By Sammy Fox on Sunday, November 20 2022, 00:33 - Video Game QA
One day there was the Atari 2600, and all was well. Then the games started sucking. Then people in north america lost interest, and the industry crashed. It's a bit simplistic, but one of the things Nintendo did when they entered the market was to introduce a mandatory program for developers and publishers that they had to go through if they wanted to be allowed to sell games on the console without the big N breathing down their necks. This program is called the Nintendo Seal of Quality.
One of the issues that led to the crash in 1983 was that anyone with a computer could cook up something that would run on the Atari 2600, but the Atari 2600 is a notoriously difficult machine to program for, having no video ram for example which meant that graphics were coded by the scanline, and the console had no sprite capabilities of its own. This then meant that the games that ended up on the market were of a particularly poor quality, a problem that came to head with the release of Pac-Man and E.T. whose own poor quality damaged faith in the Atari brand, and its failure indirectly dragged its competitors (among which were Mattel and Coleco) along, and companies with interesting and innovative ideas like the GCE Vectrex and its vector screen enabling 3d vector graphics at home (albeit in black and white, with screen overlays for each game). By the time the crash hit GCE, the company had been experimenting with color vector technology which Atari itself had been using for some of its own arcade games.
So with the Nintendo Seal of Quality program, Nintendo could make sure that even if the game sucked ass, it would at least be "complete" in the sense that the player could play through the game without any major issues unrelated to balance or difficulty. In that sense the famous seal itself is a bit of a misnomer, since you would see it on any officially licensed nintendo game regardless of its actual quality, from Super Mario Bros. to Silver Surfer, from Kirby's Adventure to Karate Kid, from Willow to Who Framed Roger Rabbit; and so on.
And yet without it we wouldn't have the modern video game industry, because what the seal of quality program did was something that was completely unknown in the video game world at the time, and it brought in a sense of control to the chaos that had brought the industry on its knees, as the ESRB would later do in the 90s. It's just a shame that today we keep having games put out that are clearly unfinished, all because of the poisoned promise of the almighty day-one patch.