On the most recent episode of the excellent classic gaming podcast Retronauts, Frank Cifaldi hosted a round table of 3 programmers who worked at Atari during the Tengen days. There’s some interesting stuff in this, and you get a real sense for how things were making games in the 80s, when you could have the license to “port” a game to a new platform but not have any source code or oversight from the original IP holder.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tengen, you can read more on Wikipedia. If you grew up on the NES you may remember their strangely shaped black cartridges, but it’s possible you didn’t realize what was going on there. At one point, one of the developers tries to draw a parallel between Tengen and people who jailbreak their iPhone— while I do think that the strict licensing methods of Nintendo during the 80s is a good comparison to Apple’s App Store, I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far.

—Casey