For those of you who do not know the tale of that long dead game machine, the NES, or Nintendo Entertainment System, I'll spin it for you now (with some slant, I must admit):
The machine itself was, by modern standards a joke, but for Late-Eighties El Cheepo console machines, it was enough to take the market like a rapist with a ribbed condom. It took the market hard. In 1990, it was estimated that 40% of Toy's 'R' Us's profit for the Christmas season was from Nintendo games. Nintendo has redefined the gaming console market, and it is not unusual to hear somebody standing in front of a Sony Playstation saying, "I'm Playing Nintendo".
Now, Nintendo was a late comer to the game console market, following such illustrious examples of management strategy as Atari. Nintendo had figured out a few things from looking at the competition, the most significant being that they should be a single-vendor operation. Atari had suffered from other companies entering the market and making games for their machines. Nintendo designed a number of "keying" systems to prevent third party game makers from setting up shop. They then patented these "inventions" and protected them fiercely.
Now, that fellow I met in '89 was Dan Lawton, a classic "bright guy", and he decided that the Nintendo market would be a sweet nut to crack, so he bought himself an NES, and proceeded to start reverse engineering it. The first and most obvious problem was getting around the Key-chip, which proved to be an easier task than I would have guessed...
The Color Dreams Key-chip workaround: Neg 5 Volts.
That's right, Neg 5. Right onto the key-chip as the system was booting. By the time the little sucker woke up, the system was running, and there's nothing left to do but play the game.
By the winter of '90, there were games afoot.
At that time I was contracted to do some simple stuff like drawing up the Schematics for the Color Dreams development board, rev 1., and designing sound effects using the machine's awful little sound chip. A complete development system was built, oddly enough using MASM (Microsoft's assembler for the 8086/DOS) as a cross-assembler. This was done in such a rush that the development cards didn't even use the NEG-5 key-chip scrambler, and instead we went to local Video stores which carried Nintendo games and bought them, cracking them open for the key-chip. (It wasn't until '97 that I realized Zelda was in a gold case, and I owned a copy... well, just the board, with no key-chip... sigh.)
The initial fellow teamed up with a company in the PC clone market he had written a BIOS or two for, IBS, and from their offices in Brea a new generation of video games was to be born.
The first game, Baby Boomer, was symbolic of the heady optimism of the company, with 200,000 PROMs (the device used to store the game's code) burned, Color Dreams went to sell. Unfortunately, nobody was buying. The game was of reasonable quality (actually, it was probably the best gun game released for the NES...), no where near the forecasted quantity of buyers could be found.
Other games followed, a few of the better ones being Capitan Comic and Crystal Mines, each was released with more caution. Fortunately, the market was telling US what was wrong. Unfortunately, there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it. It didn't help that games like RAID 2020 were coming out and giving us a ...questionable... reputation.
Earlier in the decade, the console gaming concept was pioneered by companies like Atari, they produced good games, relative to the hardware they were using, but they had absolutely no business sense. At one point, Atari produced three copies of one game for each console capable of running it! Now, Nintendo was far smarter than that. By controlling all production, they were able to closely regulate the ratio of games to systems, and optimize profit. The flip side of this was, theoretically, that a misforecast could cause shipments to be delayed to key stores, and while Nintendo was never caught on tape saying, "If you sell another company's games, you won't sell ours.", the DOJ seemed to think there was something fishy going on, and Color Dreams knew it. Nintendo provided 40% of the average toy stores revenue, and the toy stores wouldn't risk it for anything.
Hellraiser was never brought to market, for reasons which seem to be clouded by 'Net-jabber now... The official reason is on the 'Net if you want to search.
Color Dreams was struggling, and in an effort to increase market share, began operating under assumed names, first Bunch Games, a child company dedicated to producing cheaper, lower quality games (if that was possible at this point.). They managed to find an outfit in China to program some games, coming up with such wonderful titles as Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu Later, another spin-off arose called Wisdom Tree, selling into the Religious market. (One of the few markets that Nintendo was afraid to touch.)
Color Dreams did try to do some cool stuff, such as designing a cart' with a Z80 and 64K of RAM (often referred to as the Hellraiser cart', but at the time there were no plans to use it for Hellraiser) the cart was designed by another very bright guy who at the time was in Med School...
They also tried to sell games for other machines, but they were hampered by the way they had entered the market. I still have the 68000 CPU from the SEGA Genesis that we reverse engineered. We had to take the CPU out to make room for the ICE (In-Circuit-Emulator) which enabled us to step through the operation of whatever games happened to be around and figure out how the damned thing worked. The Super NES was fun, the Game Boy was a disaster, the Atari LYNX was one of the few machines to get a genuinely good game, right before it croaked -- the LYNX was the only machine Color Dreams ever bought an official development system for.
It is truly a sad tale. Nobody got what they wanted, and everyone got screwed, but Color Dreams maintains it's unique place in history as the only company to make third party games for the NES and not get sued.
In the end, there were still eighty thousand Baby Boomer PROMS left in inventory when I finally parted company with Color Dreams, I had made three games for the company, and worked on a half dozen more, not to mention the other projects, both hardware and software, which I worked on.
The group that was Color Dreams still exists, and from time to time still talks about bringing another game to market. They now make digital cameras under the name Star-Dot Technologies, and they have enough webcams that you can sometimes see one of the old crew straining to make a buck. These once proud people, now brought so low.
Though it pains me to admit it, I was directly involved in the following Color Dreams/Bunch Games titles:
