For decades, game companies entered into long-lasting and mutually beneficial licensing deals with gun manufacturers. If a game wanted to use a recognizable, trademarked design or a brand name of gun, it would need permission. The same was true for vehicles, recognizable landmarks, or other kinds of weapons.

A single game could have hundreds of such licenses, one lawyer whose firm offers legal counsel to video-game companies told me. (The lawyer requested anonymity because of worries that speaking publicly would jeopardize business relationships.) In exchange for the use of their intellectual property, manufacturers would stipulate that the weapons in the games be portrayed realistically and positively. Money rarely changed hands, but the relationship was symbiotic: Game companies got verisimilitude from featuring trademarked guns; gun manufacturers got easy, free exposure, on their terms.

But then two events changed the tenor of that relationship, at least on the surface.

The first was a landmark 2011 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. The Court struck down a California law banning stores from selling violent video games to minors without an adult present. It effectively granted video games new legal standing as bona fide artistic expressions, with similar legal privileges to movies, TV, and books, which, generally speaking, do not need to license products in order to depict them. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion, finding that “California’s claim that ‘interactive’ video games present special problems, in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome, is unpersuasive.”

The second was Sandy Hook. In the weeks after the shooting, then–Vice President Joe Biden met with the game developers behind first-person shooters such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor to discuss how to move forward after the attack. The Entertainment Merchants Association cautioned against renewed research efforts into whether games caused gun violence—that matter had long been settled. “Additional studies will research the same conclusions as the multitude of previous studies,” the EMA’s interim president, Mark Fisher, wrote in a letter to Biden. Biden briefly floated a tax on violent games, with proceeds going to gun-violence victims. The gaming press condemned the idea, but it showed that Biden was grasping for hard proof of change in the industry.

In 2013, some semblance of that hard proof finally arrived. When reports of the licensing deals between gun makers and gaming companies resurfaced that year, Electronic Arts (EA), which developed the Medal of Honor series, announced that it would no longer pursue licensing deals with gun manufacturers. (The Medal of Honor series, set during World War II, is itself a licensed adaption of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.) To be clear, it still planned to use the recognizable guns its fan base was used to. It was simply asserting a First Amendment right to use trademarked weapons without the burden of licensing deals.