, albeit in a cautionary way.

Keen for history not to repeat itself, Nintendo had very strict licensing rules for third party software publishers. If you wanted to make a game for their system, you had to agree to their terms. One of which was their infamous 'Five games per year' clause, which meant that no company could release more than five games per calendar year.  This was infuriating for some publishers, but there's always a loophole, and you didn't need to call Saul Goodman to figure it out.

Publishers didn't want to be told what they could or couldn't do, so many of them decided to publish their games under an alias. It was such a simple idea, but it worked perfectly. Konami even had the gall to invent two shell companies, Ultra Games and Palcom, for the USA/European markets respectively. Both of these were in addition to the games published under their regular 'Konami' moniker. It resulted in some bizarre title screen variations across regions, as can be seen below. 

Konami were not alone. Sunsoft published some of their games under the guise of 'Tokai Engineering' and Tecmo, in order to to get around a NES exclusivity deal, released Solomon's Key on Sega's competing Mark III System under the alias 'Salio' which is both hilarious and very naughty. 

As the years passed, licensing rules were loosened, signalling the end of this shady practice. Still, with what seems like a hundred different games released each week for the myriad of platforms currently on the market, maybe we'll see this behaviour again, after the next videogame crash?