After finally making it to the top it was to be expected that Nintendo would face the envious eyes of those that want that same spotlight. After Nintendo fought so hard to finally break into the American video game market and establish itself as a viable video game developer it still had it’s hardships to go through. Once they made it to the top, their new problem became the many lawsuits they would then face. The main reason they had to face these had to be because of the fact that they were the biggest name in the video game industry and other companies felt like they had no way into the market with Nintendo the way they were.

One such company is Atari.  In 1988 they filed suit against Nintendo saying they were, “improperly using their patent and greater market share to monopolize the home video game market.” This was all a ploy to try to help bring them to the top and get Nintendo out of the way. Luckily Nintendo didn’t crack under pressure as they took their time to respond to the suit and in turn filed one of their own. Their, Nintendo, suit was accusing Atari of patent infringement, breach of contract, unfair competition, and tortious interference with contract. The case eventually settled in Nintendo’s favor but this was only the beginning as more suits began to flood in, coming at Nintendo with anything they could throw at them from accusing them to announcing a ROM shortage to control the market to a suit including the attorney general of all fifty states and the District of Colombia. No matter the suit or what they accused them of all of them came from the same place in each instance and that was other companies way of trying to force themselves into a market that Nintendo dominated.

In terms of the decisions from this suits and their affect on the parties involved, it can be said that it did affect Nintendo in a negative way to some degree. After the case against the states of NY and MD it could be said that Nintendo perhaps seen the error in their ways or possibly did not want to continues getting complaint and lawsuit after another. It made them seem, in some light as if they were a dictator of the market and gave them a sort of bad image. Seeing this it could be said that they changed their agreement with their licensees allowing them to make other games for other consoles and allowing companies to make games for their console as well.