Pirate Discussion > 2000-present

Colosoftware games (prototypes?)

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Icareevenless123456789:
A while back I got a plug 'n play simply titled the Super Video Game. I never used it much because the thing gets burning hot after, like, 30 minutes of being plugged in. It has mostly hacked games on it, like Super Shrek Bros. among some others. But three of the games are these weird ports of Commodore 64 games. They changed the names slightly, so I didn't realize it until just now. The (presumably) copyright screens are replaced with "Push Start to Play", so I couldn't see the company name either.

The games are:

*Hunter: Actually Ice Hunter. You have to roll a snowball to the edge of the river, so you can float across and escape.
*Magician: Actually Magic Madness. Shoot the stuff, whoopee.
*Shoot the Goof: Couldn't find a C64 counterpart to this; just a poor lightgun game.

The originals, at least, are from a company called Colosoftware. There's barely any info on them other than that they made these two games, along with a complete ripoff of Q-Bert called "R-Nest" (I'm not kidding), and [edited by taizou, see below]. Seems like a fantastic company, huh?

I'm guessing these are prototypes of some kind. I don't see why pirates would rip off these of all games. Does anyone have more information on these? Pictures whenever this website actually decides to let me upload them.

taizou:
There is a plug & play out there that contains only the Colosoftware games - afaik there was either a youtube video or an article about it somewhere but unfortunately I now can't find it. I think there were more than those 3 though, maybe 4 or 5, and they had copyrights intact.

I'm assuming that at some point, some plug & play maker wanted to make a 'legit' console, and somehow were in contact with the ex/current/whatever programmer of Colosoftware, who ported those games to the NES for them. "Shoot the Goof" was probably made from scratch because the P&P system came with a lightgun and they wanted a game to justify it.

And then, as often happens with these things, the games were copied and ended up in other plug & play systems like yours, I guess.Oh it's because the video was deleted :(
http://web.archive.org/web/20150820180805/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFsXxsXsbco

There's some discussion of it in this thread though http://s4.zetaboards.com/PGC_Forums?topic=8143608/1/

and here's a list of the games on that console: http://obsoletetears.free.fr/jeu.php3?Marque=&Machine=Game%20Startuh also, I removed a certain claim from your original post - assuming you got that from the Denver Post article, they were using "Colo." as an abbreviation for "Colorado", it's nothing to do with the Colosoftware guy... and I'd rather not have a claim as serious (and potentially libellous) as that against an innocent person on the forum, you know

Icareevenless123456789:
Found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPCdMusg78

Don't know why I didn't think of licensed P&P being a possibility. And that's the worst accidental claim I've made in a while.

If "Game Star" is the original developer of these ports though, I think it came after Nintendo saw some of their other systems. I have one under that brand ("Fun Educator", a keyboard Famiclone) with a handful of standard NES titles on it (Mario 1, Mappy, etc.).

And upon closer inspection, looking at the controllers, manuals and whatnot, it looks like both of my systems are from the same manufacturer, except the Super Video Game is unbranded. So it all kind of comes full circle.

taizou:
Ah nice, that's a different video to the one I saw.

AFAIK "Game Star" was a brand name used by Macro Winners or some related entity, they're still in the business of making plug & play and handheld stuff today. If your Super Video Game was also made by them it would make sense, since they probably still had the ROMs for those games hanging around.

But yeah, this probably did come about because they (or some distributor) were wary about selling consoles with pirate NES games in certain markets, even if they hadn't been specifically targeted by Nintendo. Given that the on-screen text shown in that video is all in French it was probably done in conjunction with a French distributor and originally intended for that market.Oh and if you're having trouble uploading pics to the forum you could upload them somewhere like Imgur and link them here, I'm curious what this console looks like..

codeman38:
One interesting thing about the older, now-deleted video is that it included the original game audio, rather than overdubbing everything with Galaxy Force. This revealed that, for whatever reason, the title screen music in these games was ripped from Linus Spacehead (the 6th track in the NSF rip for that game, specifically).

I have no idea whether this was used legitimately, or whether it was just thrown in by bootleggers. Allister Brimble (the composer for Linus) did audio for various Jakks plug-and-play consoles, but as far as I know, none of those used Famiclone hardware.

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