Free Talk Live

From a longer article about the Madden Football franchise.....

Secretly, Hawkins assembled a team to reverse engineer the console -- that is, figure out a way to make EA's games run on Sega's hardware without its technology or approval as a way to avoid licensing fees altogether. Publicly, he began negotiations with Sega, once meeting with the company's executives while the reverse-engineering project went on in a nearby room. The gambit was risky: Once Sega caught wind of EA's plan, it likely would sue -- in part to discourage other software companies from following EA's lead, in part because reverse engineering without copyright infringement is technologically vexing. Hawkins' team, however, managed to pull it off.