 | Color Dreams Inc. What Other Companies Didn't Dare Do |
Back in the year of 1989, a man by the name of Daniel Lawton formed a company by the name of Color Dreams. Color Dreams was a small company that produced mostly unlicensed 8-bit Nintendo games as well as a few Sega Genesis games. Every Color Dreams game was unlicensed except for one: Crystal Mines 2 for the Atari Lynx portable system. According to Dan, the reason Color Dreams didn't license their games was because of Nintendo's licensing policies, which were:
Color Dreams held a contest around the 90/91 time period. You had to "find" a pot of gold in your game between levels one and two. This explains the reason why there are two different versions of some Color Dreams carts, such as P'Radikus Conflict and Captain Comic. The blue carts had were possible "winner" for the Play For Cash contest, and the black (and generally rarer) carts were rereleases of the blue game carts.
Color Dreams Carts, Both Black and Blue Versions
After a while, Color Dreams began to get a bad reputation with retailers. Eddy Lin, one of the workers, thought of a sneaky plan. He had thought that they should make an alias for Color Dreams to prevent Color Dreams from getting an even worse reputation. Al Bunch was hired to run the company after Eddy got the idea. Al was planning to retire to Colorado to open up a hamburger stand anyway, so he agreed to give it a shot. Since Al was to run it, the alias was named Bunch Games. Bunch Games had an even worse reputation than Color Dreams did. Those games were whipped up and not good at all. Some were even Chinese games, the rights being bought from Joy Van and Sachen. As bad as these games were, Al Bunch was quite fond of Taggin' Dragon saying things such as "This game isn't so bad!"
Below is a complete list of Color Dreams games (NES versions only), both released and unreleased. Click on the links for pictures of the games in action, I really dont have too much stuff (i.e. media) for the unreleased games, though I do have some stuff. Enjoy.
Now Color Dreams is under the name StarDot-Technologies which is producing web cameras. I heard that if you open up a StarDot-Technologies camera, there is a message on the board from the Color Dreams people. I do not know if this is true or not.
A Chinese company named Pelican manufactures a Nintendo like system which was shaped like a controller. It was named the Game Station Arcade. It contains 15 Color Dreams games. It confirms the rumor Jon Valesh told us about a whole system with just Color Dreams games. This baby is pretty cool, totally approved of by Color Dreams, and cheap as an added bonus.
Sega's licensing agreement was not much better, according to Dan. Atari made it easy to license and they also helped market the game for you. When Color Dreams first got going, they produced some pretty cool games such as Raid 2020, which was inspired by the arcade game Narc, Captain Comic, a game which did well on PC, and Crystal Mines, a fun puzzle game. After Ken Beckett developed a graphics program, Nindraw, things went downhill for Color Dreams. They seemed to use about two different game engines for their games, and things got repetitive thus gamers quickly lost interest in Color Dreams games and Color Dreams soon got a bad rap by the retailers.
Bible Adventures
Captain Comic
Castle of Deceit
Menace Beach
P'Radikus Conflict
Pesterminator
After awhile, the Color Dreams folks developed an inside joke about programming religous games. Several months later, Bible Adventures was produced. Several others followed. Parents liked this idea for it was the one type of game that was useful. Most of the Wisdom Tree games were hacks of other games, Exodus was basically a Crystal Mines hack, Sunday Funday was a Menace Beach hack, but there were a few really cool religous games too. Spiritual Warfare was this awesome Zelda clone, and Bible Buffet was a party board game.
Color Dreams was also a pretty cocky company, the designers did stuff no one else thought to do. Jon Valesh worked on Operation Secret Storm, a game based off of Desert Storm, and as we might have guessed, the boss of the game is Sodamn Insane (funny play on words). Then there was Hellraiser, a game that supposedly gave the NES the enough power to handle 16 bit gaming graphics. Could you imagine the look on Nintendo's face if this would have been released? This Hellraiser super cart had a Z80 processor in the video memory space, which had the ability to write to video memory side by side with the main Nintendo processor, and also switch palette register values every other screen scan. It was designed by Ron Risley, who later gave up computer design to study medicine. The only game which was designed for this cart was test program, Koala Chase, which is lost somewhere at Color Dreams.
Color Dreams Bunch Games
Unreleased Games
Baby Boomer Castle of Deceit Code Blue
Captain Comic Galactic Crusader* Creation
Challenge Of The Dragon Mission Cobra* Escape From Atlantis
Crystal Mines Moon Ranger Free Fall
King Neptune's Adventure Taggin' Dragon* Gil
Master Chu & the Drunken Fu* Happy Camper
Menace Beach Wisdom Tree Hell Raiser
Metal Fighter* Bible Adventures Maggots
Operation Secret Storm Bible Buffet Star Blade
P'Radkis Conflict Exodus Targhan
Pesterminator Joshua
Raid 2020 King of Kings
Robo Demons Spiritual Warfare
Secret Scout Sunday Funday
Silent Assult*
