When I was at the mall today to pick up some books, I saw someone with a kiosk selling a gaming device. It was shaped like an N64 controller, and allowed people to play some built-in NES games on their home TV without a system. Now, I’m familiar with classic gaming, and suspect that these things as sold are not legal. Were that not enough, I got a chance to see the built-in game, and it was one of those 700,000 in one multi-carts, which I know full well are indeed illegal (in fact, I’ve seen the specific one being sold at an earlier time). Now, the obvious thing I should do is set up my own personal protection racket, threatening to report him if I don’t get a cut, but my conscience would never let me live that down. So where might I report this so that something might get done about it?
You could probably report them directly to Nintendo. Now that I think about it, I remember seeing something like this at my mall too. Was it the old original Nintendo games. There’s a chance Nintendo licensced out the rights to them figuring they’re not going to be making any money selling the video games at this point. If it really is illegal, you could report it to (like I said) Nintendo, the mall they’re working at, the FTC maybe, FBI maybe. I dunno, Nintendo is where I would start.
Yes, that was it! I’ll repeat that whether or not the consoles themselves are illegal, it’s fairly clear that the game included was. I’m going to see what I can do at Nintendo, I suspect they’d be interested to hear about
Just though I’d chime in here and point out that there are a lot of similar (and quite legal) devices being released these days; I know that in the last couple months Namco, Activision, and Atari (at least) have released “joysticks” or similar controllers that have a few games built right into them.
I’ve not seen any of these that take cartridges, but I’m not going to claim they don’t exist. In any case, calling and asking certainly isn’t out of line.