Here's a great Gamasutra article on the matter: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134790/the_secret_history_of_donkey_kong.php?print=1
Ah, I see. Good read! Well, it looks like BT is in the right, they did rip them off and the only party that ever got credited for this achievement was Nintendo and Miyamoto for the idea of the game. The contract was clear according to what I read here on a particular matter: Ikegami getting to be the sole maker/supplier for the Donkey Kong arcade boards beyond coding the game itself. Nintendo decided to thumb its nose at that, burn a bridge and it eventually led to a lawsuit. My bet is that they found somebody else to manufacture the arcade PCBs much cheaper and regretted ever making that kind of deal, then just decided they would no longer honor it.
But Nintendo didn't actually own the manufacturing rights to Donkey Kong. Although their game was still a Nintendo product, and the characters, name, and brand all belonged to it, the development contract gave Ikegami Tsushinki the exclusive rights to manufacture and sell boards to Nintendo for ¥70,000 each. After the initial order of 8,000 units, Nintendo ceased to buy boards from Ikegami. Although the contract was unclear with regard to actual copyright of the program code -- still new territory for the law -- Ikegami was named as the sole supplier for Donkey Kong boards.
Nintendo didn't see it that way. Before long, Nintendo had manufactured about 80,000 additional units without Ikegami's involvement, burning the bridge with the company that had developed its biggest hit, and opening themselves up to a bitter legal battle that would drag on for almost a decade.
If the contract was clear in the sense of you develop our game idea, work with Shigeru Miyamoto, we pay you a one-time fee, no royalties, you hand over the game, all code becomes our IP, you totally give up your stake in it, then fine, you'd have a point. That wasn't quite the nature of the contract in this case however.
They agreed essentially to some kind of royalty and co-ownership deal, that is, Ikegami would also get to be the only one to make and sell Donkey Kong arcade boards (
after coding the game based on Miyamoto's guidance) back to Nintendo which, yeah, is like a royalty deal almost. Nintendo later decided to do a F U and breach this contract is what I see, not just the matter of nobody ever hearing of "Ikegami" as far as crediting, just Nintendo and Miyamoto.
Ikegami later got out of videogame development too and this may have been a factor over time, although that's just speculation on my part (
first time I ever heard of the company). Nintendo fearing a legal loss finally decided to settle out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, so we don't have a solid, slam dunk win in court to go by because of this, but if the facts of the article of yours are clear, then yes, Nintendo cheated them out of an originally agreed upon contractual benefit and they stuck to their guns across 10 years to finally get justice (
notwithstanding lack of crediting as mentioned which I guess you could escape if it wasn't apart of the contract, but it's still a moral/ethical issue after that)! B.J.DeuceBag, my Ys fan translator and a criminal cheat his own self, would call that an "obsession," not getting over it after a year or two and take a "Cry me a river" position.
Lastly, there's the further matter of reverse engineering Ikegami's code to help make a sequel without their involvement once again (adding more insult to injury) and that gets into the gray area on who gets to claim total 100% ownership - I don't think one side or the other does, there are co-rights here and the contract on who got to make/sell the arcade PCBs reflected that! Nintendo simply chose to unilaterally act as the 100% owner and dared them to do something about it!
If I am a judge and the contract didn't specify one way or another who gets 100% IP ownership on the game code (
an oversight on Nintendo's part perhaps), I would simply grant co-ownership rights and rule based off of that (
Is it 60/40% in Nintendo's favor or whatever ?). Anyhow, in the end, this developer was screwed over by Nintendo in more than one way (
contractually, thus legally and morally/ethically) - that seems clear to me.