Hellraiser: Virtual Dreams by Color Dreams

The Hellraiser video game history is an intriguing example of ambitious, often abandoned, game development projects, rooted in the movie written and directed by Clive Barker. Despite the franchise’s success in films, multiple attempts to bring “Hellraiser” into the video game world have largely failed, with only a few limited releases and numerous canceled projects. Today we will start our journey into some of these projects. If you remember the mostly defunct Hellbound Web, started by Matt Rexer, aka “Captain Tripps”, you might have seen some small images of vaporwear games like the one below:

The first notable effort to create a “Hellraiser” game dates back to the early 1990s. Developers “Color Dreams“, known for producing unlicensed Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games, attempted to develop a game that would mirror the horror themes of the Hellraiser series. They reportedly aimed to use a unique “3D” engine developed by Wisdom Tree, which was an ambitious move for the hardware limitations of the NES at the time. This game was set to incorporate puzzle-solving elements that would simulate the opening of the Lament Configuration (the iconic puzzle box in the Hellraiser series). However, due to technical limitations and budget constraints, the NES Hellraiser project was eventually abandoned before its release, remaining one of the most curious “lost” titles in horror gaming history.

NESWorld.com has a great write up about this company in particular and of course some general info about this game, in 3 parts, that I recommend: I am lifting bits from that article extensively here, as the internet is fickle and you never know when it will disappear completely: Part 1, part 2, part 3.

Dan Lawton was the founder of Color Dreams in 1988. After watching the Hellraiser movie he was inspired to talk to his partners into making a game version, and they licensed the rights for Hellraiser, paying the movie studio a whooping amount estimated at between $35-$50k! Then he hired an engineer called Ron Risley to develop the Super Cartridge that would allow them to have more computing power to develop the games they wanted to do. Here’s a quote from Dan:

 I liked the movie, and convinced my partners that it would be great for a game. But the Nintendo didn’t have enough power to do it justice, so we came up with the idea of doubling the processor power in the Nintendo by adding another processor to the video space. The Nintendo fetches its background and sprite images from a separate memory from the main program memory. Our idea was to share that memory with a second microprocessor which could execute and change those video “tiles”, without adding to the overhead on the main NES processor.

In 1990 Vance Kozik started working at the company and eventually became one of the main programmers, his first job was to evaluate the Pesterminator project and come up with suggestions on how to improve it: he would go on to work in many other games and ultimately Hellraiser.

Now it’s hard to come up with a lot of information from people who worked on it, but the plan was to use a different type of cartridge, the Super Cartridge which had been developed as a prototype piece of hardware, but apparently, according to NESWorld’s article, no software was ever written to be used with that protoype, not even for Hellraiser. Phil Mikkelson would also join Color Dreams and work in the Hellraiser project, designing the title screen for the game (below), and allegedly the box art as well, which you can see gracing the top of this article.

Now I’m not super keen on the specs for this but what I found out about the Super Cartridge was that it would allow 16-bit style graphics on a 8-bit system, because it had a special chip, the Memory Manager Controller or MMC which contained an extra 8-bit processor, the Z80 running at 2 MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). This was supposed to connect to the NES motherboard. You can find out more information on that tech here.

Dan Lawson explains a bit more:

The Nintendo had some kind of 6502 as I recall, but it’s been a while. We put a Z80 with DRAM into the video memory, and “dual ported” it so that the nintendo main processor would be able to access it at the same time. Finally, we added some extra zip by putting the video color palette registers in the same place, so that the Z80 could also change those on the fly. The idea was that we could alternate colors between scans of the TV and increase the effective number of colors on the screen. […] As I said, I lost interest in the project after the SuperCart was actually running. I’m a total geekazoid and don’t know squat about gaming, so figured I’d probably write dain-bramaged games. I assumed that Color Dreams never did anything with the SC, since they never called with any questions or problems with the design (though Dan could probably have handled all that without my help, it was a pretty complex piece of hardware and the inevitable production snags should have prompted a call).

Another member of Color Dreams’ team, Jon Valesh, was quoted on NESworld about the connection between the Hellraiser project and the Super Cartridge (SC):

Well, the Hellraiser game and the mysteries surrounding it seem to have a lot of politics or market positioning in them. I was around when the Hellraiser project was first started, and it seemed a lot different than everybody seems to think it is now.
First, The ‘Super-cartridge’. This was a Z80 based computer designed by Dr. Ron Risley, M.D., who was at the time in Med. school in San Diego, California. He and Dan Lawton had worked at the same company for a brief period a few years earlier, and since Ron is a very intelligent person who had been involved in the computer industry quite heavily. (Mostly in the Mac. world, he wrote the some famous share-ware, the front end for the Genie Online service for the Mac, had a regular column in Macworld, etc.), he was asked to build a coprocessor for the NES. It did not tap a ‘second processor’ (which to the best of my knowledge didn’t exist), but instead used the fact that the NES used the cartridge ROM as a real-time source for graphical data and code. It didn’t load the program into RAM and run it there, like a PC game or a Playstation does.
The idea was that the parts of the cartridge which were normally ROM accessed by the Nintendo for displaying graphics, etc. was RAM in the Super-Cartridge, and since the cartridge was in fact a whole computer, a game could have bitmap and complex graphics by using the coprocessor to change the contents of the ‘ROM’ as it was being read by the Nintendo’s graphics chip. (If each time you display a character, it is slightly different, you can have very dynamic sprites and background objects.) By modifying the code space as the game ran, you could create a far more dynamic game, and since the z80 could figure out what part of the game was being played, it could run it’s own code to further enhance both the graphics and gameplay. In effect, you would be able to program enemies which were controlled by the Z80, which had bit-mapped spites, and could have a lot more smarts than would be practical for the CPU in the NES.

Apparently there was some code created for the Hellraiser game, including a test level, but nothing intended to run on the SC. According to Valesh, the reason why that game never really crystallized was due to the fact that there wasn’t a real coherent vision for the game and it was a subject matter that wasn’t right for the company or even to market for the NES at the time. Considering the demographic of NES players, it probably would not have been a good idea, and the technology just wasn’t there to make it as gory or violent as it should be for a Horror property like Hellraiser. Not to mention they eventually turned towards making more friendly Christian-themed games. A big chunk of Color Dreams broke off to create a digital camera company called Star Dot, and the rest of Color Dreams starting working with another company called Wisdom Tree, which would sell their games like Super Noah’s Ark 3D, Bible Adventures, King of Kings, etc.

Eventually the license expired and another company picked up the rights, and started talking about possibly developing a Hellraiser game for the PC and SNES, to come out in 1994 or 1995. A last bit of trivia is that apparently the boxes or cartridges were never put into production but the labels for the cartridges were, so there may be some out there in a box in someone’s garage, or, more than likely completely gone into a landfill.

But that is a story for another time.

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