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Made In The USA
Color Dreams

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 pollicies.

  • Commitment to about $350,000 in cartridges
  • Nintendo had to approve the games, and they used their own schedule
  • Nintendo manufactured the game taken 6 months to do so
  • The company paid Nintendo 3 times the amount for the cartridge then the company could produce it for themselves
  • Nintendo could reject or approve your games, depending on subject matter and quality

    Sega's licensing agreement was not much better. Atari made it easy to license and they also helped market the game for you.

    Color Dreams released several cartridges, in black and blue cases. The games released were:

  • Baby Boomer
  • Captain Comic
  • Challenge Of The Dragon
  • Crystal Mines
  • King Neptune's Adventure
  • Master Chu & the Drunken Fu
  • Menace Beach
  • Metal Fighter
  • Operation Secret Storm
  • P'Radkis Conflict
  • Pesterminator
  • Raid 2020
  • Robo Demons
  • Secret Scout
  • Silent Assult

    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. As bad as these games were, Al Bunch was quite fond of Taggin' Dragon saying "This game isn't so bad!" Bunch Games produced:

  • Castle of Deceit
  • Galactic Crusader
  • Mission Cobra
  • Moon Ranger
  • Taggin' Dragon

    Surprisingly Bunch Games didn't produce many games which was probably for the best.

    After the Bunch Games idea flopped, one of the workers got the brilliant idea of making bible based games. It first started out as a joke, but it soon became reality. 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. Some of the Wisdom Tree games were:

  • Bible Adventures
  • Bible Buffet
  • Exodus
  • Joshua
  • King of Kings
  • Spiritual Warfare
  • Sunday Funday

    Exodus and Joshua were both Crystal Mines ports with changed graphics. Sunday Funday was a Menace Beach hack and it also included a game called Fish Fall. Bible Adventures played like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Spiritual Warfare was a Legend of Zelda clone.

    As it is with all companies, there was a few games that were planned but never released. They are:

  • Code Blue
  • Creation
  • Escape From Atlantis
  • Free Fall
  • Gil
  • Happy Camper
  • Hell Raiser
  • Maggots
  • Star Blade
  • Storm Lords
  • Targhan

    Color Dreams made two games featuring "Sodamn Insane". They were Operation Secret Storm and Happy Camper.

    Operation Secret Storm was originally titled "Who's Sane Who"

    Color Dreams was threatened by various sources, but not sued, and Nintendo even referred to Color Dreams in a court case and used their method of production to show an example of a legal product, while suing someone else.

    Color Dreams had planned a "Super Cart" that had more power than the normal Nintendo cart. It was in prototype form yet no software was ever made for it. It 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.

    Nina Stanley still works making games, and is the daughter of the famous Ausley Stanley, known as "bear" in the 60s, and also at grateful dead concerts where he's well known for his scull jewelry which symbolizes the group.

    Color Dreams also tried doing some development in Mexico, with a branch office and about 6 or 8 workers, but they never finished anything there.

    Color Dreams was probably the only company that designed, programmed, built, and marketed their own product.

    Onto Page II

    I would like to thank Dan Burke, Roger Deforest, Dan Lawton, Jim Meuer, Nina Stanley, and Jon Valesh for all of the support and information provided. I wrote this article for fun and also because of my interest in Color Dreams. I also have tried to be as accurate as possible, as to achieve a correct story.