Camerica was formed in 1988, a company that produced controllers for consoles such as the Nintendo and PCs. Two of the first controllers produced by Camerica for Nintendo were the Supersonic and Freedom Connection; both had official licenses from Nintendo. It's interesting to note that Camerica had bought these controller designs from Acemore, a hardware development company located in Harrisburg, PA.

Why Camerica dropped their license with Nintendo, it's hard to say. A few months later Camerica re-released their entire catalogue of controllers, as well as a few new accessories. One accessory was a western 6-shooter style lightgun complete with a pull down hammer; another was a wireless NES Advantage clone. Feeling threatened by the stiff competition, Nintendo was successful in suing Camerica for their infringing product. This was the beginning of a road with many hardships.

In 1990, Codemasters of UK began to develop a gaming device tentatively titled the Power Pak. When Camerica got the rights to the Power Pak, they renamed it Game Genie and they made a few design changes as well.

Lewis Galoob, the well known manufacturer of the Micro Machine toys, had plans to release Game Genie in the US. Nintendo sued Camerica over the Game Genie device, claiming that it violated the "Moral Rights" of the authors of the game. Camerica quickly won the court case in Canada, releasing the Game Genie soon afterward. To show they had Nintendo beat, Camerica had advertisements in videogame magazines blaring the words "Thank you Canada." The US release of Game Genie was delayed until July 1991.

In 1990 Camerica started to obtain the rights to Codemasters' extensive line of PC megahits. The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy was the first Camerica released Nintendo game, it was developed in 1990 but a release was delayed until 1991. The Quattro Series, Ultimate Stuntman, and Bignose the Caveman, a Flintstones clone, were also released in 1991. Fantastic Dizzy got great reviews in the United Kingdom, though sales were lower than expected.

1992 was another good year for Camerica, games such as Bee 52, Mig 29, and Linus Spacehead were released. Camerica obtained the rights to do a Micro Machines game for Lewis Galoob, their Game Genie buddies. Micro Machines got rave reviews and is one of the better racing games on the NES. In fact PC and N64 versions of the game was released a few years back, the game is pretty much the same as the NES version of 1991.

Camerica had another interesting device up their sleeves, it was known as the Aladdin System. Camerica revealed this project at the winter CES of 1992. The Aladdin System, later renamed the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, was an interesting device. Mini cartridges, when connected to the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, "made" a whole NES game to play.

Many a rumor was flying around in regards to the Aladdin Deck Enhancer. Some sources claimed that the Aladdin Deck Enhancer provided gamers with larger and faster games, a built in save function, and improved graphics. In a small interview with Richard Darling, one of the founders of Codemasters of UK as well as one of the designers of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, I asked how the idea first came about.

"The idea came from looking closely at the make-up of NES cartridges with a view to trying to get the manufacturing costs reduced so we could sell them at the lowest possible price. In overview, there are several components of each cartridge that are generic: the Graphics RAM chip, the memory management chip and a few other parts. The only part of the cartridge that needed to be unique for each game was the game ROM chip. So, we thought that if we could put all the common parts onto an adapter we could make the cheapest possible cartridges by packaging just the ROM chip onto a mini-cartridge. When this mini cartridge was combined with the adapter it would effectively be identical to an ordinary cartridge of the same game."

Although displayed in 1992, Camerica released the Aladdin Deck Enhancer in 1993. The adapter with Dizzy the Adventurer was priced at $30, additional carts could be purchased through the Home Shopping Club for around $15-20. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer didn't sell well, Camerica lost their "fizz" and they went under. Codemasters tried to put more life into the Aladdin Deck Enhancer but they eventually quit while they were ahead. Codemasters re-released their NES games in Europe, though they still didn't sell too great so Codemasters moved onto other things.

Since Camerica did quite well for an unlicensed game company, they had some super advertising right? Not really. Back in their hardware days, Camerica had a spiffy space commercial with a family singing a rap song. Lyrics are as follows: