Comment by dabeledo

Older handhelds had also their quirks! The original gameboy boot bios would load the Nintendo logo from the cartridge ROM and would run a "checksum" of the logo data, to compare it with a constant value stored in the Bios itself - it the logo in the cartridge is the copyrighted Nintendo logo, it would start the game. With that Nintendo wanted to be sure that any cartridge would require a copyrighted logo so a License would be technically required.