Super Mario by Jeff Ryan Read Free Book Online

backyard, to attempt to straighten things out. Arakawa and Lincoln attended for Nintendo, along with reps for Universal and Coleco (who still hadn’t told Nintendo it had capitulated). Nintendo said Universal was, to skip the legalese, full of it. There were lots of other unlicensed King Kong products on the market, and Universal hadn’t gone after any of them. This was about Nintendo’s money. Coleco sheepishly tried to get Nintendo to fold to Universal. But Nintendo wasn’t budging.
    Universal promised Nintendo it would send a chain of title for King Kong , documented proof that it owned the property. That would be the easy part of the legal battle, of course: the hard part was proving that Donkey Kong was a rip-off of King Kong . No one had ever asked a judge or jury to decide how close a video game had to be to impinge on a film. But no chain of title arrived in the mail at Redmond. When Nintendo asked again for it, Universal instead demanded a royalty payment. It was a foreshadowing of Universal’s poor legal standing.
    In a possibly perfidious piece of brinkmanship, Nintendo arranged a special meeting with Universal, to discuss matters. These sorts of meeting are only called when there’s something to discuss, i.e., Nintendo caving in to Universal’s demands. Universal’s president personally attended, wanting to see the upstart Nintendo fall on its own sword and offer him royalties. But Lincoln and Arakawa merely reiterated their already-stated belief: we’re not liable and won’t be paying you anything. To quote Ice Cube, it was on like Donkey Kong.
    “His reaction was shock,” Lincoln recalled. Universal made movies, and its movements seemed reflective of this: big, bombastic, very entertaining, but as ephemeral as the fog around Skull Island. Nintendo, on the other hand, was a game company. Its lawyer just scored a major tactical victory, without the pieces on the board moving a whit.
    As if the suit wasn’t complicated enough, a new player entered: Tiger Electronics. Tiger had exclusively licensed King Kong from Universal for a handheld game. Universal realized that if Tiger kept that exclusive license, and Donkey Kong was shown to be the same as King Kong , then only Tiger would be able to sell Donkey Kong games. Furthermore, Tiger’s King Kong game was a pretty blatant swipe from Donkey Kong . (The layers of irony are like a lasagna.) Universal rejected the game. Tiger redesigned it to have bombs instead of barrels, and straight instead of crooked platforms. Also, the hero was given a fireman’s hat.
    Universal continued its aggressive actions, officially suing not only Nintendo but six other companies to whom Nintendo had licensed Donkey Kong . It collected royalties from all but two of them: Milton Bradley for the Donkey Kong board game (which refused to pay) and Ralston-Purina for Donkey Kong cereal (which offered a measly five grand, which Universal rejected). Combined with Coleco’s payments, Universal was already making steady money off of a case that hadn’t even started yet. This was the benefit of lawyering up: smaller companies backed down so fast, it was almost a legal form of theft.
    Nintendo was seeing this through to the courtroom, though. Howard Lincoln had pulled in a hotshot trial lawyer named John Kirby to mount the Nintendo defense. Universal City Studios Inc. v. Nintendo Co. Ltd. lasted seven days. Kirby listened to Universal’s legal team explain its case: the two have similar plots, they’re both apes named Kong, so in conclusion give us the money. Kirby, in turn, highlighted every difference between the game and the film. He read deposed statements from Shigeru Miyamoto, explaining how the game was designed.
    Then, Kirby sprung the trap. In 1975, Universal had sued RKO, the original makers of King Kong . Universal, in a case-winning argument, had proved that King Kong was in public domain, since the movie was from 1933. Universal didn’t need to pay a dime to the