Color Dreams

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A screenshot of Robo Demons, a Color Dreams game

Color Dreams was a company that developed video games for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). While most companies that developed NES games obtained an official license from Nintendo to produce game cartridges, Color Dreams was unique in that it developed NES games without an official license. To produce these unlicensed games, Color Dreams had to reverse engineer the NES to work around the system's "lock out" chip. The company successfully reverse engineered the system, developed a game (Baby Boomer), and released it in 1989. Several other titles followed in 1989 and 1990, including Captain Comic, Crystal Mines, and Robo Demons. Despite Color Dreams' efforts to work around the NES's built in protection, consumers frequently had difficulty getting their systems to play Color Dreams titles, sometimes having to restart their systems multiple times to play the games.

As a result of its reputation for releasing poor games, Color Dreams formed the label Bunch Games in 1990. Bunch Games was meant to be a label that Color Dreams could use to release lower quality games so that its reputation would not be damaged further. In 1991, Color Dreams formed Wisdom Tree for the purpose of releasing Christianity-themed games. The Wisdom Tree label resulted in Color Dreams' best selling titles, including Spiritual Warfare and Bible Adventures. While Wisdom Tree remains active today and is still selling religious video games, Color Dreams quit the video game business in the mid 1990s. Wisdom Tree is no longer associated with Color Dreams.

One Color Dreams project that was never released was a game based on the movie Hellraiser. The game cartridge, or "Super Cartridge" as it was called at the time, contained an extra processor that modified the tiles in the cartridge RAM without alerting the NES processor. This allowed for enhanced graphic effects rarely seen on the NES, such as a fully animated background running without the lag usually found with such tricks. The extra processor also performed palette swaping between scans of the TV to give the illusion of extra color. Because of delays in production, development problems, lack of a market for unlicensed games based on horror movies, and the exorbitant amount of money it took to make each "Super Cartridge," the project was finally abandoned when Nintendo announced the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Color Dreams games, as well as the games of its two subsidiary labels, were frequently criticized as being sub-par compared to official NES releases on nearly every front. This underlined the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" aspect of properly licensed developers. Despite (or because of) this, Color Dreams rose to a legendary status among NES fanatics, and several of their rarer releases have garnered substantial sell prices in the years after the company's life.