8 August 2019

Famicom Pirate Label Origins #3

And we are back. Today's post on "Famicom Pirate Label Origins" promises to be somewhat more interesting and the previous ones, as the findings that you are about to see now would possibly surprise you.

21) 8 Eyes [E-S8]

A pretty interesting game that plays in a way like Castlevania, and not a very common find on pirate carts. There exist an early bootleg, which has the label taken from original deal, and also this.
When me and my colleague were looking for the original source that was used for Magical Doropie, in higher quality, I stumbled across the part of the picture, which you can see here on 8 Eyes cart.
Turned out that this is the same "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" series, but this time it's Dragon Lance Adventures.
I think that it won't be a huge surprise to you that AD&D is a series of "Fantasy" board games, and these books were the guides with different rules for certain games. Besides the board games, you could find some games of this series on computers of that time, like IBM PC, Commodore 64 and so on.

So, yeah, this turned to be a pretty interesting subject to learn and find out about.

By the time, we published the original post in our VK group (click here), and it got reposted to "Dendy Forever" VK group, quite a few people decided to help us with solving that puzzle of pirate labels.

Thanks to Alexey Pinyagin for his finding on the right part of the pirate label for 3 Eyes.
He told us that it's the part of "Captured by the Black Dragon Khisanth" art by Clyde Caldwell, used for "Dragons of Autumn Twilight" book of 1987.

So that was the first finding in this post, we'll go ahead to the next cartridge.




22) Attera / Athena [A-A7]
I am pretty sure that this title on the label won't say you anything, as there are no games on NES or Famicom released under it.
In fact, this is actually a screwed up title, made possibly to avoid copyright infringement.
Under "ATTERA" cart, pirates actually released "Athena" Famicom game, which even though got its released outside of Japan, you'd likely get the Japanese version here instead.
For those, who are interested in bootleg games, and especially the "Famicom piracy", this game might look and sound familiar to you, because of two things:
A) The visuals, used in the first stage, were later re-used for Pocket Monster pirate-original game, released on the same console
B) The sound engine used here shares some similarities with Hummer Team sound engine, used for their games (you might know Hummer Team, by some of their games, like Aladdin, Somari, Earthworm Jim 3, etc.)

As for this label, the character on the foreground is actually taken from "Forgotten Realms: Curse of the Azure Bonds" from "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". Where the background was taken from - we can't say for sure, and it's still yet to be found.

23) Castler Vahia II / Castlevania II: Simon's Quest [C-V9]
For my foreign viewers, this cartridge might be not quite as familiar as to my audience in native country.
But in any way, it wouldn't be an overdone thing to cover it here. This is the same "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" series, and more exact - it's Ravenloft.
But this is just one copy of the two, that were released under this ID, and which held the "Castlevania II: Simon's Quest" game. In case you are wondering, there is a North American version on both carts, with all the copyrights and stuff. So you just get the screwed up title and random labels, but the game remains untouched inside.

The other copy, which actually was covered in Dendy Chronicles #8 (click here), is still a mystery to us. But we have a suspicion that it would be just many random sources put altogether into that label, so we'll be looking out for that and attempt to see, where everything came from.


24) Dragon Fighter [D-F2]
The searches for original label sources started by Alexander Chatskii in his VK group (click here). We figured out that this was worth sharing in our group.
The warrior on the left is taken from "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - Forgotten Realms: Waterdeep".

Then after we published the post, and it got reposted to the aforementioned group, the guy named "Psy Duck" told us that it's in fact "Dungeons & Dragons: Combat Shield and Mini-Adventure".



Thanks to both guys to the findings on that label!
As for Dragon Fighter, it's a pretty awesome game by Natsume, which we would usually get under this label... Or more rarely, under the label, which would be taken from original deal, which I actually showed on my blog earlier here (the collection got outdated since then, but I still have that "Dragon Fighter (JPN version)" cart in my possession).
To those, who saw the review of 150-in-1 PocketGames, and watched videos of it on YouTube, this game might be familiar to you as well, as it uses the Stage 1 theme as the main menu theme. :)

25) Dragons / Dragon's Lair [D-S1]


Under such title you would find the game called "Dragon's Lair". The whole word "Lair" from the title was removed, along with ', so the title looks somewhat confusing. Because, as you know, there are quite a few games released for NES/Famicom with the word "Dragon", so which one to expect here? Unless you looked it somewhere before, or bought the cartridge and inserted it into your console to check it out, you won't know for sure.
The picture that we get here is an art from "Artifact of Evil - Greyhawl Adventures" book, which was strunk and adapted to Famicom cartridge format.
I personally don't like this game at all, and would recommend to get it only for collection, but not for actual gameplay, honestly.

26) Godzilla [G-A1]
We couldn't find all the characters from this mixutre of a label, but the rhinoceros, which is actually taken from "Future Coal" art by Thomas Gieseke. The rest is yet to be found.
We'll come back to this game in later parts, as it turns out that it was released under another label, which we need to take a look at.

27) Sword Master [S-R2]
The original sources for this label were quite as tough to find out, due to the help of SuperBrain1997 of finding the Dragon's Lair picture, which we showed earlier. And that find gave both of us a hint for the further searches.
The background, used for this Sword Master cart, is actually from "Greyhawk Adventures". And the warrior on the left is from "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Wilderness Survival Guide".

With that, we can make a conclusion, that one of the more common places, where A-B1 pirate carts had their labels used for, is "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" board game series, because, as we can see here, we successfully found the label sources for at least 4 cartridges already.

28) Olympic '96 / Track & Field

 So yes, Track & Field - a game, which many of you are familiar with, as you might have owned it for NES back in a day... or if you are from the country, where Famicom piracy was a thing, you know this game from many different multicarts, where the events would be split into different games in the menu.
The label itself is pretty interesting, as it actually uses the mixture of Hyper Olympic & Hyper Sports Famicom labels, released for Famicom, which were actually two separate games, but when Konami was to brought this game in North American NES market, they combined the events from those two games together and released it as one.

However, that would be wrong to wrap up our discussion on this cart right now, as...
If we look at the sportsman on the right, you can see that part of some text was actually cut off, and you have just "MPIC" word - and in fact, it was the title of the game in English. As we look on the original Famicom artbox, or the cartridge itself, we don't see that on the same place as the pirate cart.
So, we get a reasonable question - where exactly was that taken from?
Judging by the picture quality, we can definitely say that it wasn't right from the original source, as the quality is slightly worse, but it could be used from a pirate cartridge instead where this picture was used, and the English title was put on top of it.
And so, I was correct! Those two games "Hyper Olympic" and "Hyper Sports" got their releases on pirate carts, as you can see here. Those were not really easy to find though - they were pretty rare to find outside of Taiwan, where I got this photos from.
As we look at the label of Hyper Olympic pirate singlecart, we can see that besides the original title in Japanese, you also have the title in English, written with plain white text.
With that, we may conclude that the picture of Hyper Olympic was taken from early pirate singlecart from late 80s-early 90s for Olympic 96 cart!

By the way, looking at Olympic' 96 label, we can see some really crappy editing, where one of the runners from Hyper Olympic got his hand cut off, as well as the guy with 768 T-Shirt from Hyper Sports.
And, of course, the picture with hitting the target was moved to the left. The runners from Hyper Olympic were moved to the right, instead.




29) Felix vs Jerry (Tiny Toon Adventures hack) [F-Y2]

The pirate label itself is a mixture of two labels, related to "Tom & Jerry Kids" show.
One of them being the picture from VHS under the title "Goodappeltje Video Collectie".
And the other part of the label is actually a poster from one of "Tom & Jerry Kids" episodes, called "Perk, the Fish-Pinching Penguin".
But that was not enough for pirates. They also decided to put the Felix's head on top of Perk the Penguin's head; which itself was taken from "Felix the Cat" for NES.

And summing all of that, you get this somewhat screwed up label to the hack of a good game, Tiny Toon Adventures.

30) LH-291 Speed Hero Story 爇血 Super Vaule 道行曲
This cartridge was reviewed by SuperBrain1997 himself on his website, dedicated to his collection, so, if interested, you can check his review here (in Russian; sooner or later we'll work on English version of the website too): https://superbrain1997-retro-museum.herokuapp.com/cartridges/337

The picture itself, as it turned out, is taken from "Speed" (1994) movie poster, and the only relation that the game itself has to do with the movie is the speed... and that's it.
Under this picture you'd get "Downtown Nekketsu Kōshinkyoku: Soreyuke Daiundōkai - Downtown Nekketsu March: Let's Go to the Great Athletic Meet".
And in fact, if you find the word "Hero" anywhere on the cartridge, there is a high chance that there would be a game from Nekketsu series, as pirates really loved to use this word for this game series.

Off-topic: The movie "Speed" (1994) is really awesome, and is really worth watching, if you haven't yet. Highly recommended!

And this ends our third installment of "Famicom Pirate Label Origins". The next one will come out as soon as possible, so be sure to subscribe to our blog, and stay tuned for more updates.
I'll try my best to keep this blog up-to-date more often.


(C) AlexSRMD Productions (2019)

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