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Wonder Boy

Discussion in 'General Sega Discussion' started by ICEknight, Jun 25, 2010.

  1. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
    From the Wiki:
    Where did this info come from? I don't think I've ever seen any official confirmation of this.

    I remember how years ago that's what used to be speculated when trying to explain the existance of Adventure Island, but thanks to sites spreading rumors as facts it seems to have slowly evolved into "truth" without it ever being confirmed.


    There's nothing that would suggest SEGA not allowing another company to port one of their arcade games to the NES, as there were already ports of Fantasy Zone, Altered Beast, Shinobi and After Burner.




    tl;dr: [citation needed]
     
  2. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

    no reverse gear Wiki Sysop
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    I think I stole that info from Wikipedia so there's bound to be holes in the story. I don't know the truth about the whole ordeal but if someone does... they can replace it. I made a lot of pages very quickly so I could get scans all in one place (that wasn't this computer) - I assumed someone else would provide the written substance.

    I am almost certain that Hudson own the rights to the Adventure Island franchise though. Master Higgins has appeared in other Hudson games with no relation to Westone at all, namely Saturn Bomberman.

    I don't know the legalities behind the NES Sega games. They were brought to the system by Atari's home console division of the time, Tengen, and Tengen didn't bother with the Nintendo seal of approval. As I don't think they ever got the "rights" to bring games to the NES legally, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't get the rights to play with Sega's franchieses either. In Japan Fantasy Zone was brought to the famicom by Sunsoft, but as with most Japanese things the western world hasn't really bothered to document the reasoning behind it. My only guess is that the Mark III sucked too much.

    There's a lot of Sega history around the 1980s that hasn't been talked about. I don't know the reasonings behind Sega games on the TurboGrafx-16 when NEC and Sega were battling each other in the marketplace, for example. I just know that the history of video games is very different in Japan and a lot of things that effected the west were based on agreements in the east.
     
  3. LocalH

    LocalH

    roxoring your soxors Tech Member
    Well, it seems that most of Tengen's NES ports of SEGA games carried on-screen SEGA copyright notices, although I can't find a title screen image for Altered Beast and am too lazy to hunt down the ROM. Although, they did take a big legal risk by defrauding the US Copyright Office to get the information about the 10NES chip, so who knows. I don't think they'd infringe on SEGA's rights as well, as bypassing mechanisms preventing you from writing your own code for a platform is way different from directly infringing on someone's copyright and trademarks just to port a game without permission (see SEGA v. Accolade on the former, although didn't that case occur after Tengen's?).

    I'd say the chance of Tengen at least securing the rights to port the games they did is fairly good, even if they were assigned those rights by someone who didn't properly have them (see Tetris).
     
  4. ICEknight

    ICEknight

    Researcher Researcher
    But either way, not only Tengen was making those SEGA ports.

    Fantasy Zone for the Famicom was made by Sunsoft and Altered Beast by Asmik. Judging by that, Hudson could have perfectly made a real Wonder Boy port without any legal problems on SEGA's behalf.

    For some reason, the deals involving Westone seem to be the only ones with odd name/character alterations involved, so it might not have been SEGA's "fault", perhaps.