this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Printing “Nintendo” on the device has got to be a bad idea, right?
100% a trademark violation, and there's nothing like an interoperability carveout for trademarks that could be used to defend it.
Here something I always thought was interesting about Nintendo and copyrights.
The Nintendo logo for the original Game Boy (the one that scrolls down) was a way to prevent unlicensed developers from releasing games on the Game Boy.
Games would not boot up if the Nintendo logo is not read on the cartridge and the ROM.
So for a developer to release a game on the Game Boy without Nintendo knowing, they would have to commit copyright infringement.
Source: Reverse Engineering the Gameboy Boot Screen (catskull.net)
The Game Boy was released in 1989, over 36 years ago. They used this same tactic on the Switch. They claim the prod keys, which are needed for Switch emulators, are copyrighted.
Because the Gameboy logo check and the actual display of the logo happen separately, there were ways to pass the check while still displaying a different logo on the screen. Given that I bought cartridges from major retailers that did this, I'm guessing that Nintendo either didn't know about them, or didn't like their odds in court.
Sega was doing something conceptually similar around the same time, and that did get tested at trial (Sega vs. Acclaim), where the court ruled that Sega could go suck a lemon. So there's some doubt as to whether any of this is enforceable anyway, although Sega kept including a similar system in their hardware up to and including the Dreamcast.
Of course, a company as large as Nintendo could just bankrupt a lot of smaller companies with legal fees via delaying tactics.
This was also explained in the source I linked.
Thank you for the info.