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Dan Lawton Interview
Dan Lawton was the founder of Color Dreams. This article gives us some insight as to why Color Dreams went the unlicensed rute.
TWZ: Could you tell me the story about the Hellraiser cart? Was there any playable demo/proto/beta version or did it only exist in the 1 screenshot and box art I saw?
DL: No, we had a prototype built. It was great, it had at least 3 times the processor power of the nintendo, with the exta processor sitting in the video memory space. It could change the entire screen every scan. By changing the content of the color registers we hoped to come up with new colors also, although we didn't get to test that out (it was working, just no software).
TWZ: What was your favorite game that you guys made? I personally liked Captain Comic the best yet I like a lot of them.
DL: We did the best we could with the limited resources we had, but for the most part I guess most of them were not very good. Crystal mines was probably the best game play. It certainly got the best letters from buyers.
TWZ: What all can you tell me about Color Dreams? Why did you make Crystal Mines II on Lynx licensed yet you didn't all the others?
DL: Here was Nintendo's deal for licensing:
Commitment to about $350,000 in cartridges
They had to approve the games, in their time schedule.
They manufactured the games, when they felt like it (6 months as I recall)
You pay them for the cartridges at about 3x the actual cost you could make them for yourselves.
They could reject or approve your game, and also refuse to allow specific games based on subject matter.
Genesis wasn't much better. And they verbally threatened to sue us if we didn't license, which made the engineers in the company more interested in finding a way to produce legal cartridges without licensing. But the Lynx people made it easy to license, they were extremely helpful, and their licensing and manufacturing weren't quite as oppressive, plus they helped market the games for you.
TWZ: What all games went unreleased? I know about Happy Camper which Jon Valesh did, and Hell Raiser.
DL: I don't remember. At first we had close to 50 outside programmers working on games, but only a couple of them finished, so we had to take over making games ourselves. There were probably a dozen games that never released, most of which were never finished.
TWZ: Well I really appreciate talking to you. I really like the Color Dreams games a lot.
DL: You can't be serious. We did the best we could, considering major stores were afraid to carry the unlicensed games, probably thinking Nintendo would punish them, but without large sales it wasn't possible to make the kind of quality of game we would have liked to make. So most of them were schlock.
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