23 July 2019

Famicom Pirate Label Origins #1 | Famicom Bootleg Oddities #3

Hello everyone! It's been quite a long while, since I made any post here, but here I am back.
With a pretty interesting topic to talk about.

It's that we will discuss the origins of labels that are used for certain Famicom pirate carts.
With the help of SuperBrain1997 / SPBR97_Museum we could find a few of them together, and here we'll present a few of our findings.
#famiclone_labels
 
1) Magical Doropie [M-D2]

The picture is taken from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Gateway to the Savage Frontier for IBM PC / Amiga / Commodore 64, nothing much less. We also get the game's title and ID added here. There is indeed a Japanese version of the game, and not Krion Conquest, as all of you may know. :)


2) Super Mario World 9 [S-D9] & Adventure Island [JY-110]
The original source to this label was found by accident. As it turns out the same picture was used for Super Mario World 9, that's Hudsons Adventure Island II hack and Adventure Island cart, released by JY Company. And that source is Famitsu magazine, #9 (1990). On the first picture, instead of Necky the Fox's head, ther was a Mario game put from Famicom Golf: US Course. And the second picture was copied without any changes.



3) Duck Tales
I think that this picture on Duck Tales pirate cart is well known to everyone: the small ducky near the pond, that doesn't have any relations to the Walt Disney's Duck Tales TV Show.
We couldn't figure out for sure where it was taken from, but we have a suspicion that it could be taken from Felix the Cat cartoon episode, where goose laid the golden eggs ("The Goose That Laid Golden Egg" cartoon). The screenshot will be attached below.

4) Bird Fighter [B-D5] / Choujin Sentai Jetman
As for this cartridge, there was two labels used from two Sega Mega Drive games: those are Golden Axe III and Gynoug, and funnily enough there are Japanese releases. But it remains a mystery to us, where the original background was taken from, which is used for this Choujin Sentai Jetman cartridge.



















5) The Punisher [P-R7]
The main character that we have here is taken from Dynamite Duke from Sega Mega Drive, but the original source for this background is still unknown to us.

6) Mickey Mouse [M-M1]
There exist at least two versions of this cartridge under the same ID, but the funniest thing is that two different picture sources were used for them. In our case, that you can see here, the picture with Mickey Mouse is taken from the Sega Mega Drive label for "Castle of Illusion: Starring Mickey Mouse". We guess that the choice for this artwork was because of the first stage taking place in house. But here, it's a huge and scary castle of illusion, as it was titled in original Mega Drive game.

7) 1991 Super Basketball
As many of you know, on pirate carts there would be Taito Basketball. But "where was this label taken from?" you might ask, because the official Famicom release clearly had a different picture.
So, here's an answer: the pirates simply copied the picture from Super Real Basketball for Sega Mega Drive, and removed the bottom part of the picture.
8) Ninja Ryukenden IV [N-R4] & Castle of Dragon IV [R-29]


As of the time we wrote the original post in VK, and posting it to SuperBrain1997's Retro Museum and copying the text here, we managed to find only one character from this label, who is located on the right side. We couldn't find the character on the left and the original background...yet,
Samurai on the right is from the game Second Samurai for Sega Mega Drive.

9) Joe & Mac [J-C5]
I don't think that it would be an easy thing to guess, that our character here is taken from Fight Through Time Tyrants, unless you played this game before in its original form, and saw it beforehand. The only difference is that, instead of a bone, he has an axe.

10) Bast of the Bast [B-T6]


The game's title was screwed up for some reason.
The picture with the character that looks like Alexander Nevskii, is taken right from Art of Fighting game for Sega Mega Drive. It was copied almost without any changes, except for adding the game's title and ID.




















We'll continue in the next part with a few other findings :)
See you in the next part.
(C) AlexSRMD Productions (2019)

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