Tengen (company)
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| Industry |
Computer and video games Interactive entertainment |
|---|---|
| Fate | Shut down by Time Warner Interactive |
| Successor | Time Warner Interactive |
| Founded | 1987 |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Headquarters | Milpitas, California, US |
| Products | Video games |
| Parent | Atari Games (1984-2003) |
Tengen was a video game publisher and developer that was created by arcade game manufacturer Atari Games and focused on computer and console games.
Atari had been split into two distinct companies. Atari Corporation was responsible for computer and console games and hardware and owned the rights to the Atari brand for these domains. Atari Games was formed from Atari's arcade division, and were able to use the Atari name on arcade releases but not on console or computer games. When Atari Games wanted to enter the console-game market, it needed to create a new label that did not use the Atari name. The new subsidiary was dubbed Tengen, which in the Japanese nomenclature of the oriental game Go refers to the central point of the board (the word "Atari" comes from the same game). Tengen then made an agreement with Namco to bring some of their Family Computer games to the NES over to America before Namco opened its own American branch (Namco Hometek) in 1990. Tengen also released games by Sunsoft (another developer without an American branch at that time).
Tengen unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with Nintendo for a less restrictive license (Nintendo restricted their licensees to releasing only five games per year, and required their games to be NES-exclusive for two years). Nintendo refused, so in December 1987 Tengen agreed to the standard licensing terms. In 1988, Tengen released its first and only three cartridges licensed through Nintendo—R.B.I. Baseball, Pac-Man and Gauntlet. Meanwhile, Tengen secretly worked to bypass Nintendo's lock-out chip called 10NES that gave it control over which games were published for the NES. While numerous manufacturers managed to override this chip by zapping it with a voltage spike, Tengen engineers feared this could potentially damage NES consoles and expose them to unnecessary liability. The other problem was that Nintendo made frequent modifications to the NES to prevent this technique from working. Instead the company chose to reverse engineer the chip and decipher the code required to unlock it. However, the engineers were unable to do so, and the launch date for its first batch of games was rapidly approaching.
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