Deep down under in Australia yet another company decided to jump the wagon even though it could turn out to become a bumpy ride. The company was called Home Entertainment Suppliers also known as HES and it was formed by Mr. Sebastian Giompaolo. HES has since 1984 been supplying Australians with video game products such as various Atari 2600 single game and compilation carts as well as various accessories.

The company is actually still active today and while the mother company, HES itself, only distributes video game accessories now, a subsidiary called Tru Blu Entertainment was founded in 2003 with distribution of Xbox, PlayStation and PC games in mind. Only a handful of games such as Rugby League, Rugby League 2 and Melbourne Cup Challenge (a horse race track game of some sort) has been released though, all licensed of course.

Anyway HES' entry into the business of publishing unlicensed Nintendo games was made with help from American Video Entertainment, lead by Richard Frick, who had been quite successful in buying and publishing low quality titles from a Taiwanese outlet called Thin Chen Entertainment, probably better known as Sachen Entertainment. The relations to Thin Chen (Sachen) was most likely provided by another AVE worker, Phil Mikkelson, who had been in charge of publishing several Thin Chen developed games while he was working at Color Dreams.

The first game published by HES was most likely one of the games AVE had already published, called Pyramid which is some sort of bad Tetris spin-off that doesn't work very well to give you my oppinion. Well to keep production costs to a minimum HES aquired some left over boxes, manuals and cartridge labels from AVE's production and used these for their release of the game. They did however manage to get their own cartridge shell designed as well PCB for the game. While the PRG (program) part of the ROM was written to EPROMs the CHR (graphics) chip is a 256k mass manufactured chip most likely made by Macronix, just like it is in AVE's release of the game.

I must say that the release of Pyramid is quite funny, not because the game sucks seriously but because the cart and box says American Video Entertainment and all that has been done to make people see that this actually is a Home Entertainment Suppliers release is a small sticker on the box. Another funny thing is that the cartridge label had to be modified a little to fit the HES cartridge.

The best relationship was probably with Thin Chen (Sachen) and Bit Corp. Home Entertainment Suppliers actually managed to publish a few games for the NES that hadn't been picked up by any company in the US, games such as Duck Maze (aka. Duck), Arctic Adventure (aka. Penguin & Seal), Little Red Hood (AVE had plans to release this one), Othello as well as the most annoying NES game I've ever seen, called Jackpot.

FUNBLASTER PAK features Pipemania, Twin Eagle, Metal Fighter & Little Red Hood. Metal Fighter never saw a release as a single cart by HES, though both Color Dreams and Sachen published the game for the NES. The rarest of games on this cart to find as single game carts is definately Pipemania and Twin Eagle, both of these seems to have been released late, if they weren't actually the last batch of games along with Soccer (distributed by Magexa).

HES 6-PAK features Cosmos Cop, Balloon Monster, Porter, Magic Carpet, Adam & Eve, Bookyman. This cart is identical to the 6in1 release in the US by Caltron and later Myraid who picked up the remaining cartridge stock from Caltron and released them in new packaging, old wine on new bottles anyone?. The 6-PAK is fairly hard to come by, so good luck.

MINDBLOWER PAK features Math Quiz, Jackpot, Arctic Adventure & Galactic Crusader. While Arctic Adventure and Jackpot both were released as single game carts, the ramining two games, Galactic Crusader and Math Quiz supposedly never were released as single game cart releases, though rumors say that both actually do exist, but I have yet to confirm this with my own eyes.

TOTAL FUNPAK features PAC-Man, Sidewinder, Duck Maze & Othello. This is by far the easiest compilation cart to find and can be found on ebay quite frequently. The games included were all released as single game carts. If I had to say that one of the games could be hard to find as a single game release it would be PAC-Man, but it's not impossible to aqquire.

At least one single game cartridge was released in limited quantities too. Death Race was only offered to members of the HES Game Club. What exactly the offer details were is not yet 100% confirmed, but rumors say that 6 or so dongles had to be returned to enable you to buy the game for AU$60.

The idea to use a dongle most likely came from Sachen as some of their carts come with a small port where a ribboncable can be attached. One of Sachen's cartridge adapters was actually released with such a ribboncable included.

I think it's safe to conclude that dongle cartridge were used for the first generation of games even though it goes against my belief that Pyramid was the first HES release as Pyramid uses a non-dongle cartridge. Well the Piggyback cart was most likely (definately) the mid-era cart while the non-dongle cart was late-era.

This also could explain why Soccer, Pipemania and Twin Eagle are so hard to find, by the time they were released the demand was most likely low and they were therefore manufactured in low quantities. However it is pure guessing from my part though.

I've used a few shortnames in the list and the following is an explanation of them.

B = Black & While label
T = White Text Label (text only)
R = Red Label
G = Green Label
C = Color Label

Let get on with the list then....

Unfortunately not everything HES had in mind for a release actually happened. Below is a list of games that in one way or another was announced, but has yet to be discovered or verified to actually exist.

One HES release received an update rather quickly and I believe the stock was removed from the market. The release was the Maxi-15 pack and it wasn't really HES' fault that the ROM had to be changed.

HES had licensed a compilation cart from American Video Entertainment called MaxiVision, 15 games on one cartridge. Well it turned out that AVE had included two games in the compilation that they actually didn't have a proper license to use on a so-called multicart. The two games were Pyramid and Double Strike, both made by Sachen.

The most common version of the HES Maxi-15 is what is known as MaxiVision Version 2 (V2), while the Americans are used to the first version (V1) of the MaxiVision. America did see V2 released in very limited numbers and it's a real rarity. In Australia it's the opposite, being V1 which is the most rare.

A few games included a small catalog of HES releases, and some future ones that never made it. You can view the entire catalog below.

I had almost forgotten about it, but HES also released an adapter for the NES called Uniadapter. As far as I know two version exist and what it does is allow foreign games to use with with an Australian NES deck, be it Asian (Famicom), American or European NES cartridges.

One version of the Uniadapter is a piggyback style adapter, where two cartridges piggyback the Uniadapter. The other version is a bit of an oddity. It's a normal HES cart with a major dongle and ribbon cable attached.