Color
Dreams was started in 1989 by one man Dan Lawton
he bought a NES and started to reverse engineer
it the first problem he came across was the lock
out chip which turned out to be much easier than
he thought. A complete development system was made
which used MASM (Microsoft's assembler for the 8086/DOS)
as a cross-assembler. This development system was
rushed so much so that the development cards didn't
have the NEG-5 key-chip scrambler used to get around
the lock out chip.So they went to a local video
game store and bought up some games to break open
for their key-chips.
The
first game released by Color Dreams was Baby Boomer
one of their better games a zapper game 200,000
PROMS were made for Baby Boomer but only 120,000
were sold. Captain Comic and Crystal Mines were
the next two releases some more good titles but
by this time Color Dreams games were not working
on all NES systems due to a change in the lock-out
chip and stores were refusing to sell their games
because of this.
Later
came games like Raid 2020 which gave Color Dreams
a bad reputation it was then decided they would
start to release games under the company name of
Bunch Games so Color Dreams did not get a worse
reputation than it already had. Bunch Games found
some people in China to program Master Chu &
Drunkard Hu not one of the best games to say the
least.
Then
yet another subdivision of the company Wisdom Tree
that released religious games mostly modified versions
of Color Dreams existing games and the Zelda clone
Spiritual Warfare. Wisdom Tree started to make money
and later came up with the Super Nintendo game Super
3D Noah's Ark which used the Wolfstein 3D engine.
Wisdom Tree are are still going today and still
sell NES games for the high price of $25 along with
Game Boy, Super Nintendo and PC religious games.
One
of the more interesting unreleased titles for the
NES is Hellrasier a super cartridge which was to
have it's own 8-bit processor to work along with
the NES processor giving a total of 16-bit but Color
Dreams had problems getting the processor in the
cartridge and the one in the system itself to work
together in sync the 8-bit market then started to
die with the release of 16-bit systems Color Dreams
knew it would be impossible to sell Hellraiser with
a $99 price tag because of the large cost to produce
the super cartridge so the project was scrapped.
Like
Active Enterprises, Color Dreams decided to ship
a load of their games to Europe to see how they
sell but they had the same problem they did in the
United States with the lock-out chip. Not all of
Europe got them the few countries I know did are
France, Denmark and Finland. I found a French version
of Mermaid of Atlantis that has the disclaimer in
French click here for a scan.
Color
Dreams is still going today but no longer in the
video games market they now make and sell digital
cameras going under the name Star-Dot Technologies.
Color
Dreams |
Bunch
Games |
Unreleased |
| Baby
Boomer |
Castle
of Deceipt |
Code
Blue |
| Captain
Comic |
Galactic
Crusader |
Escape
from Atlantis |
| Challenge
of the Dragon |
Mission
Cobra |
Free
Fall |
| Crystal
Mines |
Moon
Ranger |
Happy
Camper |
| King
Neptune's Adventure |
Taggin
Dragon |
Hellraiser |
| Master
Chu & the Drunken Fu |
|
Starblade |
| Menace
Beach |
Wisdom
Tree |
Storm
Lords |
| Metal
Fighter |
Bible
Adventures |
Targhan |
| Operation
Secret Storm |
Bible
Buffet |
|
| P'radikus
Conflict |
Exodus |
|
| Pesterminator |
Joshua |
|
| Raid
2020 |
King
of Kings |
|
| Robo
Demons |
Spiritual
Warfare |
|
| Secret
Scout |
Sunday
Funday |
|
| Silent
Assault |
|
|
Thanks
to Nes World,
Jon
Valesh's site for much of the informarion and
to Grand
Nestral for the Hell Raiser picture.
