In the 80's Factor 5 made a mario bros clone called The great Giana sisters. And it didn't last 2 weeks before Nintendo took notice and had it pulled from the shelves.
Or so the story goes.
Originally Posted by OldManClayton And now Factor 5 is a 2nd party developer for Nintendo. I think I remember hearing that they were being made an internal developer at Nintendo too.
But that was when programming was at its start and was a lot less common. It was a lot easier to find a position then.
They weren't but they've always had close ties with Nintendo. Thier sound chip design ended up going into the Mega Drive (or so the story goes). They used to make a lot of tech for lots of people and make games. These days they don't seem to be doing much of either
They also took Metroid and made Turrican, the cheeky sods!
No, we were saying that people who wrote programs in their bedrooms were new and fewer then, and had more of a chance of going "pro". Lots of people make games now, most surpassing those in the olden days, but there's an established industry now with higher standards and more competition.
Originally Posted by AndyUK In the 80's Factor 5 made a mario bros clone called The great Giana sisters. And it didn't last 2 weeks before Nintendo took notice and had it pulled from the shelves.
Or so the story goes.
Permission which you won't get in a million years. In fact, its technically illegal to even distribute a Mario Fangame, since Nintendo holds the intellectual copyrights and thus reproduction and distribution rights to the Mario Character (and probably every single little thing associated with Mario has been meticulously covered by legal documents).
The difference is, unless your game is more popular than Halo, Nintendo isn't going to give a shat left or right if you make a Mario fangame. They will, however, bring the long (arm) of the law down upon you if you try selling it. Believe me that. But feel free to make mario fangames. As evidence, notice this:
Originally Posted by OldManClayton And now Factor 5 is a 2nd party developer for Nintendo. I think I remember hearing that they were being made an internal developer at Nintendo too.
But that was when programming was at its start and was a lot less common. It was a lot easier to find a position then.
As someone said, they never were, but even their close relationship with Nintendo (which is probably what you mean) came to an end years ago.
I'm fairly sure they were officially a 2nd party developer. O_o They probably aren't anymore, especially since they might be going under... But they were at one time. They made Nintendo middleware, I thought.
And then there's the rumor that they were making Kid Icarus for Nintendo.
It's a weird one, because they were very close to Nintendo through many generations, but they were never tied to them by contract, or had any stake in Nintendo themselves, other than their early audio Dolphin work (GameCube). It's very common that they're called '2nd party' because of this relationship, or perhaps because the phrase is used quite a lot where the definition is unsure of, or even perhaps because they contributed to the audio processing of the GC, and had individual contracts for games on it. They were always completely free to go where they wanted, but didn't really exercise that until this generation of consoles (Lair etc), when they started to spread themselves across the other platforms (and interestingly, have had problems ever since, losing staff and money). Looks like their Wii game might never happen now, either. Sadface. They shut down on the tailend of last year.
It's such a common belief though (even some dolt on wikipedia has edited it in) that anyone would be excused for thinking it, I think I assumed the same thing for a long time, due to their Nintendo exclusivity.
It'd be nice to see them go 2nd party if it means that an accomplished studio with a brilliant technical history would be saved.
Edit: On the Kid Icarus point, it looks likely that they were. But don't forget developers have been given much more prominent franchises to work on -Sega with Mario and F-Zero, Artoon Yoshi, Capcom Zelda and Namco Starfox - all on individual contracts.
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Nobody will probably want to, either. 
Make something unique! 
Edited by OMC
I think I remember hearing that they were being made an internal developer at Nintendo too. 
