Need Info on these odd games

[Smada Bez]

I have two very odd games and I was hoping someone could give me some info about them.

 

This one I got from a guy in Canada. It is NTSC and looks nothing like the Puzzy games here on AtariAge.

 

This one came from Australia and it is PAL. This game is the same as crack pots. Also the main label is upside down on the cart.

 

Thanks for any more info you guys can give me.

[Skatepunk60]

The first one seems to be a typical Canadian .. half english half french game but the second is a Zellers games from canada. There is a department store up there that sold off 2600 games. Look under "Zellers" here to find more info

[Atari freak 1]

When I first saw the second game I thought it was a zellers game as well, but it says nothing about that game on this site.

[Smada Bez]

I was thinking zellers on the second one too but all the Zellers games on this site are NTSC and the game I have is PAL. I didn't know if Zellers made PAL games or not.

[Skatepunk60]

hmm. sorry man i didnt see that you said it was PAL .. no i dont think that Zellers made PAL games .. actually im almost positive they didnt

[Skatepunk60]

For more info visit Sandy great site www.atari2600.nl

[Atarinvader]

I think there is some evidence that Zellers sold PAL games, or rather that Zellers games ended up in PAL countrys through some channel or other. I've found a copy of Time Warp here, and others have found other Zeller games in the wild.

 

I hope I find some nice carts when I'm in Australia...the excitement!

[Ze_ro]

I don't think it's entirely correct to call these games Zellers games... I think it's more likely they all came out of some Hong Kong factory, and that Zellers is just the best known source of them. I'm sure a lot of them ended up all over the place. All my Zellers games have upside-down labels as well, so this isn't uncommon amung these games.

 

Also, it's worth pointing out that the Zellers section on AtariAge is by no means complete.

 

--Zero

[Atarinvader]

These games were made especially for Zellers if I remeber rightly, the boxes say Zellers on them. With the ROMs being surface mount rather than actual chips(?), which I was told wasn't easy to do.

 

Wasn't there a court ruling stopping Zellers selling these games? would it have been possible that they shipped out their surplus stock abroad?

[Alex]

Cracker Pet is, AFAIK, a pirate game of unknown origin. We will be adding another company listing for either "Unknown" or "Taiwan 3" or something like that, to lump these similarly labeled games together.

 

The Puzzy game you have is a real Puzzy game. The Puzzy games we currently have listed should actually be under Bit Corp, we actually had a fairly lengthy discussion about this here. Puzzy appears to be a subsidiary of Bit Corp.

 

Can we use your scans on AtariAge?

[Noble Kale]

iirc, WeaselBrains (Mitch), has a lot of games like the second. Maybe he can lend some info to the subject if you emailed him

[Smada Bez]

Sure you can use those scans. I can get you a higher res scan if those aren't good enough.

 

Also anyone have any idea about the rarity of them?

[Jek]

WOW! I like the Space Tunnel card!

 

Nice!

 

May I steal it for GameReset ??? Hopefully

 

My next "out-of-Europe-vacancy" should be in Brazil or Canada

 

have to check out with my wife.....

 

Greets

Jens

[Alex]

I just came back to this thread while looking something up...

 

Zero, you say "Also, it's worth pointing out that the Zellers section on AtariAge is by no means complete."

 

If you know of any Zellers games we are missing, we would like to know. Please note that we mean actual Zellers games, not just games with that label style, which is not reliable as you noted. All the Zellers games in our listing I have seen actual Zellers boxes for.

 

Thanks!

[Ze_ro]

Sorry Alex, I have no information that you don't already have... I was mostly referring to the last few sentances in your entry for Zellers... about how there were never any catalogs, so no one's really sure how many games they made. Chances are, if no more boxes have been found, then they probably don't exist... but considering how often strange stuff seems to turn up for the Atari, who really knows?

 

--Zero

[Deleto]

Ugh.. okay, here's the final word on this. Pirates were produced in mass quantities in Taiwan as well as in Brazil, but the Brazillian ones stayed in Brazil (until recently). The Taiwanese manufacturers sold their PAL and NTSC ROMs (often soldered on Atari PCBs! that were probably surplus stock from a Taiwanese PCB plant), casings and sticker labels to anyone who would buy them. The only thing the seller had to do was box 'em. Zellers (Canada) put them in Zeller boxes, Froggo (USA), in theirs, Action Hi-tech (Australia) in their boxes, Rainbow Vision (New Zealand) in theirs, and Quelle (Germany & Holland), Suntek (Germany) and Hot Shot / Goliath in theirs, and so on and soforth.

 

This is the theory Marco and me have come up with after puzzling for years and years. It's obvious that some companies have one mother company (probably based in Hong Kong) with many subdivisions. There are many ties between some of the above.

 

So the PAL Zellers was not sold by Zellers in Europe, but by stores like Quelle and Bart Smit. They came in the exact same red boxes with "2600 Compatible", but not the little white Zellers tag. So they were probably printed at the same (Asian) printer even!

 

I love the Canadian Puzzy game. There's gotta be more. Like "Le Bobby va à sa maison". Man.. my French has really drifted away.

 

Be prepared when we unleash the Foreign Atari 2600 section in Digital Press Guide #7, with 2000+ titles.

 

[ 05-16-2002: Message edited by: Deleto ]