“When he saw Super Mario Bros, he became very excited about it,” recalls Trenz. With its slick scrolling, myriad of secrets and superb level design it proved to be in a totally different league to many computer platformers of the time and gamers were going absolutely nuts for it.Įager to grab a slice of the Super Mario Bros pie, the then CEO of Rainbow Arts, Marc Ulrich, saw Shigeru Miyamoto’s creation and immediately hatched a plan. Super Mario Bros was one of Nintendo’s biggest titles and was helping the Japanese publisher to grab a lucrative slice of the Western gaming market. Sometimes just being threatened was enough, as Manfred Trenz discovered when The Great Giana Sisters, a game he’d been working on with Armin Gessert, faced the wrath of Nintendo due to it being a little too similar to one of the Japanese giant’s most popular games. Occasionally, however, these games came under fire, with their creators having to face copyright violation lawsuits and having to pay the consequences. They even proved to be easy calling cards for fledgling developers – Geoff Crammond and Jon Ritman, for example – who were eager to break into the industry. In the early days of videogaming, many of these clones were left to leech off the arcade originals, growing increasingly fat off the efforts of the original creators. Krazy Kong was a surprisingly good ZX81 clone of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong and was also the name of an unofficial bootleg of the very same arcade game, Snapper, Munchman, Hangly-Man and Munchkin were direct rip-offs of Namco’s Pac-Man, while Super Invaders, Cosmic Monsters, Space Attack and Space King were spin-offs of Taito’s Space Invaders.Īs you can see, the similarities between Giana Sisters and Super Mario Bros were extremely obvious. Here, Manfred Trenz looks back and reveals how it all started.ĭuring the late-Seventies and early-Eighties, clones of popular arcade games were rampant and they quickly began to spread to home computers like a cancerous growth. Even with this controversey Giana’s success would have been assured as it’s such a fantastic platformer. The Great Giana Sisters earned notoriety on various 8-bit and 16-bit computers when Nintendo had it pulled because it was a little too similar to its own Super Mario Bros.
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