About Color Dreams/Bunch Games/Wisdom Tree/Star-Dot Technologies
Most of this was taken from what a former programmer of Color Dreams, Jon Valesh, says about the company, Color Dreams, whom he used to work for. I'll let him tkae it way from here...
Nintendo was a late-comer to the game console market and they learned from the severe mistakes of Atari. The most significant thing that they should be a single-vendor operation (TGZ6: Sounds like Nintendo wanted to make a monopoly...eh?) Atari had suffered from other companies entering the market and making games for thier machine. 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..(TGZ6: Sounds like the *ahem* "keying" systems, are only a way of Nintendo's to keep competition down to a minimum and gain a complete monopoly...eventually.)
Now that fellow that I men in '89 was Dan Lawton a classic "bright guy", he decided that the Nintendo market would be a sweet nut to crack. So he bough 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 and easier task that I would have guessed...
That's right Neg 5, (TGZ6: Don't ask me what Neg 5 is..the Neg 5 chip is the one metioned in my Lock-Out Chip File.-that all I know.) right onto the key-chip as the system was booting. By the time the little sucker woke up, the system was running, adn there's nothing left to do but play the game.
Eventully a complete development system for carts was built, oddly enough (TGZ6: Thats not odd enough!) using MASM (Microsoft's assemble for the 8086/DOS). This was done in such a rush that the development cards didn't even use the NEG-5 key-chip scarmbler, and instead we went to local Video Stores which carried Nintendo (TGZ6: Liscensed of course) games and bought them, cracking them open for the key-chip. (TGZ6: OK so how comes there is a Neg-5 chip in Moon Ranger, huh?)
The initial fellow (TGZ6: The Owner) teamed up with a company in the PC clone market, he ahd written a BIOS dor IBS or 2, and from thier 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 that is used to store the game's source code)(TGZ6: Look to my Multicarts section for more info on the PROM chip.) burned in, Color Dreams went to sell. Unfortunately, nobody was buying. The game was of reasonable quality (acutally, it was probably the best gun game for the NES), no where near the forecasted quantity of buyers could be found. (TGZ6: Could of figured that.)
Other games followed, a few of the better ones being Captain Comic, and Crystal Mines, each was released with more caution. Fortunately, the market was telling US what was wrong. Unfortunately there was not a damn thing we could do about it (TGZ6: See I told you again). It didn't help the games like RAID 2020 were coming out and giving us a...qeustionable...reputation. (TGZ6: I told you Nintendo does this to unliscensed companies).
(TGZ6: Now THIS is very interesting huh..Nintendo???) Nintendo was far smater than Atari. 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, theoritically, that a misforecast could cause shipments to be delayed to key stores, adn while Nintendo was never caught on tape saying, "If you sell another company's games, you won't sell ours." (TGZ6: Of course, they knew how to hide it.), the Dow Jones people seemed to think there was something fishy going on, and Color Dreams knew it. Nintendo provided 40% of the average toy stores revenues, and the toy stores wouldn't risk it for anything (TGZ6: That includes selling Color Dreams's or anything unliscensed companies' games, Nintendo pretty much had the video game market in its iron grip.).
By the winter of '90 I was designing and programming games for Color Dreams,as well as doing graphics art, and coordinating, Music Production Etc. The company had been reduced to mostly selling to video stores, who were already being actively attacked by Nintendo for renting our games (TGZ6: I could of figured that would happen.)
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 porducing cheaper, lower quality games (TGZ6: If that was possible.) They managed to find an outfit in China to program some games, comming up with such wonderful titles as Master Chu & the Drunkard Hu. Later, another spin-off arose called Wisdom Tree (TGZ6: They are still around by the way). They were selling into the christian market, one of the few markets Nintendo was afraid to touch (TGZ6: Obviusly, Nintendo wouldn't waste their time going after Wisdom Tree.)
Color Dreams did try to do some cool (TGZ6: & original) stuff. Such as designing a game that would get 16-bit graphics, sound, & quality out of the 8-bit NES. They also tried to sell other games for other systems (TGZ6: I'll take it away from here...The Sega Genesis they never could figure out how it worked, Super NES was fun, the Game Boy was a disaster, the Atarui Lynx was one of the few machines to get a genuinely good game made by Color Dreams, right before it croaked--the LYNX was the only machine that Color Dreams was ever liscensed to make games for.)
It is a truly sad tale (TGZ6: Yes, it is.) no one got what they wanted everyone got screwed, but Color Dreams maintins its unique palce in history as the only 3rd party company to amke & sell games for the NES without getting sued by Nintendo. (TGZ6: You guys do have some wit, after all.)
In the end, there were still 80 thousand Baby Boomer PROMS left in inventroy when I finally parted with Color Dreams. I had made 3 games for the company and I worked on a half dozen more, not to mention other projects, both hardware and software, which I worked on.
The group that was Color Dreams still exists. And from time to time they still walk about bringing another game to the market (TGZ6: That would make a big splash in the industry.) they now make & sell digital cameras for Windows under the name Star-Dot Technologies (TGZ6: Star-dot Technologies), and they have so many webcams that you can sometimes see one of the old crew straining to make a buck. These once proud, belligerent people, now borught so low. (TGZ6: Very sad.)
Jon Valesh worked on the following games.
Originally called "Who's Sane Now?", this game was originally intended for realease during the Gulf War, and as such as the Happy Camper Project & the Hellraiser Project (that 16-bit 8-bit cart I told you about) it was delayed into its grave. The reason being they believed that Suddam Huessein may try to kill us, and the company believed it....really.
By the time this game was made Jon Valesh was so embarrassed of having anything to do with this game he put his initials in the background graphics of the sewer level.
This game was a never-released wonder that was all done by Jon Valesh.
I have been trying to persuade Str-Dot Technologies to realease another game to the market...which is what they are always talking about....but they really don't sem to care too much I try to tell them that Nintendo is no longer the big operation they used to be. I'll continue to try....
So there you have it...thats all the Nintendo did to gain a monopoly told from someone who used to work for one of the company's who was stifled and stamped out by Nintendo.
This story may be old and dated, but it tells another side of company's espeically monopolistic companies....and I think it is just not fair to the little guys like Color Dreams and that is why I am doing this