Evan Ratliff

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.

they kind of got in bed together and they said, you know what, if you show, if you schedule as a broadcaster our cartoons that sell toys, we'll give you a profit on those toys.

Yeah, I mean, anytime you control that much of a market, the FTC is going to sniff around.

So if you run these G.I.

And there were other companies out there trying to bootleg games still.

Joe cartoons, then we'll give you a little cut of what we're selling.

There was one called TenGen that had a few licensed games, but they wanted more money.

Plus also, we'll buy ads on those cartoons, or on your network too, to sell those toys when you show these cartoons, I imagine.

And so they went to the patent office and said, hey, can we take a look at that patent for these lock and key chips?