The Illegal World of Chinese Bootleg Games | Xplay

chipmunks firing guns just look at this art it works like what nine million games wait wait i was i was just kidding fans even made a genesis port there is a minions game for the nes what if they changed the game's code to bootleg another game to the extreme tekken 3 for the nes yes it's as wrong as it sounds final fantasy vii in its near entirety on the nes how many costumes of spiky-haired jrpg protagonist do you have how much was this this was 100 bucks what picture if you will a world of gaming unlike our own an alternate history found in another corner of the globe brought about by economic inequality an actual ban on console gaming and a desire to just play games no matter what the cost i'm adam sessler and joining me is x-plays jefferson as we take you on a wild ride through the multiverse that is chinese bootleg video games [Music] bootleg games they exist you might have seen them if you grew up overseas and parts of the world like southeast asia or russia but for most americans they exist as an odd novelty you pass by at the swap meet they're about as mediocre as the shovelware wii games your filipino grandma bought you for christmas oh wow game party and bakugan battle brawlers thanks auntie the year is 1985. nintendo is the dominant superpower in the video game industry thanks to their choke hold that was the nintendo entertainment system and it was the must-have toy for every good little boy or girl in a working class household unless you were a child living in china in the late 1980s or early 90s first party gaming in china and most of southeast asia where my family's from was a rich kids sport to put it simply it was nigh impossible to own a legitimate nintendo or famicom at the time not only did the high import tariffs and taxes put these already expensive consoles into the stratosphere of raw cost but the baseline 150 retail price of an nes console exceeded the entire annual income of an average urban chinese household saving every single penny for an entire year in the family still wouldn't have enough money for a proper mario machine so when some clever opportunistic chinese computer nerds found out how to reverse engineer an nes system they looked at the market like [Music] and almost overnight markets were bombarded with bootleg nes machines with all the power half the plastic and more importantly of all a fraction of the cost of the real thing the red and white machine or red chun tang as the famicom was called by millions of kids in china was replaced by a new term the fema clone because it's a clone get it an earlier iteration of these famiclone consoles came fully endorsed by none other than jackie chan himself they called it the little tyrant but this little bastard was anything but little it was an educational machine with a full-size built-in keyboard and the educational part was deliberate it helped skirt the restrictions within china around purely gaming hardware and it gave permission for parents to purchase with full confidence that their child will be learning everything they need to succeed in school half that employs nes cartridges [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the little tyrant wasn't alone famiclones and knockoff game consoles took off through the early eight and 16-bit era through to the playstation generation and even to today gaming alternatives were hot and other parts of the world wanted in on the action family clones made their way to my neck of the woods in the philippines and while i was enjoying luxurious life of a navy child living in japan my cousins in manila into gig had a mixture of both bootleg getting machines and real first party systems when my family and i came to visit them why get your child an expensive playstation when a cheap poly station exists oh anna happy birthday i got you the video game you wanted oh you got me a playstation oh thank you so much auntie wait wait this is this is a yeah it's uh how you say has an 8-bit graphics and the audio visual app kit i just pick it because that's spider-man like but but i wanted a playstation what's the difference as you can see these plastic pieces of came in a variety of flavors ripping off whatever console is popular at the time our tactics show co-worker stephanie brought this family clone from china resembling an nes that comes pre-installed with a buttload of games not even playstation was safe i personally felt for a ps2 lookalike when i had vacation to guam as a kid yeah so since they delayed the kotor remake it looks like i got the perfect excuse not to play the game and you're just gonna have to accept it it's beautiful isn't it what the what is it it's a poly station but it's really a poly station this is a bootleg gaming system from southeast asia or russia who knows can we play it yeah hell yeah we're going to play it open that thing up oh my god does it smell like china outside it smells like wish smells like witch it's blue holy pristine plastic exactly how i remembered it how much was this this was 100 bucks what what is that holy it's real this says nine million nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine in one nine million games this isn't a disc there is no disc because it's cartridge base gonna be so fun right i feel like they put more actual effort into the box than everything else no they definitely did this was photoshopped before photoshop you know we should review that there are literally nine million 999 thousand 999 games on this cartridge and times are ticking but enough about the consoles themselves you clicked on this video to see some of the games and well sit back and strap in it's about to get wild the creation of consoles made exclusively from china led to a boom and hacked to bootleg video game cartridges mass-produced for the chinese southeast asian and eurasian markets from simple sprite edits to full-blown original games they were in an odd and admittedly exploitative way kind of like an early prototype of indie developers and because copyright laws in china were non-existent at the time these games were showing up without any quality controls or formal consent like an ex-boyfriend showing up at the community theater play you're starring in after finding out about it from a friend on instagram and pretending everything is okay and you can stay friends and everything is fine but but deep down everything is not fine and you can't just be friends and that love you felt was just a bootleg knockoff of the real thing jesus christ jefferson who hurts you are you okay she lives on now only in my memories let's talk about pokemon the year is 2000. pokemon gold and silver were taking the world by storm and the next generation of ruby and sapphire were just looming over the horizon so imagine the shock pikachu look on my face when on a trip to the philippines with my family we passed by a video game store at a shopping mall and i see upfront over everything else in the store two pokemon games no one has ever seen before pokemon jade and pokemon diamond the boxes looked off why does the sea serpent thing look like my bowel movement after drinking blue kool-aid and oh god why does the four spirit from princess mononoke looks like he wants to eat me i begged nay pleaded to my dad to buy me one of these pokemon games and like the spoiled navy brat i was i flew back home with pokemon diamond in my hands i couldn't believe what i was seeing new creatures new region a cell phone calling mechanic and cussing i know i wasn't the smartest kid 22 years ago but something felt off so what was really happening here the history of pokemon jade and diamond is still fuzzy but what likely happened was in 2000 an unknown bootleg developer saw a completely unrelated japanese gameboy jrpg also about monster battling and collecting and while they could have just stopped at translating the game to chinese and called it a day they went the extra mile to capitalize on pokemon's popularity by replacing the box art and renaming the entire game to bamboozle gullible kids into buying something that is not related to pokemon that initial chinese translation was then translated again into broken english hence why we have sentences like this the real game that was unknowingly caught in the crossfire was officially known in japan as kaitai denju telefang which literally translates to cell phone beast telefang a series where you befriend monsters called denju by adding them to your cell phone contacts and calling them up every time you need to battle they're like geek squad but if you want to kill an innocent animal as far as bootleg games go reskinning an entire unrelated game's box heart to fit another franchise is just the tip of the copyright infringing iceberg what if they changed the game's code to bootleg another game now there are many examples of bootleggers changing the sprites of nes games like putting mario's fat head on top of a kung fu master and calling it mario 10. or you can do what gametech did and take an obscure 2d platformer rip the playable sprites out of the cartridge and replace them all with pikachu that's what happened to poor athena for the famicom pocket monster on the nes is an elaborate yet still half-assed bootleg of a game where you take control of pikachu in an environment unrelated pokemon in the slightest that's because most if not all the assets were stolen straight from the famicom game athena with music from another game twin b it's a simple yet boring platform made to cash in on the pokemon craze the novelty of playing a pokemon pipeformer on the nes wears off after you realize you're stuck listening to the same annoying music track over and over again never stopping ever now going back to the notion that since gaming was much more expensive in other parts of the world leaving gamers in these regions feeling left out from playing new releases other more fortunate players are enjoying shenzhen nanjing comes to the rescue shenzhen is a well-documented bootleg software developer and rest assured this won't be their only appearance in this video they are mostly known for taking currently popular jrpgs and back porting them to the nes from the ground up with fascinating results not only is this painstakingly impressive but the sheer amount of effort and knowledge to do this is enough to make you ask the question is this still piracy we might answer that question as we move along shenzhen brought home many popular jrpg titles to gamers in china who would have never otherwise been able to experience these stories titles like golden sun sword of mana harvest moon and chrono trigger all back ported and de-maked to the nes thanks to shenzhen but the ones we want to quickly spotlight is their games kodai bao shi jin and ko dai bao shi yin what could these ports be you may be wondering mother pokemon ruby and sapphire from the game boy advance ported to the nes sure jin means gold and yin means silver so there was definitely some mistranslation in there but rest assured these are ports of ruby and sapphire for the nes everything from the sprite work locations are the ones one perfect no glitchy abominations really but to some gamers this is enough for all intents and purposes this was pokemon for entire generation of fans stepping away from all the pokemans and the pikachus we have another back port of the fighting game variety tekken 3 for the nes yes it's as wrong as it sounds developed by hummer team in 1990 who the knows tekken 3 is a complete port of actually the first tekken game for the playstation as far as we know the sprites are built from the ground up directly inspired by the original polygonal counterpart but this time on a 2d nes plane this particular bootleg was then bootlegged again imported to the sega mega drive as tech and special developed by game tech the same bootleggers who did the pikachu platformer the mega drive version of the game plays more like virtual fighter adds additional characters to the roster and runs slightly smoother than its nes counterpart now we know you're all familiar with the chip and dale rescue rangers nes games from capcom there were only two games only two definitely only two right i distinctly remember a third game an extreme chip and dales game with chipmunks firing guns rocket launchers and blowing up tanks it was enough to push my balls off to the extreme yeah okay i'll stop you right there johnny the next bootleg oddity we have is chippendale 3 which is exactly how jefferson described it as released by bootleg devs real attack in 1995 this is chip and dale like you've never seen them before terrorist guerrillas have taken control of a nuclear missile site and who does america call to goddamn chipmunks with goddamn machine guns just look at this art something that the bootleg gaming scene had on lock was some of the most eye-catching click-bait box art you'll ever see can you imagine how differently the rescue rangers movie would have gone if they just gave dale a gun the whole story would have been resolved right when they entered the uncanny valley town is this actually an all-original unofficial sequel to the nes rescue rangers game no what real tech did was take yet another obscure game in this case heavy barrel by data east in arcade style shoot em up yeah i've never heard of it either but you know what i can't stop hearing about minions too the rise of gru wow that's a great segue to the minions bootleg wait wait i was i was just kidding to paint an even more clear picture of how recent the bootleg game market was thriving there is a minions game for the nes there is no release date on record for the sighting of this bootleg but despicable me came out in 2010 that means this bootleg must have been released by 2011 at the latest when minions were all over your auntie's facebook page oh yeah look at this meme it's funny huh yeah real funny auntie look at this one it's funny because it's true wait you and uncle jon jon are getting divorced yeah don't tell your thousands when we go to jellybean today while we don't know when this came out we do know where it came from shenzhen well minds not to be confused with shenzhen nanjing and after a thorough cross-examination from our team of experts we were unable to pinpoint if this was a game hacked from assets of a base game to look like minions or an entirely new game from the ground up it's an extremely fascinating look at the lengths these bootleg developers will go just to be up to date on a popular trendy intellectual property what's next an angry birds nes game hey adam there's an angry birds nes game what how does that work it works like released around 2012 and developed by nice code software this is a kind of accurate d make of angry birds on the nes i mean it has the core gameplay correct but the game physics hell no you just kind of have to aim your bird and pray it hits the target it's the type of game you give to your kid to shut them up about not having a phone to play angry birds on it's sad really it kind of makes you more grateful for the little things we take for granted electricity running water clean air a bootleg ps1 cd of 350 games in one that's right who cares about quality over quantity when you can have 350 games in one product or the 9 million 999 999 games that x-play now owns how's that review coming all right frosh show me your gamer skills let me see are you really out there in the streets why is your leg so long like a breadstick this is game four by the way this is only number four this is how many more wait a minute how did that know to give me a black guy i don't know how i feel about that man i feel like that's i don't know it's a little interesting still insensitive no way i did not pick this character did you beat frost i of course he did he's the black guy by default which is funny because he looks like a black mario believe it or not digimon was just as popular as pokemon in several corners of southeast asia and europe this led to many unlicensed products of digimon in the late 90s and mid-2000s most of them cursed and of course this includes unlicensed digimon games okay well i clearly have no idea what a real digimon game even looks like so you can take the digi-wheel i promise i won't take too much of your digi time there are a number of digimon bootlegs but i'll just talk about the two that stand out the most digimon adventure for the snes is an action platform made by chinese bootleggers syntax this game almost looks like a legit digimon game with a respectably rendered agumon as a player character an enemy did you want crawling and flying around a bright backdrop that feasibly looks like it could be a digi world the assets from these bootlegs were taken from other games but the effort to combine everything into a new product gives this bootleg a sense of earnestness like maybe fans really did make this game it's not great but it certainly has more effort put into it than that pokemon platformer we mentioned earlier also it has a small dinosaur that can shoot a fireball that can transform to an even bigger dinosaur and even bigger fireball so the odds were already stacked against pikachu the other digimon game worth mentioning is digimon ruby for the gameboy advance have you ever played a pokemon game and thought to yourself i really wish this was digimon no right me too i wondered the same thing so these taiwanese bootleggers vast fame answered that very question with a full-blown digimon rpg you play as davis from digimon season 2 and follow an original storyline separate from the anime's plot it's janky as hell really tedious the english translation is hilariously bad but for the most part characters look like they should colors are vibrant and okay that's it i just think it's neat look at this opening cut scene with a star wars auto scroll oh probably a few person hearing over the figures world this place this is a human parallel of a fantasy world figures world behave that this is unbecome human life is the life of the beast book co-existence with digimon live in the human entity among this place to support mutually each other it'd have no power did war to us the figures world probably too is we mini the year may track four to look for a fantasy emmy dice wow i didn't know i had that character inside of me and yup the g4 discord is blowing up right now with shad grim gravy memes again i'll deal with that later next up we have cart fighter developed by hummer team in 1994. it's a totally legit mario fighting game that came out years before super smash cart fighter is what actually happens after a mario kart race luigi you son of a that race was a mine you want two lets ago you had a blue shell coming i am the alpha brother now you will always be a player too i slept with a peach you're a mother of a girl oh yeah i actually remember playing cart fight at my cousin's house and thought i just imagined it until the rom made its way online this game is a fascinating novelty you choose from 8 playable mario characters all rendered like they were drawn by the g4 hosts blindfolded aside from basic attacks everyone has a move list of three special moves with street fighter ii styled inputs and quarter circles the music is annoying character frames are constantly going in and out but it technically functions as a fighting game and we saved the best two for last have you heard about final fantasy vii remake yeah on the nes how many costumes do spiky hair jrpg protagonist do you have yeah this isn't even my final form i don't know what that looks like yet final fantasy 7 in its near entirety was backported to the nes in 2005 through shenzhen ninja the same bootleg devs who made the pokemon jrpg ports this is art the idea of putting other jrpgs like pokemon in golden sun was ambitious enough but cramming final fantasy vii on an older console from scratch no one just does that for a quick buck this is a labor of love and thanks to emulation it has found a second life to an even wider audience that could appreciate it yeah that's right i'm not afraid to admit it i cried again for eric's 8-bit pixelated death scene [Music] it doesn't have every beat from the original game but most of the banger moments are there it plays that final fantasy 1 or 2 did on the nes but now you're playing as clow tifa barrett and the rest of your eco-terrorist friends it was so beloved by the fandom that the bootleg was given new life when modern lin blum accurately translated the dialogue directly from the ps1 original and while this is the worst possible way to experience final fantasy vii it stands as a testament to the ecosystem of games chinese bootlegs cultivated and provided to their less than fortunate audience consoles like playstations or nintendo's were not widely allowed to be sold in china until 2015 when the console ban was finally lifted all right there was a console band in china well not precisely a ban but that's what people call it in 2000 just three months after the japanese launch of the ps2 the chinese government passed a bill severely limiting the operation of video game arcades and gaming hardware the playstation 2 did finally manage to officially launch in just two cities a few years later but it cost more than double the regular retail price due to import tariffs and way more than the gray market bootleg consoles but we'll get back to that where was i right final fantasy shenzhen took the time and effort to release a version of final fantasy vii to people who otherwise would have never been able to play the game it's a fun little novelty now but back in the day this was the final fantasy 7 to many people well when you put it that way maybe some of these things do have a place in gaming history when people think of bootlegs they just think of arbitrary box art baiting modding assets from other games or just straight sprite swaps but many of these knock-offs are how a lot of kids around the world discovered their love of video games in the first place so what's the last piece of art you just gotta show me a straight sprite swap of sonic replaced by mario oh dear god why so mari answers the question what if sonic and mario switch places released in 1994 by hummer team yet again so mari is one of the most infamous bootleg games known even outside of the bootleg community it is what it is mario and plays a sonic in green hill zone it's fascinating when you consider the fact that not only did they technically backboard an entire sonic game to the nes years before the gamecube but it's on the nes there was no way this 8-bit system was going to keep up with the speed of a genesis but they try it anyway the bootleg is well known for having significantly difficult and broken level design and for the sheer audacity of its existence it garnered so much love that fans even made a genesis port with improved eye-catching visuals sprite work and the system that can handle the speed it needed to function bootleg games they're a touchy subject i grew up in the playstation era and in the philippines consoles were not outlawed but very expensive for the average family so bootlegs of ps1 games were everywhere while yes it is a morally grey area pirated and copyright breaking games were the only way gamers could afford to play in these parts of the world and in my case it was the only way i could have played awesome things i never would have had access to or heard of otherwise psychic force kamen rider bike race balco kyodai let's end go eternal wings and penis wait what was that last one glad you asked this here atom is penis penis was my first exposure to retro gaming and emulation i never owned an nes and this bad boy has the entire nes library and some other cool stuff all playable on my modded playstation without it i never would have been able to enjoy not only the classics but some wacky and wild rom hacks like super peach brothers toilet brothers super amish brothers super carnage brothers and naked mario brothers as of now the bootleg market of yesteryear is a thing of the past the chinese ban on console gaming was finally lifted in 2015 allowing gamers all over china to finally legally own the latest games from nintendo and sony in fact the xbox one was the first modern era console to finally be released to the chinese market on the historic day of september 29th 2014. in the philippines stores like gameline and manila now sell real games legitimately as bootlegs were outlawed in the mid 2000s shout out to the bootleg games wiki page and their extensive documentation on game entries and the bootleg developers without them a lot of this information may have been lost a time yes most of them are ass but every now and then you might come across something that'll make you go huh that's interesting in a vacuum yes they're not as important to the history of gaming as the real deals but all together by their powers combined they serve as a look into a unique ecosystem of gaming unlike any other you lived a very interesting life as a gamer and i've been waiting for years to tell it and now that i have i think my time at x-play is done thank you so much for everything x-play and g4 got speed jeffrey sora

Channel: Xplay

Views: 208,344

Keywords: G4, G4TV, XPlay, Gaming, G4 Gaming, gameplay, review, game review, game reviews, gaming news, completionist, Dendy, Bootleg, Bootleg Games, Bootleg Systems, Final Fantasy 7, Pokemon, Jefferson Carvey, Adam Sessler, Knockoff, Minions, Pikachu

Id: tHbttiEjk4k

Length: 27min 3sec (1623 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022