Ultra Games

~ the obituary ~

In Turkey the NES mostly arrived as clone hardware running pirate multicarts, and the publisher's name on a box carried no information, when there was a box at all. Ultra Games was a creature of American licensing paperwork and nothing else, so the entire reason it existed stopped at one continent's border. I have read about this label for years and have never had one of its cartridges in my hands.

The legal entity was Ultra Software Corporation, and the cartridge manuals are where that gets settled rather than any encyclopedia. Base Wars carries a limited warranty issued by Ultra Software Corporation of 900 Deerfield Parkway, Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-4510, and prints the line "Ultra® and ULTRAGAMES® are registered trademarks of Ultra Software Corporation." The address is the Konami of America campus. Wikipedia types the company as a shell subsidiary that merged into its parent, though neither of those fields carries a citation and the article's own text says only that Konami dropped the label.

It opened with Metal Gear on the NES in 1988. Computer Entertainer reviewed it that August as "the first Nintendo game from Ultra Games", so the start of the label is anchored in period trade press and not in a wiki list. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles followed in 1989 and Snake's Revenge in 1990, though the month given for each release in the catalog list is uncited.

~ the case file ~

~ five games a year ~

Nintendo of America capped each third-party publisher at five NES titles per year. The cap was a scarcity policy: it kept shelves from filling with junk, and it kept Nintendo in charge of who got shelf space. Konami's Japanese operation was already shipping more than ten titles a year across the Famicom and the Disk System, so the American limit was not a mild inconvenience to it, it was half its output.

So Ultra was a counting device, a second name on the paperwork so that five could become ten, and the trade understood it that way from the beginning. Kotaku's account calls it "superficially a new publisher but really just a spin-off of Konami's American operations". One detail separates this from a rename: Konami of America kept publishing under its own name the entire time Ultra existed, so both companies were shipping NES games in the same years out of the same building.

~ palcom ~

Konami ran the same trick in Europe under a different name. Palcom Software Limited, based in Middlesex, was founded in 1990 and wound up around 1994, outliving its American counterpart by about two years. The two were not mirrors of each other. Palcom shipped titles that never reached North America at all, including Road Fighter and Parodius, and published SNES games such as Cybernator and Sunset Riders that Konami put out under its own name on the American side. Metal Gear went the other way: an Ultra release in the United States, a plain Konami release in Europe.

The forgotten part of a label built to launder a quota is how much of it was bought in from outside. Beam Software supplied Defender of the Crown and Nightshade, Rare supplied Silent Service and Pirates!, and the NES version of Star Trek: 25th Anniversary came from Interplay. The final catalog runs to seventeen NES titles, nine on Game Boy, two on DOS and two on the Commodore 64.

The ending has no date attached to it. Kotaku's account, which is the only non-Wikipedia source for either end of the label's life, says simply that Ultra "was closed down in 1992". Wikipedia names Ultra Golf and World Circuit Series in March 1992 as the last releases and hangs the Kotaku citation on that sentence, but Kotaku names no final games at all, so the March is corroborated only by other Wikipedia articles. The corporation was certainly still alive in February 1992, because Star Trek shipped that month with a 1991 Ultra Software Corporation copyright line in the manual.

~ what ultragames.com is now ~

The domain was registered at the end of December 2002, ten years after the label was dropped, so it never had anything to do with Konami. It spent the 2000s as a parking frame and a spam redirector. Today it loads 157 kilobytes of online casino: lottery draws, a sportsbook, a live dealer room, and a privacy policy naming Ultra Games Services N.V. of Birkirkara, Malta. You log in with an account ID and a PIN, and the error page signs off "Regard from the Ultra Games Team".

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