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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.
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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.
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