Gold seal of Quality

[Neo-Jorge]

I dont know about you guys but did the Nintendo gold seal of Quality have any influence over your buying decisions?
I can say that at 1st It did but as I grew older and I started to see that everything that came out had a gold Seal of Quality and for the most part it should have been called a gold Seal Of Crap. I mean some of those Nes games were just god awful how could nintendo justify and let those things come out? DAMN YOU HOWARD LINCOLN AND YOUR SIDE KICK NESTER.



Thanks

[Anonymous]

Apparrently Howard Phillips was a prick. I never got to meet the guy unfortunately (that was one of the things I was looking forward to when I started working there). Howard Lincoln on the other hand was a good guy. But the seal of quality is starting to mean less and less. Sony's loose licensing system and strategy of getting as many third parties as possible during the first half of the PS1's lifespan caused many developers to ignore Mario Club and focus only on the technical aspect of the gold seal approval process. Over the years it became more important to get licensees than to make sure they were making fun games. DAMN YOU SONY AND YOUR CRAZY 3RD PARTY TACTICS!

[spoon]

"It all about the bejamins, baby" Puff Dady Circa 1995ish

Really just a gold"we are gonna make your life a living hell third parties" seal
as long a the big "N" got their money, they didnt care.

[Anonymous]

Not True. The people who work in Mario Club and The Treehouse are as true a gamer as you will find. They were (and continue to be) truly determined to make a game better. I think if you meet some of these people you will find that it is the third parties who are pushing low quality software through. Unfortunately, not everyone has the resources or resolve to polish a game and work it until it is ready for release.

Spoon, Please get your facts straight before hurling accusations at people, especially real hard working gamers that stay true to their lifestyle.

[GENESISNES]

If i see anything in goodwill or salvation army that has that, such as a mario shampoo, the first thing i check for is the gold seal of quality. I just want to make sure its nintendo brand.

[YoshiM]

No, the seal never influenced me at all. The screenshots on the back of the box did. Plus I never really saw an unlicensed game around here except at one store, which was the only game only store within 50 miles, and they had Tengen stuff.

I rented a lot (to my parents disgruntlement I rented a lot) so I quickly learned that the seal didn't mean a damn thing.

[kainemaxwell]

It was the quality of the games and whether I wanted to play them or not which did it for me- not the seal.

[maxlords]

I never paid any attention to the seal, cause in IMO, it was just another marketing gimmick. I only rented games that looked interested, and if I REALLY liked those, then I'd buy em, regardless of Nintendo's pointless seal.

[strongmanx]

It never meant anything to me. I used to buy the worst games ever because they had good art on the front box, i played it in the arcade or they had a cool commercial for it. Robocop, Xexyz, and Yo Noid, and another one i can't think of right now.

[spoon]

"Although Nintendo supposedly had a strict licensing policy (only games with the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" could be sold legally), many games were merely mediocre clones or crappy licensed games. Nintendo's "Seal of Quality" wasn't a measure of how good the game was, the seal just meant that the company had paid a licensing fee and that the game didn't contain adult content. Nintendo censored all U.S. releases, removing questionable words or adultish content. While this protected Nintendo's image, it effectively alienated its over-13 market. Nintendo also had strict third-party programming policies for many years: if you programmed for Nintendo, you only programmed for Nintendo. This policy helped kill off most of the NES's early competitors, like the SMS. Companies were also limited to releasing two games a year, and Nintendo manufactured all NES cartridges themselves to control production (this hurt them greatly during the 1988 chip shortage, and the practice was discontinued in 1990). Those types of policies were later changed due to government pressure."

http://www.classicgaming.com/museum/nes/

I'm as big a fan of the NES as the next guy. I'm not trying to be an ass, but everyone knows that the big N had some shaddy buisness practices back in the day(That's why they are closing up a law suit about buisness practices in the early 90's), nor am I attacking the Mario club/Treehouse. I just dont feel that the seal of quality meant the game was "qualirific". I think we just have two different opinons on the topic, sorry. Who knows, I could be wrong, it is more of an opinion.

[michael]

I back Spoon 110% on this issue.
Look at crap games like Dash Galaxy ( ;) ) And A boy and His Blob.
All the seal means to me is the Nintendo Seal Of Greed.

[Achika]

I was five or six when I got my Nintendo. Did I care about the seal? No. Do I care now that I'm old enough to make a "wise" perchase decision? No, because I know the seal doesn't mean crap anymore (if in fact it ever did to anyone).

[Anonymous]

@Spoon, sorry if my reaction was that of the knee-jerk variety. I get riled up when people attack Nintendo (or Microsoft or Sony) the entity without thinking about the individuals involved. I know there were some crappy games that got released with the gold seal on them, but I just want to make sure people also know that there were options available to help third parties ensure that the games were fun. For every Robocop, Total Recall, and Superman64, there was about 30 or 40 people directly involved with the creative process at Nintendo who collectively wailed and gnashed their teeth at the horror of these products. But from a strict business perspective, the Gold Seal only meant one thing: Test for XXX type of technical bugs and pay Nintendo money.

I didn't mean to sound like I was brushing Nintendo's business practices under the carpet, but making a sweeping generalization which implies that everyone at "the big N" was tying third parties to railroad tracks while twirling their mustaches and grinning an evil grin really ignores the fact that a lot of money was spent to ensure that third parties could make good games, and a lot of people who had nothing to do with marketing or business practices worked hard to make games better. There was a "quality" side to the seal of quality, and it was the third parties who ignored it, not Nintendo. Remember, Mario Club is there to play the games and provide feedback to third parties, and they will work with third parties for as long as the third parties want to, but many third parties are foregoing this part of the process and only focusing on the technical responsibilities of the gold seal. (And for the record I would argue that not allowing companies to put tits in their games does not make them any less fun)

Having said all that, the gold seal of quality is more a legal liability than anything else. Aside from the oft publicized ability to bully the market, it also allowed Nintendo to guarantee compatibility with products, and broaden their warranty policies (Nintendo has a one year warranty as opposed to Sony and Microsofts' 90 days, and the GC costs 75 dollars to repair non warranty as opposed to 125 and 150 respectively), and on a non-game level allows consumers to pick accessories that are guaranteed to work with their system and to not void the warranty. In theory, any Non-Sony brand controller you use voids the warranty.

So, to sum up, the Seal of Quality is more about the quality of the manufactured product than the quality of the gameplay, and that's not nintendo's fault.

[spoon]

@AnotherFluke,We are both right. I never even thought of it from that point of view. I guess in our two posts we covered the good and the bad of the Gold seal, but forgot to even answer the question at hand,

"No, the seal did not effect what I bought, nor did NP(Nintendo Propaganda Magazine, J/K)

"And for the record I would argue that not allowing companies to put tits in their games does not make them any less fun"

I agree 110%, the same goes for Blood and gore, best thing is good old game play=fun, which in short can be accomplished by going through Nintendo and getting a gold seal, in some cases. It would be nice if all games were play tested to the point of greatness.

Also most of the games released without seals were crappy :D

[Anonymous]

Lol True Dat, Spoon!

The Gold seal never influenced me either. I lived in Guam during my teens, so picking up fami multicarts and japanese titles was common for me.

[yiearkungfu]

When I was buying games long ago, I never even noticed there was a golden seal.

[zmweasel]

I apologize for digging this thread out of its grave, but I didn't see this question answered in any of the posts, so...do GB/GBC games have an "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" as opposed to the GBA's "Official Nintendo Seal"? Did Nintendo ditch the "Quality" at some point, or have all GB-series games been "Quality"-free? Thanks in advance for any info.

-- Z.

[whoisKeel]

i have a few 'quality seal' gba games, castlevania cotm, tactics ogre, ssf2tr...earlier gba games.

interestingly enough zelda dx doesn't have any seal on the cart...i guess it just wasn't good enough :)


on a side note...even as a young kid i realized the seal just meant it was licensed...it wasn't too hard to figure out those tengens were different somehow...although i like most tengen nes games.

no the seal means nothing to me, but there sure are alot of crappy unlicensed nes games (tengen excluded)...i just never came across them. (whoisKeel goes to find a copy of micro machines)

[Emily]

I apologize for digging this thread out of its grave, but I didn't see this question answered in any of the posts, so...do GB/GBC games have an "Official Nintendo Seal of Quality" as opposed to the GBA's "Official Nintendo Seal"? Did Nintendo ditch the "Quality" at some point, or have all GB-series games been "Quality"-free? Thanks in advance for any info.

-- Z.

Some of my GB titles have the seal of quality-I believe Final Fantasy Legend is one.

Also, I only got used games, or hand-me-downs from relatives.I thought the seal was important kind back then, but i chose which games to try by the label art.If it had a monster on it, I wanted it :)

[rbudrick]

And A boy and His Blob

??? That game rocks! Have you ever actually played it through? It's a great game! It's so David Crane/Pitfall-ish. It's definitely original, that's for damn sure.

Dash Galaxy? Yeah, it sucks.

-Rob

[Chronodriftersx]

I back Spoon 110% on this issue.
Look at crap games like Dash Galaxy ( ;) ) And A boy and His Blob.
All the seal means to me is the Nintendo Seal Of Greed.

You had to play those games back in the day to like them, though I never realized there was an ending to Dash Galaxy, there is right?.

[Push Upstairs]

I don't think i ever once associated the "Seal of Quality" with outstanding games. I had always thought the seal was juat a way of Nintendo saying "yeah, we are ok with this game being made".

There were some real stinkers on the NES and having a seal, even one of gold, doesn't make them a good game.

[GarrettCRW]

Someone has apparently called Nintendo out on the "of Quality" portion of the seal, as games and accessories have been lacking those words on the seal for about a year now.

Of course, Sega had the same type of seal during the Genesis days, and the NES seal was as much a sign that the stuff bearing the seal was well made as it was a purported sign of a game's quality. (It should be noted that outside of Tengen, the unlicensed stuff in the NES days was almost alway garbage.)

[The Manimal]

I assumed that it meant that the thing was compatible with the NES and wouldn't damage it....