Caltron

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Caltron Industries Inc. was a Taiwan-based video game company that produced at least one unlicensed cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and developed multiple others. There is a direct link between Caltron Ind. Inc. and the video game companies NTDEC and MegaSoft. All three are believed to be the same company. This company developed more than twenty original games released worldwide, some in the form of unlicensed Famicom cartridges, and some in the form of unlicensed NES cartridges.

The game published by Caltron Ind. Inc in North America is a 6 in 1 multicart which includes six seemingly original Caltron productions, of which some are clones of existing titles. The 6 in 1 was released in 1992, yet some of the games had already been released previously, in 1991, on individual unlicensed NES cartridges in Europe.

The six games on the cartridge are:

  • Bookyman - A clone of Williams Electronics and Kural's arcade game Make Trax/Crush Roller, which had previously been released by Hwang Shinwei/RCM - Shinwei's version featured graphics taken directly from the original, while they were modified in the Caltron release, presumably to avoid legal trouble.
  • Adam and Eve - A single-screen platform game similar to Nintendo's Balloon Fight, in which you have to kill snakes by bursting the balloons attached to their heads.
  • Cosmos Cop - A pseudo-3D into-the-screen shoot-em-up, similar to Sega's Space Harrier in a futuristic setting.
  • Magic Carpet 1001 - A side-scrolling shoot-em-up, later released on pirate cartridges as "Aladdin III" and with some graphical and sound modifications as "Super Harry Potter".
  • Balloon Monster - A clone of Mitchell's Pang, or Buster Bros. as it was known in North America
  • Porter - A puzzle game similar to Sokoban (originally by Thinking Rabbit), in which you have to move boxes into a specific place.

Soon after Caltron produced their 6 in 1, possibly due to some financial trouble, they sold their remaining stock to a Texas-based video game company called Myriad Games, Inc. Myriad Games re-released the 6 in 1 with their own label placed over Caltron's label, and with a new manual and box. Each respective cartridge and box of this re-release has a serial number, and the highest number found has been 888, according to the Digit Press rarity guide, making the Myriad version the rarest commercial NES game released in North America.

In other languages