Evan Ratliff

Here's a measure that will restrict once again and impose some legislation on this programming aimed at children.

They created a lock chip on their circuit board.

It passed the House by 328 to 78.

and only Nintendo officially licensed games or manufactured games had the lock key or the key chip to unlock it, and that really kept quality control under their wing.

passed unanimously in the Senate and Reagan vetoed it and said, basically one of the things they were trying to do, they were trying to limit programming to advertising to 10.5 minutes an hour on the weekends and 12 minutes an hour on the weekdays and also provide, require broadcasters to provide educational and informational programs as a condition of renewing their licenses.

They said even to third parties, they said you can only make two of these games a year.

Don't come at us with 200 games.

Make something really, really good that we'll approve of, and we will put the Nintendo seal of quality on the front of the cover.

Yeah, and they were really nitpicky, too.

So Reagan vetoed that and said no way, we're not gonna do that, we're gonna keep it as is.

As you were developing the game, you needed to send Nintendo explanations of the gameplay, the characters, the design, all that stuff.

People that were in favor of this went crazy basically.

They were saying like how can you guys say you're the party of the children and education and then veto something that is clearly going to help protect our children.

And Nintendo would make notes and send it back and make you change stuff.

And that's what you could do if you had 80% of the market as far as video games were because people had to come to you.

Yeah, that was messed up, man.

I had no idea about that one.

Yeah, and not only that, what happened was, along with this deregulation, the toy companies and the cartoons, they actually...

And it was really smart for them to just kind of protect their intellectual property like that because it was so good.

But they were basically so heavy-handed about it that they were actually investigated by the FTC at one point for their licensing practices.