The ground-breaking Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), was released on September 1st, 1985 and to this day is the best selling video game console of all time. The NES revitalized the gaming industry and set the standard for subsequent consoles of its generation. To this day, the NES is still played by thousands around the world because of its charming and innovative games that still hold up as some of the most fun and challenging titles ever made. Now that the hardware is so old and harder to find, it is sought after now more than ever. Some of the games are virtually impossible to find because of how scarce they have grown over the years. People have also tampered with some of the games' data as well, bringing fresh material and bright beginnings to some of the adventures the games have to hold. Since Nintendo no longer manufactures these products, collectors have had no way to obtain some of the ridiculously rare, altered versions, or unreleased versions of the games on an actual console. This lead fans to create homemade "reproduction " cartridges of these games as a way to keep the NES community alive. Although illegal, these reproductions are a completely justified way of bringing something fresh to the scene and to these old, yet pivotal pieces of videogame history.
The term "reproduction" can be defined in a few different ways. Stanley Stephanic, avid and experienced video game collector, sees a reproduction as "a game that was in some way not commercially available for sale in a particular area which is then made into a usable format for a particular system." "These games were not made commercially available for a few different reasons. James Rukstalis, reproduction reviewer and head of an online reproduction database, furthers the description by stating, "A reproduction is a remake of an existing game. The game may have never been released, could have been released in a different country, could be a heck of a game, or just a remake of an existing game (usually due to price).
