The NES & Licensing
If the 1983 crash happened because anyone could publish software and nobody was checking quality, the answer becomes: put a gatekeeper in place. The NES, the North American version of the Famicom, built an authentication chip into both the console and the cartridge — the 10NES chip. Insert a cartridge that didn't match, and the console would reset itself once a second, the screen and power light flickering, known as the blinking death. A system built to police quality brought a dead market back to life. The story of the company that tried to pry that gate open is told above, in the myth. The gatekeeper idea later found its way into a Game Boy patent too (→ back to Nintendo's founding).
The myth, corrected
Nintendo won an outright victory in its lawsuit against Tengen
It wasn't that simple. Atari's subsidiary Tengen, trying to reverse-engineer the 10NES authentication chip on the console side, filed a false claim with the Copyright Office that it was "in dispute with Nintendo" in order to legally view — and copy — the confidential design documents. In court, the copying needed to defeat the chip as it currently worked was not found to infringe, while the extra copying Tengen made in anticipation of future revisions was found to infringe. On the patent side, a jury found infringement, but the court also noted that Nintendo's patent could plausibly be found obvious, lacking the inventive step. The case settled before a final judgment, so what Nintendo came away with was a tactical win, not a conclusive ruling from the court.