American Game Cartridges

~ the goodbye ~

ShareData was a low-cost software house in Chandler, Arizona. In 1990 it created American Game Cartridges to get into NES publishing, and it did so the hard way, without a Nintendo license. The route in was a person: ShareData had hired Richard C. Frick as vice president of product development, and Frick had come from Atari Games, which owned Tengen, which had already decided Nintendo's licensing terms were not worth signing.

Tengen's answer to the 10NES lockout chip was to defeat it. AGC's answer was to license the workaround from Color Dreams, the other company making unlicensed NES cartridges at the time, which is a neat detail: the unlicensed scene was small enough that its members supplied each other with the means of staying unlicensed.

The catalog is three games, all 1990. Two of them came from Exidy's arcade back catalog, Chiller from 1986 and Death Race from 1976, both adapted for the NES, and Chiller was the first NES title ShareData ever put out. The third, Shockwave, was original. That is the whole published output of American Game Cartridges.

Unlicensed NES carts were a North American and British story, and the gray NES itself was never the machine around me. Turkey's console era ran through the Famicom clones instead, where the entire catalog was unlicensed by definition and nobody was paying Nintendo anything. The specific drama of a licensed console with a lockout chip and companies engineering their way past it describes a market that had rules to break.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the lockout chip ~

The 10NES chip is the thing all of this orbits. Nintendo put a lock in the console and a key in every authorized cartridge, which turned a technical measure into a licensing regime. No key meant no shelf space, and the terms that came with the key limited how many games a publisher could release in a year.

Beating the lock was difficult, and the law around doing it was still being argued out in real time. Tengen did it and ended up in court with Nintendo over how it got there. Color Dreams did it and kept going for years. AGC rented the solution rather than developing one, which saved it engineering time and left it with the same problem everyone in that market had. Retailers were wary of a cartridge Nintendo had not blessed, so the games had to be cheap to move at all.

~ underselling ~

ShareData's model was volume at a low price, and AGC inherited it. The company aimed to undercut its competition by as much as 30 percent.

That works when you have a catalog deep enough to absorb thin margins. AGC had three games.

~ the long chapter 11 ~

Debts built through 1991, and in its fourth quarter AGC's creditors moved to force the company into Chapter 11. ShareData, its own parent, was one of them. The Phoenix Business Journal covered both ends of this under Cathy Luebke's byline, and the company filed for reorganization shortly after. It stayed in Chapter 11 until January 1994, when it finally filed a plan to reorganize, on the fourteenth.

Frick left for his own unlicensed NES outfit, American Video Entertainment, while the trouble was still unfolding. A fourth AGC game had been finished by the developer Keith Rupp, Wally Bear and the NO! Gang, and AGC's finances stopped it from shipping. Frick's new company picked up the rights and published it in 1992, so the best-known game associated with American Game Cartridges came out under somebody else's name while the company that paid for it sat in bankruptcy. A planned NES conversion of Exidy's Crossbow never got finished.

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