Bootleg 100-in-1 NES Game Carts

Back around or in 1996, my aunt and her husband went to China and Thailand, they really liked Thailand, especially the Thai boxing matches they saw. They liked it so much that they got me a Thai boxing t-shirt, that had two fighters "fighting", it actually looked more like two retards flailing around. She also bought my cousin a 100-in-1 game for his NES, which she got in China.

Actually it was more like 60-plus 40 modified versions of the last 60-in one. For example: It has Gradius and Gradius +, the "+" just being regular Gradius but with unlimited lives. It also had a few games that were just garbled sprites zipping around the screen. To top it all off, it came in a box that featured 3 games on it, one of which was a pc-engine game. Despite its crappyness, it is still a really cool novelty item. If only Americans would have the balls to pump out falsely advertised pirated lumps of trash...

Oh come now, back when i was a wee youngster, my aunt also came over from Malaysia and brought a 144-in-one cartridge. Sure it was painted some sort of green cheese color, and sure heaps of the games were simply repeats ("I've never heard of Turbo Super, Ultra, Mega, Super Mario Brothers 69-II Alpha mommy...") but this thing was absolutely fantastic!

This thing rocked my socks! There I was a conservative youngster in an age of innocence, where a single game cartridge cost like $20 a piece. Being an unemployed cancer of society - and eleven years old - a new game was few and far between, meaning I had 3 games, and even though I had the attention span of a goldfish, they did get BORING.

So when my auntie brought over this $2 cartridge with 144!?~!~!#@(!!$ games on it I pretty much or less messed my pants. My game library had just multiplied exponentially! I was a happy youngster indeed.

Sure it was completely illegal, sure it smelt and looked bad, sure I had to spend 20 minutes of the day bashing the shit out of my NES to get it working, but one hundred and forty four games? Well worth it.

Aye, that cartridge contained many a reason why I'm a pale skinny geek in front of a computer today.

God bless.

When I was teaching in Thailand, the best ones I saw were a "Super 250 in One" and a "333 in One". Since I had been living there a while, I insisted that the vendor plug the 333 in his demo Gameboy. He refused, but he did allow me to try the 250 (one was opened, one was wrapped in cellophane). I would guess that there were actually about 90 real unique games in the cart, with duplicates. I bought the 250, my friend bought the 333 over my suggestion that he pass on it.

My daughter loves the 250. My friend bought a very nice (cheese green, aptly described, Ads) plastic case with no ROM at all. If you're dealing with black market items, you get what you pay for, as long as you check it out first.

I have seen one 4-in-1 game cartridge my friend had that worked perfectly: It had Super Mario Bros 3, Shadow Warrior (aka Ninja Gaiden), Probotector and one more I can't remember... all of them worked, even when it was all in Japanese and we couldn't understand a word. Another cartridge had that 100 or so games, though the remainder was full of duplications of the same crappy tank game - the difference being slightly different game colors...

My sister has two GameBoy cartridges like these. I think the other had like 30 games, the other about the same amount.

The same problem could be seen here: I must REALLY congratulate the makers for fitting so many crappy little games into such a small space. =) I estimated one of the tank games in that cartridge must have taken only couple of kilobytes, including graphics, and yet it was a lot better than the tank game in the NES cartridge...

The cartridge even had one real gem: Something called "Sonic 5". I didn't knew Sega has already started making games for GameBoy, at the time they had just stopped making Dreamcast and just said they would make games for GB too... Also the game was part 5, the graphics were ripped from some other Sonic games - title taken from Sonic 3D Blast, with the number "5" really badly slapped on top of the logo, the music sucked raw eggs through very thin straw and the game was really unplayable... (Updatish: So now Sega has announced Sonic Advance, but it's probably better game than the warez people's ripoff ever was =)

Some pirates have, according to the rumors, even made a Pokémon platformer by taking some game and changing graphics. Numerous other weird GB warez versions have been reported to exist.

There was also a 52-in-1 cartridge which my mother got a hold of in the Canadian blackmarket (with the help of my morally-lax aunt). It contained such gems as Circus Trooper, Popeye, and Tank Fighter. It also contained various games that were obviously abandoned halfway into their production, such as "RG Fighter" which is a continous loop of enemies coming in from off the screen and fighting you. There were also a few genuine Japanese creations, by genuine I mean all text was in Japanese. Most of the games would never stand on their own, but filling a cartridge with these games was a fantastic way to waste my childhood. I spent many hours trying to decipher the controls to the "Flying Bug of Freedom." For this deviously enjoyable creation, I thank the Nintendo bootleggers of the 80's.

I think I hold the record with a 1200-in-one Nintendo cartridge. There could've been no more than 20 original games on there, though. Here are the few I remember:

• Super Mario Bros.
• Iceman
• Penggu
• Circus Charlie
• Bomberman
• Tetris
• Contra
• and a top-down car racing game.

Much entertainment for me until I sold my NES for a cool $250. Not bad for a 10 year old ;)