How Nintendo NEARLY KILLED The Giana Sisters

Great work mate. Interesting story and your videos are getting better and better!

Wow this is just great. So much info on a good game. Great work and keep it up. Just love the video's you make. :)

Thoroughly enjoyed watching this video! Absolutely great documentary on such an iconic game. I still have my original tape, actually sold off a double about two years ago. But not at the crazy inflated prices it goes for these days.

Thanks a lot for this very well done video. - By the way: When will there be another challenge video...? :-)

Didn't know there was so much history about Giana, great work and investigation ;)

Amazing documentary! Thank you for unlocking parts of my memory that I had forgotten over the years! Hearing that intro music, seeying the gameplay made me remember instantly. It must have been the late 80s early 90s and this was one of my actual first games I played growing up. My first gaming console was the Commodore 64. Unlike other friends, I never owned a Nintendo nes but I did play mario bros. I remember me and my friends saying that this was almost a straight copy (port) of that game. After seeying this documentary I have to agree. They were copying mario bros bigtime. Not that it mattered to me tbh, because I loved this game.

I didnt know sequals were made of this game and was suprised to see New games for the ds, playstation, xbox and switch. How cool is that!

I started collecting videogames back in 2010 to relive some of the old memories that I had as a kid. The nes being my most favorite console now, because I always was jealous of friends who did own one. Today I have over 350 different nes games and still collecting.

Keep up the good work, it was an absolute pleasure watching this video.

Bedankt en groetjes Daan

Giana Sisters... ah yes.. my first love on the Amiga 500, after Indiana Jones and Monkey Island. It still holds a big place in my heart!

What a nice little gem of a documentary about a great game! Loved Giana on both C64 and Amiga and played it to pieces back in the days!!

You can blame US Gold for their provocative advertising of Gian(n)a across several platforms ("Move over brothers!"). See also Katakis for its R-Type "inspired" gameplay and Garrison for its spooky resemblance to a popular 4-player arcade game. The controversy over these games only came when they were licenced to US Gold (under the Rainbow Arts brand) for much wider releaee.

Great overview of Giana Sisters. It would also be interesting to do a review of Turrican, another success by Rainbow Arts.

I guess quite a lot of work went into this documentary, but it was well worth it. Thumbs up!

A friend who had never seen super mario said - upon seeing it - "a shitty giana clone" :)

Mario did have a name in Donkey Kong, actually: Jumpman.
I love how you say 'Super Mario Bros.'. :P I also call it that in Dutch.
I don't think Sir Sinclair would've been too disappointed by Giana Sisters not being released on the Spectrum, to be honest, with his poor opinion of video games in general. :P
Solid video! I didn't know about Giana 2 or Dream Runners.
One could argue about whether Nintendo killed The Great Giana Sisters or not. Sure, the game was passed around illegally, of course, but it seems that most stores did take it off the shelves, and Rainbow Arts did not rerelease it, as you mentioned.

Thanks for the great flashback! Brings back memories!

I wonder if it was not US GOLD that brought it to Nintendos attention, since they were starting to get involved in console games as well at the time (in 88 they struck a deal with Capcom, a competitior of Nintendo). US GOLD were responsible for the UK import of Giana Sisters and it was they who made the advertisements you shown about "beating the boys" etc. This lead to they had to retract Giana Sisters it from sales and do a callback of all their tape and disk versions. The game had been sold in Germany for a full year without any letters from Nintendo. So I think it would been fine if Rainbow Arts had it released with a different UK publisher, that did not compete with Nintendo in the same marketplace. At least that is my 2 cents. (PS: I commented on your fb post as well mentioning the Sierra Jawbreaker vs Ataris Pacman law suit or legal trouble).

Wonderful Video! Thank you a lot! 🙂

I remember liking Giana Sisters a LOT more because the music was so much better to me than Mario "Bross".
Was kinda sad it didn't get a sequel (until MUCH later (and I did not like those).

💖 "promosm"

They should kill the Giana Sisters. It's a comlete rip-ff of Super Mario Bros.

I say this even as a lifelong Nintendo fan: Nintendo, as a company, is fucking evil. Like it's hard to imagine a company that behaves with more hostility toward not only their competitors (or any company that they even vaguely believe could pose a threat to them), but even toward their own audience (look at how they deal with fan games and ROMhacks of their games, even though these aren't things that realistically threaten them). It's a shame, because out of all the prominent developers that were around when I was a kid (I was born in 1990), Nintendo has probably remained the most consistent in quality (most others that come to mind now are either out of business, restructured to the point of being unrecognizable, or just vastly inferior to what they used to be, or some combination of the above), like their games are still great (their consoles are a bit more arguable, but the Switch has clearly been doing something right even considering its reduced technical specs), and they've at least become a lot less weird about third party developers and indie game support, but their business practices are still very malicious often.

This English accent spoken here in the video is terrible. And I'm German myself.

Love Gianna Sisters. I remember playing it for the first time on a bootleg mobile phone port posing as a Super Mario game, to the point they actually replaced every graphic with the ones from Super Mario Bros! It was back when mobile phones had actual buttons and now I feel old haha.
I was surprised that it was more challenging than Mario and the time limit of 100 sec made me play it over and over to see what I missed on each level. It was a new adventure every time and I loved it.

Gian(n)a.
Great game.
Recently downloaded on my phone from the playstore.
Onfortunatly it has NO unlimited time and life posibility, like in the C=64 version.

Now i know why original copys are so hard to find.
Cool video, nice information.
And nice to hear a Dutchman speaking fluently English (its much beter than mine) and then hear him say Jan van Valburg in perfectly Dutch 🤣🤣
But afteral, its one of the very few yt movies i watched without skipping parts.

There was this C64 at an exposition with a tape emulator, saw the name of this title, "huh, this sounds like a famous game...", loaded it and heard the music... Instantly hooked 😍
Thanks for your documentary!
Now I imagine a film of this German-Italian punk girl in the 80s having adventures 😁

fuck nintendo

Im surprised the remaster is on switch considering their backstory lol

fok nintendo

I know it's a year old but Krazy Kong was ok by Nintendo so it's not really a clone

You cannot protect an idea by copyright, but the expression of that idea (like the graphic and the sound, for example).

cool video is always lovely to see giana sisters stuff i love the series

Great video! Thanks for that.

The video turned out great! Thanks for having me =)