Waixing's subcontractor work on plug and play games

[APM]

Not too long ago, I found what looked like new old stock for a plug and play TV game, one that I had never heard about until then, from a company named VTG Interactive. After looking into it a bit more, it turned out that three of these TV games were produced and I found out that two of them were versions of games that I had seen on those 16-bit Sunplus Wii clones with games developed by Waixing (see: Zone 40 and Reactor 32-in-1), which now had VTG Interactive branding in-game and removed the Chinese copyright registration numbers from the title screen, with the menus even being slightly different. The games also share a, let's say, similar sound design philosophy with Waixing's other generic plug and play games in general. The TV games in question are Virtual Baseball, Virtual Tennis, and Virtual Boxing. So far, I know that Virtual Baseball and Virtual Tennis are based on the Baseball game and Virtual Tennis game on the generic Wii clones respectively. I'm not too sure about Virtual Boxing, but from going by the screenshots on a picture of the back of the box that I came across, it might be based on the boxing game on the 16-bit Wii clones of the same name. I have since added as many pictures as I could find for the boxes of all three VTG Interactive games to the respective BootlegGames Wiki article.

The VTG Interactive games are essentially simulated versions of real sports and would come with peripherals to emulate real world aspects of these sports with motion control (i.e., Virtual Baseball comes with a plastic wireless baseball bat and a wired mat you run in place on), with the games themselves being stored on cartridges. VTG Interactive would also sell their own proprietary console that you would connect the cartridge and peripherals to and play the games on. Someone named Furbland Channel uploaded a video with short demos of Virtual Baseball (named Live! Baseball on that version's title screen) and Virtual Tennis if you're interested in that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4gM2Mb5nGM. The games themselves are surprisingly very polished presentation wise for generic plug and play games and surpass the quality of Waixing's typical plug and play output. There is currently very little information on VTG Interactive as a company and their exact activity, and trying to search for information on them or their known games brings up nothing outside of the BootlegGames Wiki page I created. What I discovered yesterday though was that out of stock Amazon listings for all three of the games are still up that aren't indexed well by Google, and the Virtual Boxing listing even has two reviews from people who presumably had the product, so at least one of the games were sold at some point. The listings are all dated November of 2006, meaning that these products pre-date the 16-bit Wii clones by a bit to my knowledge and definitely pre-date the generic versions of the games. The lack of information on the games as of current and the general low quantity of stock probably means that they didn't sell much when VTG Interactive was still in business. An interesting thing about the generic plug and play versions of one of the games, Baseball, is that in one of the stadiums you play in, a version of VTG Interactive's logo is partially visible (video showcasing this here), which to me suggests that that the games were likely first developed by Waixing as a subcontractor for VTG Interactive before being repurposed for generic Wii clones. Waixing is known to have released many games specifically for plug and play systems of different types and even released units under their own name, but this is the first time I've heard of Waixing potentially working on unique plug and play games for specific companies.


The VTG Interactive games may not have been the first time Waixing dabbled in contract work for plug and play systems, either. In 2005, a Sudoku plug and play unit was released by SDW Games named Sudoku - Do You Sudoku?. It appears to be very uncommon and was only dumped in MAME as of a couple months ago. It came with what I would consider a pretty advanced Sudoku game, with save functionality, hints, and the ability to mark numbers and clashes. Where Waixing comes into this is that a Sudoku game that is near identical to this one would be included on their 16-bit Wii clones, albeit modified to remove the SDW Games logo from the game as well as the hints, instructions, and options related to saving. Here's gameplay footage of the SDW Games version running in MAME and here's footage of the generic plug and play version. The generic plug and play version even has the exact same music, sound effects, and difficulty levels from the original SDW Games release (I assume the music periodically pausing in the former is just an emulation bug). Now, there's the possibility that someone else created the Sudoku game for SDW Games and Waixing simply licensed it and modified it for use on their Wii clones, and frankly I'm not too certain on Waixing having 100% developed this game either. It still intrigues me that something released as its own product not directly connected to Waixing would end up on their 16-bit plug and plays, though.


Lastly,  something I just discovered today: a dedicated plug and play unit that appears to contain another game that I know is in at least one of Waixing's 16-bit Wii clones: Operation Cobra Strike (or "Operation: Cobra Strike" on the box of the dedicated unit). This one I also found from an Amazon listing, which I'll link here: https://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Game-TV-Plug-Play/dp/B000LC0URK. This was also a release by SDW Games, although the Amazon listing lists VTG Interactive in the product info, which I'm not sure about the significance of right now. This particular game is on the TaiKee Interactive TV Games 49 in 1, and compared to the other games I mentioned I'd say the prerendered models for the terrorists look sorta similar to the models in Virtual Tennis (and Virtual Boxing if the pictures on the back of the VTG Interactive version are anything to go by). Doesn't seem like the version of Operation Cobra Strike on the dedicated unit is much different from the generic plug and play version going by the pictures in the listing, although I'd still be interested in seeing this unit documented if it actually got released. Unfortunately, it seems that this system is also very hard to find for sale, which suggests that it probably didn't sell too well (noticing a pattern here?). Generally speaking, from what I've seen in gameplay videos, Operation Cobra Strike seems like a solid game with interesting presentation choices, such as text crawls in the intro and level transitions that have a very "computer hacker"-style theme.


That's all I have to say on this topic for now. This is a very interesting subject that I've enjoyed delving into when I got the opportunity and I probably should have made a forum thread about this a while ago just to make my discoveries more accessible. I'll update this thread if I find any more potential instances of Waixing acting as a subcontractor for plug and play development.

[APM]

Small update on Operation Cobra Strike - turns out that the dedicated plug and play unit was indeed released, and two YouTube channels did their own videos covering the system (video 1, video 2). From the looks of things, this version of the game looks identical to the one on the emulated Interactive TV Games 49 in 1 from TaiKee, but with the addition of light gun controls and SDW Games branding on the title screen and in a splash screen added to this version of the game. Both music tracks in the entire game also loop properly on this release, which I assume also applies to the generic plug and play versions when not emulated in MAME. The light gun for the dedicated unit even has a switch that toggles on a rumble feature that activates whenever you get hurt in the game.

Something I didn't mention when I first discovered the dedicated unit is that its Amazon product description states that it only works on CRT televisions. The second video I linked has a short demo of the unit on what I presume to be a modern television and no cursor appears in game like in the gameplay footage in the first video, so the light gun appears to be fully reliant on CRT television technology for tracking. I also just found an archive of SDW Games' official storefront that listed the game as early as April 2006, with its original listing price being $59.95 (USD just to make that clear), despite both videos I linked claiming it was released in 2007 (not sure where the uploader of the first video got that claim from since their video predates the other one). I assume the dedicated unit uses Sunplus SPG hardware like the generic plug and play versions, but until by some miracle someone finds a unit for sale and dumps it or documents the internals then we may not know for certain.

[APM]

Today, I got around to writing a tool for myself to decrypt the ROMs of one of the 16-bit Waixing Wii clones (Interactive TV Games 49 in 1) in hopes of potentially being able to properly take a look at the graphics and sound samples of some of the games, using MAME's code as a reference. While I was able to get my tool to work, I later found myself having difficulties trying to decode the samples in Audacity, although in some of my attempts I could hear what were clearly mangled versions of sound effects from some of the games. I have a hunch that most of the sounds in the ROM are encoded in Sunplus' proprietary ADPCM36 encoding, but I currently have no way to be able to decode the sound data in that format. More interesting, though, is one of the things I found in the graphics data when viewing it in a tile editor. Near the graphics for the Virtual Tennis game (which are located at the end of the ROM data) are a set of graphics that are clearly from the VTG Interactive splash screen in their release of the game for their system, and more intriguing, a graphic of Subor's logo with their Chinese name. These graphics aren't used in the Interactive TV Games version (or any version of this game on generic plug and plays) at all to my knowledge. The presence of Subor's logo in particular opens the door to many more questions. Were the "Virtual" sports games also released in China by Subor at some point? Did they just leave in their logo in the ROM for whatever reason? Is it part of some obscure easter egg? Is Subor's logo even in the ROM of the original VTG Interactive version? Some of these questions may never have a clear answer for a while, but it at least somewhat strengthens the connection of the VTG Interactive games to Waixing as they and Subor are known to have closely worked together, especially in the plug and play business with Waixing mainly handling software development for those systems.

[APM]

I discovered something pretty major regarding the VTG Interactive games that strengthen their connection to Waixing/Subor even more and sort of changes things about how I thought they were developed. So like any other enterprising Chinese company selling products, Waixing had their own Alibaba shops in English and Chinese in the mid-2000s where they sold white label versions of their products, presumably for other businesses to sell. In the TV Game Player section of their English Alibaba store, going back as early as December 2005 on the Wayback Machine, Waixing had two TV games listed: a boxing game and a tennis game. While the links to the products on that specific capture of their Alibaba store don't work, the preview images show controllers and packaging that are virtually identical to the VTG Interactive Virtual Tennis and Boxing games. Subor also had the same exact games listed on their Alibaba store as well, with them being listed as early as 2007. This to me seems to confirm that Subor and Waixing were definitely involved in the production of those games to some extent and likely even Virtual Baseball, and that Virtual Tennis and Virtual Boxing were likely sold before VTG Interactive was even an established entity (to my knowledge). I'm not exactly certain on all three games simply being licensed out to VTG Interactive, though, as if that were the case, then it wouldn't exactly make sense for the version of Virtual Baseball on generic Wii clones to have the VTG Interactive logo partially visible in some baseball fields. However, there is the chance that the VTG branded version may have been the only version they had the source code for on hand as the basis for the Wii clone versions. That, or there's the possibility that the Virtual Tennis and Virtual Boxing games were made before VTG Interactive got involved and Virtual Baseball was made at their request once they started working with Waixing. I don't have an intricate knowledge on all of the companies involved so I might be missing some details that could answer these questions, but overall the timeline of events surrounding the development of these games and whether any of the sports games were white label products to begin with or specifically made for VTG Interactive still aren't exactly clear to me. None of the games made for SDW Games (Sudoku and Cobra Strike) appear to have been sold on either Alibaba storefront in any form though, and considering the unusually high quality of the games I still hold the belief that those were likely a product of subcontractor work.

[APM]

While doing some research I managed to find a website with basic information on VTG Interactive as a company... sort of. The website itself is pretty nebulous and I'm not entirely sure how the information on it is submitted, but considering the obscurity of the company in question I doubt it was all fabricated. You can find the VTG Interactive page on the website in question here. According to the page, VTG Interactive was apparently founded in 2003, 3 years before they officially registered as a company in San Diego, California. The description on the site also claims that VTG Interactive had their own team of game designers that "create, design, and produce original and innovative plug-and-play tv games". Assuming that the following information is true (which is plausible considering the notably high quality of their known products), this could explain why Virtual Tennis and Virtual Boxing were being sold on Subor and Waixing's Alibaba stores a year before VTG Interactive became an established company in 2006, and might suggest that these games were released even earlier by VTG Interactive. I do not have anything more concrete at the moment to prove those theories, though. The contact listed on the page is one Mr. Avi Gerassi, whose full name is likely Aviman Gerassi going by official business records for the company.

A strange thing about the company details on this website is that even though the ZIP code lines up with the one provided for Gerassi on VTG Interactive's business records, neither it nor the address and telephone numbers match any of the ones known for VTG Interactive. What they do match though are an address and telephone numbers linked to SDW Games, which was also run by Aviman Gerassi and was properly registered as a company in 2003. The address for SDW Games can be found in their business records and both the address and business records are on SDW Games' Better Business Bureau profile. How this information got included on a company page for VTG Interactive isn't entirely clear to me aside from both it and SDW Games being run by the same person, but combined with the oddity of VTG Interactive being specified as the company in the product info for Operation Cobra Strike's Amazon listing, it leads me to believe that both companies may be connected in some way. With there being very little information on VTG Interactive and SDW Games as companies though, especially with VTG Interactive's official site (playvtg.com) being improperly archived due to it using an entire Flash file, I can't exactly confirm the timeline of events regarding VTG Interactive and how they operated.

[APM]

Managed to come across a manual for another variant of the 16-bit Zone 40-type Wii clones with Waixing games: https://www.toys24.gr/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/406027.pdf. One of the games it comes with is Operation Cobra Strike, and the screenshot shown for it is of the title screen with the SDW Games Inc. logo intact. Now, I'm not sure if the game included on this particular console actually keeps the SDW Games logo on the title screen or if any other 16-bit Wii clones include this version of the game, but regardless this was definitely an interesting find.