Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But the economic incentive to do so is worth it. This market is so big. Companies like Hacker International are making tons of money selling their own cartridges directly and not paying a dime to Nintendo. Meanwhile, they've got this brand problem that's emerged and all this stuff. If they're not careful, even though the Famicom is so advanced and so superior, you're not going to end up with the same thing has happened in America in 1983 with a video game crash, but you're going to have some of the same problems if you don't control the ecosystem of publishing around your platform. Nintendo of America, when it comes time to launch what would become the NES in the US, they come up with maybe the most genius inversion of all time. They say we should engineer a lockout chip that you are referring to into the hardware and the software. It's actually unclear to me if that idea came from Japan or from America, but the Japanese engineers implemented it. This is a specific chip in the console that needs to handshake with specific chips in the cartridges for the new systems in America that will lock out any not official Nintendo-approved cartridges from playing in the console. I don't know if it's actually how it works, but it's effectively a Nintendo signed cryptographic thing. Unless you actually go through Nintendo to make sure you get the specific chip with the specific cryptography and put it in the cartridge, it's not going to run on them. Yup, totally. Actually, later versions of the Famicom in Japan would also include a lockout chip on them, so they try and retroactively also bring this to the Japanese market. Nintendo of America is like, obviously, a lot of people in the ecosystem are going to hate this. What if we market it, though, to consumers as this is a good thing? We know that you consumers got burned by the glut of mediocre software in the last video game above all. We Nintendo are on your side. We're going to make sure that doesn't happen here. This is our Seal of Quality, the Nintendo Seal of Quality that we are promising to you, our customers, that only the very best highest quality software and hardware peripherals are going to come out for your system. This is absolute genius.…

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