By Luiz Bonaccorsi
Revision by Valter Prette
The Shockvision factory
The Shockvision company was one of the many small companies who produced classic videogame carts in the 80's.
There were tons of companies who produced Atari carts, but only a few ones that produced Intellivision and Colecovision. This can be explained because there were many different models of Atari consoles released in Brazil.
About Intellivision, it was produced by a big company called Digiplay (a division of the Sharp company), and many official games were released.
About Colecovision, it was not released in Brazil (there were a console called Splicevision, but it is too scarce) so the companies did not showed interest in produce games for this system.
The Shock Adapter
Shockvision developed a cart converter to reduce the price of the Intellivision titles.
[Note: You need to buy first the converter, then you could buy very cheap games in cartridge. No technical info is available at the moment about this technology].
They distributed these games on the rental stores, as an interesting option to attract buyers. Also Shockvision released many games that were never released by Digiplay.
A tale from the eighties
I have a very special personal story in my life as a collector regarding these Shockvision carts, that I will told: in the beginning of the 80's I was a 14-years old kid who loved videogames.
Then, I heard on a rental store about these Shockvision carts and I saw a listing with a few titles that never reached my city (Rio de Janeiro). One day, I decided to not go to school and I got a bus to the city of Sao Paulo (500 kilometers away from Rio de Janeiro), to try to purchase these special games. When I reached Sao Paulo, I got the subway and I followed the instructions that the guys from Shockvision gave to me by phone, and finally I reached the small "Shockvision factory".
The factory was in fact a small room located at the second floor of a small building. Almost everyone was out to lunch, but I told the story about my "great journey" to get the Shockvision games, and the person made the games in a few minutes especially for me!
The "special games" were: Treasure of Tarmin, Truckin', Nova Blast, Safecracker and a few other ones that I don't remember now.
There were no boxes and the instructions were only small papers with a few guidelines for each game.
I returned to my city at the same day, and arrived at 11 pm! It was a great adventure for a kid of my age! In Rio de Janeiro, I made a deal with the guys from Intelligame (another company, who produced a very weird Intellivision cart), who copied the ROMs from my Shockvision cart and I won in exchange an original Sub Hunt original game.
How many titles were produced?
Now, what is interesting to know for collectors is that these guys from Shockvision could reproduce any Intellivision titles using these carts and the converter. From the listing I saw on that occasion, I know that they produced many, many titles!
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