(This post is sort of a continuation/split-off of
Sintax and their 93+ games.)
So I was looking through the recently dumped ROM of Sintax's "Little Taichi" (
here, for those who missed it), and noticed that there are quite a few leftovers from that unlicensed Harry Potter platformer which has already been dumped--most notably, the large images from the game's opening sequence. This seemed particularly curious, since according to its product ID (ST-0206004), Little Taichi is only Sintax's 4th game--and Harry Potter was not one of the previous three.
However, as taizou pointed out in the above-linked thread... this is explainable in that Harry Potter does not appear to have been a Sintax game! It may have been
re-released by Sintax at some later point, but the original version appears to have been purely a BBD production. Indeed, the boot logo embedded in the dumped ROM isn't the "Kwichvu" that normally characterizes Sintax games, but rather, "BBD".
This actually makes sense: BBD reused one of their pre-Sintax game engines to create a new game for Sintax when requested! The leftover images aren't the only thing from Harry Potter remaining in that ROM; the engine itself is clearly lifted as well. (Note, in particular, the similarity between the two games' status bars.)
BUT WAIT. There's more!
Remember
Digimon 9 2002? Well, there are some graphics from the level intros to that game lying around in the Harry Potter ROM as well! (In particular, the old man who appears just before the first level is clearly recognizable at location 0x3C914.) And this, too, is an engine that BBD just kept reusing over and over in Sintax games as well.
And it may very well be that Harry Potter, in itself, is a hack of still
another game. Elsewhere in the ROM (0x10142), there's a somewhat scrambled character selection screen featuring...Harry Potter and three Teletubbies. And, of course, some Teletubby sprites to go with Harry's later in the ROM.
Edit: And just remembered about
this video, where someone found (and destroyed) a copy of the original (non-Niutoude) release of Digimon 9. The boot logo? BBD, of course.
