Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a South Korean multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation founded on January 13, 1969 and headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea.
As early as the 1970s, the company would be involved in various activities related to video games, legal or otherwise. They would eventually be granted the official license to distribute Sega consoles which they did under the Gam*Boy brand, later switched to Aladdin Boy. At the same time, Samsung made plans to develop 3 games for the Korean market. Those being Uzu Keobukseon, City Heroes, and Princess Fighter. Only the first game was ever released and the others were scrapped due to Korean's then-new censorship laws.
Piracy[]
Gam*Boy releases[]
Starting directly after Samsung was given the official license to distribute Sega's system. Samsung started to release an large amount of games in a very short time period consisting of Sega Master System games and early Mega Drive titles. Though with Master System games specifically, they released almost every title ever made for the system, no matter if it was Japanese-exclusive, US-exclusive, or just unlicensed.
This might of potentially led them, to releasing several SG-1000 games and conversions of MSX games to the Master System, such as Magical Tree with their copyright removed. Some being released under the Hwaseong alias. Which they did without the license of any of the developers and likely Sega as well. At the time of them being made, the Korean software piracy laws, protecting the code of computer software had already passed a few years before. Making software piracy illegal. They also seemingly released Dr. Hello and various other unlicensed games.
Pirated releases[]
All of these releases are actually SG-1000 games or conversions of MSX games that use the “Legacy Video” feature of the SMS to run. The art for these releases (Specifically SG-1000 games) are completely unrelated to their source material and are stolen for different sources, similar to Spica.
- Bomb Jack (1989?)
- Gulkave (1989)
- Magical Tree (1989)
- Power Boggle Boggle (1990)
- Dr. Hello (1991/1992)
- 2 Hap in 1 (Moai-ui bomul, David-2) (19xx)
- FA Tetris (1990)
- Champion Pro Wrestling (199x)
- Doki Doki Penguin Land (19xx)
- Flicky (19xx)
- MSX Soccer / Chuggu (19xx)
- Pro Yagu (19xx)
- Road Fighter (19xx)
- Sega-Galaga (19xx)
- Soukoban (19xx)
- Space Mountain (19xx)
- Super Columns (1990)
- Super Drink (19xx)
- Tank Battalion (19xx)
- The Goonies (19xx)
Nintendo legal actions[]
.jpg){kind=link}
Player One Magazine n° 51, France, 1995-03)
In 1995, Nintendo took legal action against Samsung Electronics as Nintendo of America accused Samsung Electronics of piracy for producing many chips found in illegal copies of Donkey Kong Country sold in Asia, South America, Europe and USA. They likely got to this conclusion by opening up a pirated cart and discovering that a Samsung chip was in it.
So, because of this Samsung attempted to filed a countersuit and accused Nintendo of America for defamation. The One Player article also mentions all of Nintendo's efforts to stop piracy in Taiwan, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Argentina, Paraguay and many other countries. The actions ended with an agreement with Samsung to stop developing pirate chips and helping Nintendo to fight and attempt to stop piracy.
It is still unknown if Samsung was actually supplying companies with chips to use in pirated copies of games. Though knowing that they pirated several MSX games before, this isn't completely rolled out and there is a good chance that they were actually involved in some compactivity.
Trivia[]
- Bizarrely one of the games they pirated, Space Mountain. Is actually not a SG-1000 or either an MSX game. But is instead a game for the obscure ill-fated Othello Multivision.
Gallery[]
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). |