9999 in 1: the legendary cartridge for Dendy, which deceived the expectations of gamers of the 90s (13 photos)

Surely, many owners of the Dendy prefix and its clones remember the very famous cartridge "9999 in 1", which went into bundled with a prefix and which actually had no more than 7 games.





Moreover, it is not even necessary that it comes with your attachment. Anyway, somehow miraculously he got to you into hands. And certainly you are unlikely to forget that very calm music, natural background and of course a seagull in the form of a cursor for choosing a game. IN in general, today I would like to make a small nostalgic review of this iconic cartridge and tell how it all began.

Where did it all start?

For the first time, Taiwanese pirates began to reproduce games, who took one-game games and hacked them.



For example, you could insert a multi-game cartridge with a game "Super Mario bros" and see some Mario games there. That's just there was only one game. Just the first game started from the first level, the second already from the second, the third - from the third, etc. Such cartridges even received its name, which can be translated as "vulnerability cartridge".

Other similar reproduced one-game games appeared, where the player could not only start the game from any level, but also with a certain weapons, a large number of lives and even immortality. Huge popular in this regard was the cartridge with the game "Contra", where the player could select a game and start with a specific type of weapon, such as S-sky.





Also, many could see the "35 in 1" cartridge, which included multiple light gun games (multiple modes) and as many as 28 items in the menu of the game "Battle City", or rather its pirate hack Tank 1990.






The first seagull cartridge



The cunning Chinese in this regard also did not lag behind, and in the end released their first cartridge with the legendary seagulls. True, on that At the time it was an "83 in 1" cartridge that included 83 games. More precisely, there were only 7 games, and the rest were only copies with some changes (level, weapons, etc.).

There you could see such cult games as "Sky destroyer", "Bomberman" and others.



But the most interesting thing is that each game had its own unique name, which could confuse the gamer.



Well, subsequent cartridges with seagulls included everything more and more games, or rather names, since the games themselves remained still no more than 7. And around 1993, the Chinese released that the most legendary "9999 in 1" cartridge, which most of saw you.

Appearance



I think that everyone will recognize this famous cartridge by appearance alone, even if it doesn't say "9999 in 1". Only one cover on a black cartridge will tell us that we severely deceived, because this cartridge depicted such games as "Contra", "Street fighter", "Ninja Turtles", "Super Mario", "Wild Gunman" and others.

And those who saw this cartridge for the first time thought that now they will arrange a powerful cut in the games shown in the picture. That's just how It turned out that the content did not quite match the appearance. Although, everything same met the games depicted in the picture.

Really 9999 games?

Of course, despite the name, there was almost no 10000 games. Yes, and in principle it was stupid to believe in it, since even then we understood perfectly well that there were so many games in a cartridge pull.



Inserting the cartridge into the console, we observed how huge the number 9999 falls to the surface with a crash, after which something appears the menu itself with the sun, the sea, seagulls and that very cult musical topic.

In fact, there were only 6 games on this cartridge:

Super Mario Bros - the same classic Super Mario;

Tank - classictanks, that is, "Battle city".

Small Bee is a classic game "Galaxian" where we you have to play as a small spaceship and destroy enemies, which slowly sink down;

Wild Gunman is the famous western light gun game. By the way, at least she was declared in the picture;

Duck hunt - Legendary duck hunt. Again, the game light pistol. Oh, how much the giggling dog patted the nerves gamers of the 90s.

Lunner Ball - and of course, we must not forget about billiards, where we had to score balls with the help of a special cursor, which we controlled with a joystick.

Tetris - met only on some versions of this cartridge. The same classic Tetris, developed by the Soviet engineer Alexey Pajitnov. This version of the cartridge was missing super mario bros game.



And the rest of the games were just a repetition of the previous ones, and they differed from each other only in the levels from which the game began, and some other points. True, even in this case, the pirates there would be no way to multiply 6 games to almost 10,000.



But here everything is simple. In total there are six games, as we have already found out. A there are 250 different variations of these games. And then what about the rest of 9743 games? Never mind. It's again the same games that go by second, third and twentieth round. After you scroll through 256 games, the counter will be reset and the 257th game will be exactly the same as the very first.

Further development

Well, then the pirates just suffered. They continued to spit similar hacks, but began to increase the number of alleged games. That is, games there were still no more than seven on the cartridge, but already on the cartridges such names as "99999 in 1" and even "999999999 in 1" appeared. True, it did not change the essence. They were just numbers.