Color Dreams

» see colordreams.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Dan Lawton started Color Dreams in Brea, California in 1989, at the exact peak of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Nintendo's terms for publishers were a licensing fee plus a hard cap on how many titles you were allowed to ship in a year, enforced by a chip called the 10NES sitting in every console and every approved cartridge. Lawton's people worked out how to get around that chip. An internal legal review concluded the company could not be sued for it, and Baby Boomer went out that year with five more titles behind it.

The cartridges were baby blue so you could see from across the shop that they were not Nintendo's. Six shipped in 1989 alone, all cheaper than the licensed competition, and the company kept the pace up through 1990 and 1991. The bypass was never quite solid. Players had to seat the cartridge with a particular motion for it to catch, and later revisions of the NES hardware stopped some Color Dreams carts working at all, which turned into a permanent customer service problem for a company selling on price.

The games were bad, and the company knew which ones were worst, because it created a budget label called Bunch Games specifically to carry them. Five Bunch titles went out in 1990. The more ambitious plans went nowhere: a SuperCartridge meant to fake a 16-bit palette by flipping between two 8-bit ones did not work and cost too much to make, and a Hellraiser adaptation died with it after the company had already paid $50,000 for a license to the Wolfenstein 3D engine.

The second act ran on a retail channel that is very specific to the United States. Wisdom Tree games moved through evangelical bookstores, a national network of shops with cash registers and shelf space and no relationship to the games industry at all. There is no equivalent aisle in Turkey and there never was, so the part of this story that kept the company alive is infrastructure I have only ever read about. I was five when Baby Boomer came out.

~ the dossier ~

~ the gambit ~

Color Dreams formed Wisdom Tree in 1990 as a spinoff making Christian-themed games. The commercial logic worked immediately. Bible Adventures, the first release, sold over 350,000 copies, more than anything the parent label ever managed, and several later Wisdom Tree titles were straight re-themes of existing Color Dreams games. Sunday Funday is Menace Beach with a skateboarding paper route and a church at the end of it.

The other half of the logic was legal cover. Nintendo never sued Color Dreams, but the threat sat there for years and some retailers quietly declined to stock the blue cartridges. The company's read was that Nintendo would not take the reputational hit of dragging a publisher of Bible games into court, and whether or not that is why nothing happened, nothing happened. Wisdom Tree went on to publish Super 3D Noah's Ark in 1994, the only unlicensed SNES game ever released in North America, built on the Wolfenstein engine that Hellraiser had paid for.

~ the cameras ~

Color Dreams label sales had dried up by the mid-nineties while Wisdom Tree carried the revenue. In 1996 the company started a division called StarDot Technologies selling surveillance equipment, and in 1997 an employee named Brenda Huff bought Wisdom Tree outright and took it away as a separate business. That was the end of the games company. What was left renamed itself after the division and has been manufacturing megapixel IP cameras ever since, for construction sites and weather monitoring, and it is still trading. Wisdom Tree is still trading too, still selling religious games. colordreams.com is a parked page with the domain name printed on it, which makes the brand the only piece of this that actually died, and the brand is the piece everyone remembers.

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