About NES/Famicom Pirate Cartridges

Pirate carts are cartridges that have games on them that are illegally copied, or "pirated", from real games and then sold, giving no profit to the original producers of the game/s. They come with a single game, or with multiple games, called multi-carts. The multi-carts range from 2 in 1, to a ridiculous 9999999 in 1. Why ridiculous? Because there was never this many games made for the NES/Famicom to put on the cart. So what pirates often do is repeat the same game over and over, sometimes with slight changes, like starting on different levels or slower music, to make them seem like different games. The title screens are also often altered.

Major piracy began in 1988, and grew from there. Even today, new NES/Famcom pirate carts and consoles are being produced. In places like Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, piracy is so large, it would be worthless for Nintendo to try to stop it. Even in mainstream department stores, you'll find pirate carts.

Piracy is done by individuals or even larger companies like Whirlwind Manu, Chui, NTDEC and Game Star, who even put their name on the carts. There are many variations in casing on these carts. Most are the size of a normal Famicom cart, but some are larger. These larger ones can be hard to fit into an NES with an adaptor. These ones come with a removable dust cover, as shown below.

Some cart casing has the pirate's name on them. You'll even find carts that are supposed to look like official companies' carts. The casing comes in various colours. Black and yellow are the two most common. The colours are randomly put on carts.

In countries where Nintendo didn't sell their own consoles, pirates ruled the market with their clone consoles and games. However, trouble can arise when a pirate company tries entering a country where Nintendo does sell their consoles. Now, the pirates got in pretty early in Asia, and Nintendo weren't able to stop them, but Nintendo of America were ready when pirate company, Super Vision, tried to release carts to the US market. Their carts were confiscated and they were no longer allowed to make any more. A similar occurrence happened in Australia, when a man decided to sell Spica consoles and games. Spica made both Famicom and NES pirate carts, and their console was shaped like an NES. The carts were often multi-carts with the same box used on many different carts. In 1991 Nintendo also exposed a pirate company in Taiwan that the Taiwanese Government owned 30% of.

Pirate carts rarely come in boxes. The pirates want to make as much money as they can while spending little. The labels often look cheap and made in a hurry. The pictures on labels are usually taken from real Famicom carts, but sometimes, new pictures have been made and sometimes even unrelated pictures are put on carts. Titles on carts (and sometimes the title screen, when the pirates hack into the game and change the title screen and gameplay) are changed to make them seem like new games. For example, this:

Nintendo had more pirated games than any other system. This is because pirates had a good opportunity to copy masses of games, since Nintendo was such a popular console. But let's not forget the ported games. Porting a game means to copy a game over from another system, usually by means of downgrading the graphics and sound. Popular games that were never released for NES/Famicom can be found on these carts. They include things like Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Some of these could have been easily ported by Nintendo from SNES, and they would have made millions. But instead, major port companies like Cony Soft and Yoko Software made the money. There are also games that have been hacked into and changed, like one which is Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu with Mario doing the fighting. Some pirates also make new games. But why do I call these pirate games rather than just unlicensed games? Well, these pirate games will steal graphics and backgrounds from other games. Kart Fighter, for example, uses backgrounds from Little Nemo, the Dream Master, while Punch Sprite is a game where the enemies from Super Mario Bros appear from the Super Mario Bros pipes and you must hit them with a hammer. Magic Jewelry is another, stealing pictures from various games including Jackpot. But getting back to unlicensed games; these games are not considered pirate, even though they are not released or endorsed by Nintendo. They are simply just another company making a game that is playable on Nintendo. Famicom releases include Journey to the West and Yuu Yuu Hakusho Final, while NES releases should be already known by us all. Games released by Tengen, AVE and Color Dreams are all unlicensed. The main problem with these is getting past the lockout chip. But HES has the solution. See it here.

Collecting pirate games can be fun, especially when you get a few surprise games on a multi-cart or when you buy a ported game. Some carts look pretty close to the real thing, but there are ways of telling them apart. Pirate carts:

Don't usually have copyright information, nor the Nintendo logo
Often have "Family Computer" written in English rather than Japanese
Use words like "Cassette" rather than "Cartridge"
Usually don't have boxes, and instead come in clear cellophane
Come with multiple games in high numbers
Have close-up label art from the real cart that is often blurred or cheap-looking

If you start up your own collection, you'll gain the sense to tell which carts are pirates.

And now in closing, I leave you with something to think about. A lot of Famicom pirate carts are written in English. As mentioned above, "Family Computer" is often written in English rather than Japanese. Why would they choose English to write the name of the console? Writing it in Japanese would look far more legit. Is it because they made these carts to appeal to English-speaking tourists who have converters to play Famicom games? If so, why wouldn't they just release them all on NES carts like some are. Interesting...

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