Licensing a celebrity, sports star, company and others are nothing new in gaming. I have seen many liceneses in gaming over the years. Movie stars, movies themselves, even commercials have made the jump to become a license for a game many times over. Most notably, licensing occurs in sports with each new iteration of whatever franchise is being brought out. The NFL is one sport that Electronic Arts and their strong arm tactics kind of stopped from having competing games come out. I am going to skip the obvious sports titles (I could do a top 100 if those were included). No, instead I am going to focus on 5 of the most obscure 8-Bit licenses here. Number 1 after the jump.

1) Mario. You may be thinking how in the world is Mario “licensed” out since he is a Nintendo owned property. Nintendo’s Italian plumber is so big that he has appeared in many non-Nintendo released titles, a few are not even on Nintendo hardware to boot. Check out his adventures in Hotel Mario by Philips for their CD-i platform. Mario is tasked with shutting the doors that are left open by guests which are Mario’s adversaries. That is another list entirely though.

The Mario game I am thinking about here is Mario’s Time Machine which did appear on the SNES, NES and PC’s of the time. The idea in Mario’s Time Machine is to travel through time replacing artifacts to their correct time period. Why are you time travelling and replacing artifacts? Because Bowser has miractulously created a time machine- now the question is, why didn’t he just go back and stop Mario from beating him the many times over in previous adventures?

If this had continued we might have eventually seen Who Wants to Be Mario? or Link Teaches Internet Basics.

2) Sega Arcade titles. In the 8-Bit period, notable for the strangelhold that Nintendo had on gaming, licensing was common. Arcade titles got licensed out all of the time for many platforms. Nintendo was not all that keen on it though while Sega apparently had no problem with their games hitting competing systems. From Shinobi to Space Harrier to Fantasy Zone no Sega arcade title was safe from the licensing beast. This all changed when the Genesis hit though as Sega wised up to the value of their system being the only place to play certain games.

If this had continued Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA may have seen release on the original Playstation.

3) Third party controller accessories. Konami had the LaserScope, Mattel had the Power Glove and Broderbund had the U-Force. Other companies such as ASCII had their own controller options available also but those are outside of this writeup. The Power Glove, U-Force and the LaserScope really changed, or at least tried to change, the way gamers interacted with games. Each did it in a unique way with only the Power Glove really gaining any notable notoriety with gamers (being prominently featured in a 100 minute long Nintendo commercial can do that).

In today’s market we might see the official John Madden 3D Football controller that is shaped like an actual football and the Kinect, Move or whatever would track that and make you actually move around to avoid tackles.

4) Corporate mascot licensing. Back in the day, licensing the characters was commonplace. One place you would not have expected to see characters, or games at all, based on would be commercials. The Noid from Pizza Hut (correction- Dominoes, thanks Jess Gingras) and 7-Up’s Spot are the most popular offenders in this realm and each was represented in gaming differently. The Noid got a side scrolling action platform game while Spot was used in an Othello style game by Arcadia Systems. Only Spot would be seen come the 16-Bit round of licensing.

Could you imagine an action platform title featuring the Geico Gecko, um never mind, minus the obvious promotion of Geico, we got that with Gex. Okay, how about a dating sim with Flo from the Progressive commercials? Or a driving game sponsored by either where you have to listen to either spout off safe driving tips while you wait for your car to repair? Honorable mention here is Jake from State Farm wingman dating sim.

5) Cartoons based on games. This last one is going the other way, against the current so to speak. During the 8-Bit days of gaming we saw everything from Pac-Man to Mario getting a cartoon, even a cartoon variety show (Captain N) was produced and featured many characters from many companies (albeit all Nintendo games).

I wouldn’t mind seeing a cartoon based on some of today’s games. Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Tomb Raider, etc probably could be made into rather decent animated series that explore areas the games gloss over, or completely forget about.

There you go, five 8-Bit gaming licenses that you don’t see anymore. Some are probably for good reason but a couple would be interesting if they were to be used right. What do you think? Did I miss an obvious one? An obscure one? Let me know in the comments.

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams