The games were pirated, but the joy wasn’t

I’m 27 years old, and I grew up in a small town in China. When I was a kid, information didn’t travel very fast. By the time kids in big cities were already playing PS2 or even PS3, I hadn’t even heard of those consoles.

Back then, China had a ban on game consoles, so official consoles were hard to come by. Most players could only get their hands on gray-market imports or clone machines. Many parents also worried that gaming would hurt their kids’ studies. That’s partly why devices like the 小霸王学习机 / Subor Learning Machine became so popular: they were sold as “learning machines” to reassure parents, even though many kids mainly used them to play games. My parents were relatively open-minded, though—they even played with me sometimes. In a way, I was lucky.

The story starts with a repaired clone FC console.

(Image from the internet. Copyright belongs to the original author.)

A Clone FC Console Made Me Popular in My Class

When I was in primary school, my older brother’s clone FC console broke. My dad fixed it and brought it home. The games were in color, and I could swap cartridges to play different titles. That felt amazing to me. My dad was into audio and video gear, so he also had a VCD player and a DVD player. Some of them could even run FC games.

There was a VCD disc that wasn’t an official Nintendo product. We called it “VCD 300 in 1.” I learned about it from a female classmate. Her family had one, and for a while, she became quite popular in class because of it. Later, I asked my dad to buy one too. If I remember correctly, it cost less than 50 CNY, or about 7 USD, and came with two controllers. The games on it were mostly mediocre.

To become the most popular kid in class, I used my pocket money to buy some pirated FC cartridges. It worked. My friends started coming to my house to play. Even if kids in the city were already playing PS3, our old machine still brought everyone together.

That female classmate often came over to play with me too. She had a console at home, but she still played very nervously.

Some Shared Memories

There was something called the “Subor Learning Machine.” It was basically an FC clone with a keyboard attached. It was a product of the 1990s. By that time, the FC was already near the end of its life, and Nintendo found it very hard to fight cross-border lawsuits, so this kind of device existed because of China’s special market situation. The advertising was everywhere. Duan Yongping hired Jackie Chan as the spokesperson, and the ads ran on CCTV. The slogan was “learning machine.” Parents saw it and thought, “Jackie Chan endorses it, it’s on national TV, it must be good.” After they bought it home, the kids used it to play Contra, while the parents thought they were learning programming.

To be fair, some players really did learn basic coding from the BASIC programming feature built into these learning machines. Later, when they got computers, they naturally moved toward programming careers. Accidental success.

We played a lot of “4-in-1” and “99-in-1” cartridges. The 4-in-1 ones usually had good games. The 99-in-1 ones had many repeated titles and some low-quality filler. I was definitely fooled by those as a kid. They were pirated anyway, usually no more than 10 CNY, or about 1.40 USD, each. The cartridges were yellow, not gray, and they had no manuals or proper boxes. Many things that overseas players took for granted as basic game knowledge, we only learned online after growing up. We had plenty of misunderstandings and got scammed more than once.

Back then, we didn’t have the chance to play complete versions, and we didn’t even know what the official releases looked like.

I’m not very knowledgeable about hardware, so the following is based on online explanations:

When we opened cartridges as kids, some had a neat square black chip block inside, while others had an irregular blob of black epoxy. The square block was a separate SOP/DIP chip with pins. It could be soldered and replaced, so broken cartridges could sometimes be repaired. The black blob was a COB “chip-on-board” package. The bare chip die was directly bonded to the circuit board and covered with black epoxy resin. It was cheaper and smaller, but sensitive to moisture, heat, and vibration. Once it broke, it basically couldn’t be repaired by replacing a single chip.

Pirate publishers loved riding on the fame of Contra and Super Mario Bros. the most.

Contra was so popular that as long as a game had characters with guns and supported two players, pirate publishers would label it as Contra. A game set on water became “Water Contra.” One set in the sky became “Air Contra.” A sci-fi themed one became “Star Contra.” Sometimes the same game just started at a different stage and got labeled “Contra 7” or “Contra 8.” When I grew up, I learned that those so-called Contra sequels were actually different games. The water one was The Last Mission, the sky one was Final Mission, and the sci-fi one was Raf World. They had nothing to do with the real Contra.

The pirate publishers were even more ridiculous with Super Mario Bros. A game where the character shot energy waves was called “Mario 10.” A platformer where the hero carried a staff was “Mario 14.” A game that started with riding a dragon and receiving items was “Mario 11.” Even a racing game got reskinned into Mario riding a motorcycle. Later I learned the real titles were Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu, Ganbare Goemon Gaiden 3, Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima III, and Top Racer. None of them had anything to do with the plumber.

I thought I would get to play many different Contra games, but in the end I only really had one.

There was a pirated cartridge that claimed to contain many “Contra” games. In reality, it only had Contra 1 or Contra 2 for the FC. The rest just changed stages, bullets, and the number of lives. It cost about the same as a 4-in-1 cartridge, sometimes a bit more. Some versions even cut content, removing Stage 2 and Stage 4 from Contra 1. I guess it was to save costs. That kind of thing was common on cheaper cartridges.

Contra 1’s “Underwater Eight Stages.”

This was a well-known urban legend among Chinese players. Some people said that in Stage 6, if you jumped into an enemy that looked like a frog’s mouth, you could enter a hidden area. Others said that falling down in Stage 7 wouldn’t kill you, but would instead send you into a blue ocean stage. The internet wasn’t widespread back then, so many kids firmly believed it was real. In truth, it was mostly a graphical glitch or bug, not an actual hidden stage.

In 2016, a Chinese video creator found that the closest thing to this “Underwater Eight Stages” was actually the MSX2 version of Contra. It had 19 stages, and after defeating the Stage 8 boss, you entered an underground or underwater area. But that was not part of the FC version.

Looking back, I treat it as a simple childhood memory. I don’t regret trying to find a stage that didn’t exist. Later, Konami recreated the “Underwater Eight Stages” map in the mobile game Contra: Return, and some fans also made their own ROM hacks based on what they imagined the underwater stages would be like. It turned into a pretty interesting story.

The Rise and Fall of Foreign Technology

During the FC era, there were very few Chinese-made games. Foreign Technology was like an enlightenment for many Chinese players. It wasn’t Nintendo, and it wasn’t a console maker like Subor. It was more like a strange presence in China’s 1990s FC Chinese-game market.

It made locally themed games such as Tunnel Warfare, Lin Zexu’s Opium Ban, and Legend of the Twin Moons. It also made rarer types like Chu-Han Contention and Jia-A Chinese Football Club Manager. But most of the time, it modified existing games: turning Contra into Super War Soul, shrinking Phantasy Star IV into Alien Warrior, and even trying to cram PC games like Resident Evil, Commandos, and Heroes of Might and Magic into the FC.

As kids, we didn’t really understand copyright. The cartridge covers just looked impressive. Later I realized it once called itself “China’s Nintendo,” but never became Nintendo. Many of its games were rough, yet they still brought many children into stories and adventures. Due to copyright issues and market changes, Foreign Technology, which once had real strength, eventually shifted to other fields. It’s a bit regrettable.

When the Arcade Hit King of Fighters Met Pirated FC Publishers

During the arcade era, King of Fighters was a major IP. I couldn’t remember the inputs as a kid, so I just mashed buttons. One day, I saw a very “special” pirated FC cartridge with King of Fighters characters on the label. I thought I could finally play a game at that level at home, but the result shocked me in a different way.

The character sprites were poor, often using only one color. The saturation looked off. The controls felt bad, and the game had no depth. My opponent and I moved in exaggerated ways, and it became visually tiring. Street Fighter also got pirated, but those versions were better than the fake King of Fighters. At least they could be played as actual games, even if the sound effects were terrible.

There are still many more pirated FC stories, such as pirated arcade machines, the Xin Tian Li VCD, and how I later encountered official consoles. I’ll continue writing later.

Did you buy any especially bad or memorable game cartridges as a kid? Were there any game rumors you firmly believed as a child, only to realize later they were misunderstandings? Feel free to share.

While writing this, I looked up some information and found an interesting contrast: the pirated FC cartridges that felt cheap, rough,