The game auctioned off, was housed in a original NES cartridge, which made me wonder if this was a preview copy of some kind. But as the label said American Game Carts, this couldn't be the case. Why? well because the very first copy of Chiller which was released, said ShareData on the label, and was by the was housed in a Color Dreams cartridge, reason being that ShareData licensed the technology for unlicensed NES cartridges from Color Dreams.

Well a bit of sniping went on in the last seconds, but my curiosity had made me put a rather high bid, and I won the game for US$36. I might've been insane for doing such, and I was asked serveral times why on earth I wanted to pay that much... well it was pretty simple.... I was curious.

Today, September 2nd 2006, the game finally arrived and here I am, trying to give my oppinion of how and why exactly this game ended up in an original NES cart.

A close up of the label can be seen by clicking on the cartridge shown on the right side of this text. It's clear to see that the label was peeled off another cartridge if you look closely around the Chiller logo, and then placed here afterwards, most likely glued onto the NES cart.

So this was the first hint that this definately wasn't made by the people at American Game Carts or SareData, they would've had access to tons of labels, so they would have no reason for peeling it off another cart.

I do not own an original "American Game Carts" release of Chiller, but the label, compared to my other American Game Carts releases, does not have the same gloing surface. Unfortunately the picture below can't visualize it as well as when it is seen "real life".

On to the internals. The cartridge had 3 security screws, and when opened, the PCB turned out to be a Color Dreams PCB, which has Chiller production ROMs mounted, as you can see on the PCB scan on the right.

The NES case was modified to pieces, which is beyond me as a Color Dreams PCB fits in an original NES case without any problems. Because the NES cartridge had been damaged, the PCB was glued to the NES cartridge, a very badly glued too.

As mentioned earlier, I do not own the Amercian Game Carts release of Chiller and therefore can't compare. But I do wonder why this cart uses a PCB which says Color Dreams, when American Game Carts had their own version of the same Color Dreams PCB made, only now saying "(C) 1990 A.G.C.I." instead of "(C) 1990 Color Dreams".

I will most likely never know how exatly this game ended up in an official NES cart, but one thing I am pretty sure of... it was not done by American Game Carts, because of the label. So either this was made by a gamer with too much time on his hands, who carefully removed the label from the original cartridge, and even managed not to rip it apart, but then messed up bigtime inside the original NES cartridge.

Or this operation was made by a rental store, to make the game look more like an original NES game... why?, well there's a missing sticker on the back, which most like would've said something like "please rewind", but now says "void". This could indicate that this is an ex-rental... or atleast the original NES case was :-)

Yeah so this was not worth $36 + shipping, but I just had to know! :-)