 | American Game Carts Three releases and a few others |
You may remember a small company, Sharedata, they produced numerous game show games such as Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and others for numerous platforms such as PC and Comodore 64. Eventually, around the 1990 time frame, a subsidiary of Sharedata was formed, known as American Game Cartridges Inc (AGCI).
Scott Schriver and Donald Forbes went to Target, bought several Paper Boy carts. They also bought an EPROM programmer and some 40 pin ZIF sockets from Tri-Tech. The chr/prg roms were unsoldered, and eventually replaced with the ZIF sockets. Keith fiddled with this stuff, what became the AGCI development system.
Richard Frick programmed the game Chiller for NES. This became AGCI's first game release, and quite a hit too. American Game Cartridges advertised their game as "A thrilling video game at an affordable price!"
As the time progressed, AGCI started making better development tools; a graphcis editor named NES Paint, a maze editor for Shockwave, a music conversion program and several debugging tools. American Game Cartridges Inc. released two other games, Shockwave and Deathrace. Eventually AGCI programmed another game, Wally Bear, but it was released by another game company, American Video Entertainment.
But what ever happened to Crossbow, the last of the AGCI games? Contrary to popular belief, the programmers at AGCI had actually started to program the game. The game was never finished, ACGI went under before the programming was completed. Crossbow was improved over Chiller...the light gun code was improved, and if Crossbow would have been released, Chiller would be the inferior game.
American Game Cartridges Inc. was overlooked by numerous NES gamers. Even though AGCI only produced four different games, they are actually quite fun to play. Or atleast they seem like they would be from what I've heard about them. Especially that Chiller game.
AGCI Releases Unreleased Chiller Crossbow Deathrace Shockwave Wally Bear & the No Gang!
