In the beginning of the 1990's a small company was formed with the main purpose of making games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The company got the name Color Dreams. They couldent afford to pay Nintendo to get an official seal of quality, so they made some software which would let them bypass the Nintendo Entertainment System's famous "lock-out chip" and they started producing their games, and all in all they released about 15 games.
Later Color Dreams formed another small company called Bunch Games, obviously because Nintendo by that time had given Color Dreams so bad a reputation that no store would carry their games because they were afraid of Nintendo. Anyway Color Dreams only released 5 games on the Bunch Games label before they formed even another label. The last game from Color Dreams was released in the last months of 1992 and noone heard from them since, though the company is still alive today under the name Wizdom Tree. Below is an almost complete list of Color Dreams/Bunch Games/Wisdom Tree games. The collom to the right is the rarity of the games, NR means that the game never was released, R = Rare, C = Common and so on...I, not like tsr who runs "tsr's NES archive", love this company and it's games.
I believe that if Color Dreams had made their way to Europe they would've succeded, mainly because NES games back then were very (and i mean very) expensive and the lower prices on Color Dreams carts would've made the Europeans buy their games instead of licensed games such as star wars galaxy of heroes hack, and I dont believe that any store would've let Nintendo decide what they should sell or not. Color Dreams games does not suck, as tsr claims. I personally can come up with more than 50 licensed titles which are even worse than the worst Color Dreams game.
What I like so much about Color Dreams, and the rest of the companies which released unlicensed games, is that they had the courage to stand up against the major company Nintendo, fighting one lawsuit after another. Color Dreams were good at making it to the headlines. When they released one of their titles called Menace Beach, which featured a beach bum whoose girlfriend has been kidnapped. SO he sets off on his beloved skateboard to rescue her. Well here
comes the thing that made some magazines claim that the games was unsuitable for children, one of these magazines was Game Players magazine. As you get further into the game you see your girlfriends clothes "dissapear" until she has nothing on but her bikini. Menace Beach was actually my first unlicensed game. I bought it from a small Danish postalorder company who had bought a ton of shrinkwrapped Nintendo games in the US, unlicensed as well as licensed games. Box shot of the Hellraiser game.
But they really got famous when they announced that they were working on a game called "Hellraiser" which, as the rumours says, had graphics like a 16bit system game, a special version MMC chip in it that actually contained an extra 8-bit processor. Other more fabulous rumors even suggested that the cartridge used the bottom row of pins to access an unused duplicate 8-bit processor on the NES motherboard. This rumored processor was assumed to have something to do with the "mystery port" on the bottom of the deck. Actually these rumours arent far from the truth. The game was engineered during the year 1990.
The cartridge had a Z-80 processor in it running at 2 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). This gave the game 3 times the computational power of the NES console alone. The cartridge also had 64k of RAM (Random Access Memory) on-board. This means that the game could store 64 thousand characters of information independent of the NES console. The game fully bitmapped out the screen to memory first (the processor on the game could draw with more colors, and handle more sprites at one time than the NES), though how many colors or sprites exactly were available is not known. Any gamer would have loved this game, but (here comes the sad news) the game never got released because of the following reasons.
The potential price that dictated the life of this game. It would have cost in the range of $80 for someone to buy, and as i said earlier most stores refused to carry Color Dream's, it would be difficult to sell this game and therefore cause very low sales. So Color Dreams were ofcourse afraid of this and therefore never sat this game in production. Noone at Color Dreams believes that a working prototype of the game exist. A PC and an SNES version, released by another company though, of the game was rumourd to be released in 1994 or 95, but noone has ever seen any of these either. So now it seems like all hopes of seeing this game is gone.
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