Back in January, we at Real Otaku Gamer published an editorial talking about the best Nintendo arcade games. This editorial gained some controversy over the inclusion of games such as Cruis’n World, F-Zero AX and Mario Kart GP DX, as these games were not made by Nintendo themselves. We were aware of this fact and still included them and still feel justified in having done so and the reason is the history of Nintendo Arcade games.
Despite the common myths about the history of Nintendo as a developer, Nintendo did not actually develop their own arcade games, with titles such as Donkey Kong, Popeye, RadarScope, Heli Fire and more being developed by outside companies such as Ikegami Tsushinki. In fact, Nintendo had legal issues with the code of Donkey Kong for some years due to Ikegami Tsushinki having an ownership stake in it, leading to imperfect ports for many years. Nintendo did not really start developing their own games until around the time they entered the console market with the Famicom, and subsequent arcade games like Punch-Out! were released.
Because of this detail in Nintendo’s arcade history, we felt justified in including arcade games Nintendo owns but did not develop themselves. F- Zero is their IP, as is Mario Kart, and the Cruis’n IP now belongs to Nintendo after Midway went under. Therefore, we felt that the inclusion of these games in a list of the best Nintendo arcade games was fully warranted as the development was no different than the earlier Nintendo arcade titles. We acknowledge that we should have made this clearer in the original editorial, but our position on the inclusion of the games remains unchanged.
You can read more about the legal issues with Donkey Kong and Ikegami Tsushinki here if you are curious. Nintendo’s history as a gaming company is not always what it is made out to be, and we felt this matter needed to be cleared up.