Multicart
|
|
In video game parlance, a multicart is a cartridge that contains more than one game.
Although generally associated with pirated Famicom cartridges and systems that often advertise "76-in-1," "200-in-1," "1200-in-1," and even "9999999-in-1" games, there have been legal multicarts as well over the years. Such legal multicarts for the Nintendo Entertainment System include:
- The Quattro series, from UK Codemasters (released by Camerica in the US). There were three in this series (Arcade, Adventure, and Sports), each containing four original games that fit the appropriate theme.
- Maxivision 15-in-1, which contained fifteen games from unlicensed NES manufacturers such as Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment.
- Action 52, from Active Enterprises. This ambitious project attempted to put 52 unique games into a single cartridge, but shoddy programming and heavy code reuse between games - combined with a hefty $200 (USD) retail price - resulted in perhaps the single worst NES release ever.
- Sunday Funday, from religious game developer Wisdom Tree. The last NES game released commercially in the United States, this three-in-one cartridge featured the title game (a graphics hack of Color Dreams's old Menace Beach), Fish Fall (a previously-unreleased Tetris-style puzzle game), and a karaoke program featuring a Christian pop song, "The Ride," by 4HIM.
Nintendo themselves even released multicarts, often bundled with their NES systems or peripherals. By far and away the most common of these is a two-in-one cartridge featuring Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, which was the pack-in cartridge for most of the system's heyday. Another common one adds World Class Track Meet to those two games; this was boxed with NES systems that included the Power Pad accessory. Other Nintendo-released multicarts include Short Order/Eggsplode, Donkey Kong Classics, and Nintendo World Cup/Superspike V'Ball.
In the world of pirate Famicom games, multicarts often advertise an inflated number of games on their labels, but in reality actually only have about five or six truly unique games. The list is padded by different variations of these games, hacked to start at different levels or to start a player with different power-ups. The games are usually first-generation Famicom titles, several of which were never officially released in America, and in typical pirate fashion have either had their names deliberately misspelled, or their copyright notices/logos removed, or both.
The emphasis on NES and Famicom multicarts above should not in any way imply that other game consoles have never seen multicarts - this was simply the most prolific platform for these to appear on. Multicarts, both legal and otherwise, have appeared for many cartridge-based systems, among them the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, and Super NES.