Did Sega really port its 1988 Tetris to the Taito B System hardware? I can only find ROMs and the System16 entry, but these don't really give any info or confirmation of legitimacy. How are we sure the Mega Drive Tetris was killed after the Tengen suit? Because it's funny that an American lawsuit would cancel a Japanese release... I'm convinced BPS has something to do with it, ut would I be worng on that? Hivebrain also found that "ACE magazine #35 (August 1990) lists a UK retail price of £39.99 and claims it's "out now".". scan Does anyone know what they were thinking? =P Thanks. (EDIT - mirrored scan)
That scan also says "NES" in the "predicted interest curve" for Tetris, so I wouldn't call it a too reliable source. The only time I saw the Mega Drive Tetris in action (not counting emulators) was in a Mega-Tech cabinet that was ready to be shipped. It was next to a Simpsons arcade, not sure if that was before or after the Tengen lawsuit...
From what I gather Bullet-Proof Software owned the Japanese (console) rights to the game and built the Game Boy (and supposedly, NES) versions. They "sub-licensed" it to Nintendo in Japan, and Nintendo released BPS' game(s) in North America. Basically we're talking about ye olde developer/publisher relationship here. BPS didn't produce Tetris games for non-Nintendo consoles so there was never a legal situation where Nintendo weren't involved in a console port. Atari Games owned the (presumably worldwide) arcade rights. They sub-licensed the arcade game to Sega, who made their own arcade games with the license (Atari also made their own Tetris arcade game(s)). Then Sega ported their arcade version to the Mega Drive, which they couldn't legally do because BPS owned the Japanese rights. Sega credited Tengen, which was Atari's home console division, because... they were stupid. Nintendo weren't actually involved here. Sega didn't challenge it. this is opposed to North America, where Atari Games (under Tengen) also tried to port an arcade version to a home console, which they couldn't legally do. Atari/Tengen did challenge this though, and failed. the worldwide computer rights were held by Spectrum Holobyte. And they sub-licensed it to the likes of Mirrorsoft... but we don't care about that. all variations of Tetris were licensed from ELORG, a company set up by the soviets to license the game to the west. This all stopped in 1996, and The Tetris Company, formed by Alexey Pajitnov took back all the rights and licensed them out where appropriate. I believe the first game to pop up under this scheme was Tetris Plus, developed by Jaleco. I think most of the Tetris themes are public domain - Sega made their own, but none of the Game Boy ones were owned by Nintendo.
I'm guessing the Mega-Tech version is fully licensed. This came out either in 1989 or 1990 (hell I'm not sure when the hardware was introduced; I'm just going by what MAME has), which I'm guessing is after the lawsuit. The Simpsons was 1991. That overlaps with what I was thinking, perhaps that is the only explanation =P And I can say that Tetris Plus was an Elorg/BPS thing when it came out in the arcades, so the TTC change was made presumably very shortly after its release, just in time for the home ports. (Random fun fact: the Tengen NES Tetris is an even more interesting thing, as it looks like it's a port of the apparently fully licensed Vs. Tetris with the rather primitive graphics swapped for Atari Tetris graphics...) I'm still curious about the B System thing, though.
Vaguely related - if you're interested in the mess of web that is the early Tetris rights, the BBC did a really good documentary on Tetris that you can watch here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6600940307313929454 It mainly focuses on Mirrorsoft & Nintendo rather than Sega but still worth the hour.
Which is also why I get upset that Nintendo didn't just license that port since they had the rights, that looked much better than what they released =|
Adding to the insanity, I just today learned from nensondubois that the Famicom Tetris is another totally different game, this time by BPS and with the worst controls in history (don't try it; I did, but here you go: up, Select, and B are not used; A instantly drops the piece, down rotates it, and left and right moves).
That probably explains Super Tetris 3... (hint: press up to use the special - seriously) Most tetris games for computers had shitty controls, to be fair.
