"The Sega Genesis wasn't any better," Dan now says. In fact "they verbally threatened to sue us if we didn't license, which made the engineers in the company more interested in finding a way to produce legal cartridges without licensing."

Dan says that they did Crystal Mines II with an official license because "the Lynx people made it easy to license, they were extremely helpful, and their licensing and manufacturing weren't quite as oppressive, plus they helped market the games for you."

Color Dreams first did the games Baby Boomer and Captain Comic, followed by Raid 2020 and Crystal Mines. Jim Meuer, the designer of Baby Boomer has to say the following about the original purpose of Baby Boomer.

"I worked at Color Dreams in the late 80's doing Baby Boomer and designing their development system for making games. Baby Boomer was the original test program that we used to make the development systems."

According to an old magazine I have, Baby Boomer did quite well. Captain Comic was also a favorite among gamers as it did quite well too. Crystal Mines was either the third or fourth release. This was a fun puzzle game that was the favorite Color Dreams game among the workers. Ken Beckett made Crystal Mines as his first video game.

"I wrote Crystal Mines for the NES (my first game), then later did CM 2 for the Lynx. Color Dreams decided not to continue with Lynx games, and I ended up making a deal with them - they took a small part of the royalty from Atari, and I got the rest (directly from Atari). Color Dreams had paid for the development system (which was an Amiga - funny since it was in competition with Atari's ST machines at the time, this was because Atari bought the Lynx from Epyx). I was happy that I could go to the mall and see CM2 in the stores with my name on it."

In the same year of 1989, Dan Burke was working as the "Art Editor for the Saddleback College Lariat", a college newspaper. There Dan Burke met a writer on staff named Leo Gilreath who met a programmer at an arcade who had a connection with Color Dreams.

As Dan recalls, "At first, I did not totally believe that the programmer was legit, but was willing to meet him and see what was going on. I figured, it is some kid making games out of his bedroom...boy was I wrong."

Dan Burke remembers when he met Frank Waung, who he says was "a very bright programmer and the company, Color Dreams, was a legitimate effort to put out Nintendo games, albeit, reverse engineered."

According to Dan, "Frank and I became fast friends at Round Table Pizza over some Coke and Garlic bread, and the three of us became a team...Leo the writer, Frank the programmer who was then working at Unisys, and myself, the artist who was employed at Sterling Art, a local art store."

Dan then remembers working on the game Raid 2020. "I did the cover art, game art, and Frank and designed the game mostly. Leo did the manual I believe."

While this was going on, Dan Lawton became a regular at Diedrich's Coffee shop. He became friends with one of the workers at Diedrich's, Nina Bedner, now Nina Stanley. According to Nina, "I met the chief engineer while working at a coffee bar (back before they were trendy) and he used to come in at the crack of dawn after a long night's work and we would talk about stuff. When he found out I was an artist he offered me a job."

Nina took him up on his offer and to her horror, "I didn't like it as the technology was extremely primitive and I swore I 'd never get involved with computers, so I quit after a couple of weeks." Nina went back to Diedrich's again. Nina says that Dan and she, well "We remained friends and a few months later he came around and said they were expanding their operations and had some new software that made the graphics easier to create so I gave it a try again." By this time, Ken Beckett finished working on NinDraw, a PC and Nintendo graphics program for Nintendo. This new software Dan was talking about was NinDraw. Nina took up the offer again for she liked the flexible hours for she had a son and she had some personal problems at the time.

Nina says that Color Dreams games were like a puzzle, "to fit in as much as I could, and to use it most efficiently."

In 1990, Color Dreams released several more games including Challenge of the Dragon, King Neptune's Adventures, Menace Beach, Pesterminator, and Robodemons. Dan Burke did Robodemons as his second game, and he says that it got done in record time. "I designed this almost all by myself and had it done under a month, but this was while I was under contract to work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day."

Dan also remembers doing Challenge of the Dragon. "I basically designed most of it, Dan Lawton and I rolled it around one night after coming back from some strip club. But Dan, he would let me run with the games and I did...I loved doing it too. I did all the art on this one...I was inspired a lot by Karateka, a game by Jordan Mechner for the Atari 800XL. Such a simple game, a simple reward (the girl) but powerful motivation nonetheless."

Nina and Vance Kozik, another Color Dreams worker, designed a game Menace Beach. Menace Beach featured a skateboarder based after Nina's son. Nina Stanley tells me that Menace Beach was her favorite Color Dreams game.

Sometime in 1990, Western Exterminator gave Color Dreams the rights to make Pesterminator, what Dan Burke describes as a "bug-squashing game." King Neptune's Adventure, best described as Captain Comic underwater, was also made in 1990. Roger Deforest was hired just in time to help make this game. Roger says, "Color Dreams was my first job in the video game world. Little did I know I'd be trapped in the game industry for several more years."

Sometime during 1990, Color Dreams dreamed up this idea of making a "super cart" with more power than the typical Nintendo cart. They got this guy named Ron Risley to create this super cart. According to Ron, "My recollection is that the original NES cartridge used two ROMs, one as a character generator and one with the program code. What I did with the SuperCart was create a complete Z-80 computer with its own ROM and RAM, and then mapped a second access stream into the Z-80 RAM for the NES console.

The Z-80 could then modify the character generator and the NES's program code in real time. For some applications (especially player's-eye view or "3-D" rendering) we would actually replace the entire character generator during horizontal retrace, so that we had pixel-by-pixel control of the screen -- something you couldn't do with straight NES cartridges even if you had the processor power (which you didn't). So the effect was that we greatly increased the effective amount of available ROM, we improved graphics control, and we had a complete Z-80 that could run as a graphics co-processor.

I only know of two games ever written for the SC: Koala Chase, which I wrote mainly for testing the SC and never finished (I don't think it ever saw the light of day) , and one commercial title that CD produced but I never saw.

The Super Cart also used a proprietary circuit that Dan developed to bypass Nintendo's anti-competitive lockout mechanism that prevented third-parties from writing NES games without paying Nintendo a substantial ransom." Ron remembers that they were making a game named Hellraiser for this "super cart." "I had to watch a few of the movies, since they were thinking of having me participate in writing it."

Bunch Games was formed around this time. They bought games made by Sachen and Odyssey software, the first being a small Asian company, and the latter being a US game company who made the game Moon Ranger. According to Dan Lawton, "I think the idea was Eddy Lin's. Al Bunch was hired to run the company after someone got the idea. He was planning to retire to Colorado and open a hamburger stand anyway, so he agreed to give it a shot." This is how Bunch Games was formed.

In 1991, Jon Valesh made a game by the name of Operation Secret Storm. This game was made using the same engine as that used for Challenge of the Dragon. The setting was during Desert Storm and the game even featured "Sodamn Insane" for the boss.

Roger Deforest made Secret Scout and the never released Free Fall game. "I was a freelance artist and tester for them for a couple of years. That's when I made Secret Scout and Free Fall on my own time." Nina Stanley gave the Secret Scout graphics a total work over, she explains in an older e-mail. Roger Deforest admits that this was probably for the best.

Color Dreams then formed Wisdom Tree, years later. They made religious games. A lot of the games were Color Dreams games with "tweaked" graphics but there were a few cool ones. One such game was Spiritual Warfare. This was a complete Zelda rip-off but fun nonetheless. After releasing several of these games, Color Dreams finally went under.

Wisdom Tree still makes religious games for the PC today anyway. They sometime split apart from Color Dreams. Several of the Color Dreams workers have now formed a company known as Star-Dot Technologies. These brilliant people now make web cameras. Looking back on it now, Dan Lawton says "We did the best we could, considering major stores were afraid to carry the unlicensed games, probably thinking Nintendo would punish them, but without large sales it wasn't possible to make the kind of quality of game we would have liked to make." Dan also notes that "We were probably the only company that designed, programmed, built, and marketed our own product."

Color Dreams still does bring about game stuff once in awhile. Recently Color Dreams licensed for a company named Pelican to make a small console of just Color Dreams games, known as The Game Station Arcade. This baby is pretty cool. I am sure this won't be the last we'll here of Color Dreams.

HOME HUMOR MUSEUM MANUALS HARDWARE PATENTS UNLICENSED NES

TECH STUFF THE WARPER UNOFFICIAL GAMES MY COLLECTION GAMES I BEAT TEST CARTS MISC NES

ARTICLES PROTOTYPES CONTESTS UNRELEASED GAMES INTERVIEWS GAME GENIE CODES

ADAPTERS CHEATS BOX ART CREDITS F.O.G. LINKS