You might have heard of Chiller, the infamous Zapper game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System that had so much blood and gore that Nintendo did not want to have anything to do with it – okay, that’s not really the whole truth as the game was released without a license from Nintendo anyway.

The game was made by an American company out of Arizona, called Sharedata. Sharedata was software publishing company founded in the mid 1980’s. They then went on to create a subsidiary called American Game Carts Inc, or in short AGCI, who would publish games for the NES. Sharedata had obtained a license to Exidy Inc’s back catalogue of games sometime in the late 1980’s, to create Nintendo versions and the first game from Exidy’s catalogue was Chiller.

American Game Carts Inc only ever released 3 games, Chiller, Death Race and Shockwave. A fourth game, Wally Bear and the NO! Gang was eventually released by American Video Entertainment, although a few cartridges are known to exist in AGCI carts with an AGCI label on it as well, but it’s unknown if they were just production samples for what was meant to be, but eventually did not pan out.

A fifth game was advertised as coming soon in AGCI ads, being Crossbow. While one ad wrote “coming soon”, another one wrote “shipping next” – it actually seems like AGCI might have planned to release Crossbow before the release of Shockwave, meaning the game must have been in development for quite some time.

Crossbow was yet another Exidy title, an arcade coin-op from 1983 that later in the 80’s got ported to a lot of video game systems as well as DOS, and from the ads seen, AGCI was working on a NES version as well.

Fast forward to the summer of 2025 when the Video Game History Foundation released what seems to be an early copy of Crossbow. The game looks quite unfinished at this stage, there is no sound at all and the levels seem a little eerie, although the game is very true to the DOS version I have seen.

Your objective in Crossbow is to be the protector of a group of adventurers who are travelling the through dangerous lands. You do not play as the adventurers though, but you will need to defend them, by using a crossbow (your Zapper), from various threats like bandits, monsters, and environmental hazards and that while the adventurers, one by one, move across the screen automatically.

So your job is simple, defend the adventurers, if they are hit you loose.

Nothing really happens when you have completed a level except you are taken to the level select menu again, if you loose there does not seem to be any game over screen or anyting similar.  This version of Crossbow is also credited to Sharedata, the  parent company of American Game Carts Inc., meaning development must have begun very early on as some early copies of Chiller also were credited to Sharedata.

In all honestly, and my own opinion, Crossbow is not an enjoyable game – but neither was Chiller for that matter. Unfortunately I do not know why Crossbow did not get published, other than maybe AGCI was coming to the same conclusion as me - the game was just too simple for anyone to care? Maybe it needed more polish.

What I do know is that AGCI never gave up on bringing Crossbow to the NES. However Sharedata faced financial struggles by 1991, American Game Carts Inc. was supposedly shut down by Sharedata sometime in 1991 and the NES development team at AGCI/Sharedata simply ran out of time.

Sharedata is said to have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy a few years later, in 1993, allowing the company to reorganize itself and in December of 1995, Sharedata and its assets, were merged into Aztoré Holdings to manage the Sharedata assets. Sharedata ceased to exist as a software publisher after 1995.

Distributing your own Nintendo cartridges was not easy. Nintendo was turning retailers against anyone who tried to publish games that did not hold the Nintendo Seal of Quality. Companies such as Sharedata/AGCI were therefore met with a “no thank you” when approaching retailers as they feared reprocautions from Nintendo, which could be orders for official games being denied.

So, back to why I know AGCI never gave up on Crossbow. Well when I, yesterday – the day before writing this article, noticed the Crossbow prototype released by the Video Game History Foundation over at the Hidden Palace website, I was reminded of a ROM sitting on a Compact Flash card of mine, tugged away in an old NES PowerPak flash cart of mine, a ROM that was handed to me over a decade ago, a ROM that I might have powered up less than a handful of times, thinking it was unfinished junk and kind of forgot about it, yet still remembering I have it.

After playing the early prototype, reading about what kind of game Crossbow is, combined with my decades old passion for unlicensed NES games - ever since I experienced getting Tengen’s Vindicators and Color Dreams’ Menace Beach game in a “grab bag” of old new-old-stock NES games back in the mid 90’s.

That and the story of people wanting to create something, wanting a slice of the “Nintendo” cake, building development tools from the ground up, wanting to create something great at a lower price for consumers, while yeah still wanting to earn some cash. Sorry if it’s starting to sound like soap opera sob story, and while most of the unlicensed NES games are far top quality, especially from Color Dreams, American Video Entertainment or American Game Carts Inc, in no specific order, I highly appreciate the effort that was put into bringing these products to market, even if the games are junk for the most part.

Before I get too carried away, let’s dive into the Crossbow ROM I have had sitting on the Compact Flash card for ages, because it’s very different.

First up is the titles screen, gone is the green mess from the early prototype and you are greeted with a ginormous Crossbow logo, the actual Crossbow logo, nice!

 

Next up you are taken directly to the game screen with the bridge, and while the early prototype works, this is where the fun ends for this prototype, because the sprites for the adventurers are missing and the enemies doesn’t really do anything. A difference here is that the game is prepared for a second player, though I am unsure what that second player would be doing as Crossbow is a 1 player game.

 

It kind of leads me to believe that they decided to rebuild the game from the ground up. I am by no means saying that the graphics in this later prototype are ground breaking, they are actually quite good – for an unlicensed NES game. As far as I remember all the backgrounds for the newer version were done, or at least more than the one that is "visible" in the newer prototype. I did have a file with the graphics and the NES Paint program used to create art for NES games at American Game Carts Inc., unfortunately it's long lost in a hard drive crash, many years ago.

While the early prototype doesn’t really give any indication of who made it, a look at the later prototype with a HEX editor reveals some names, and they are not strangers when it comes to American Game Carts Inc. The text in the ROM writes:

Exidy by American Game Cartridges

Programmed By: 
Donald Forbes, Scott Schryver, James Dunn.

Game Testing By:
David Wood, Thomas Hedden.

Original Music By:
David Wood, Donald Forbes.

Sound Effects By:
Donald Forbes, Scott Schryver.

Artwork By:
Scott Mavor.

I have been searching for Donald Forbes and Scott Schryver though out the day, to no avail – there are almost no traces of them online. Time is ticking though and I wish we could get the stories behind these games preserved - I bet it was not easy, small company, small budget and lacking tools to build the games, yet they kept pushing.

And before you ask, the ROM will be made available “soon” and hopefully someone out there is able to have a look at the ROM and maybe let me know how far along development of this later prototype was. Maybe you have a more complete build of this later prototype and could tell me how complete it is, it would be great to know how far they got – how close they were to “the finish line”.

If you would like to check out the early prototype ROM, it's available over at the Hidden Palace website.

That pretty much wraps it up, unfortunately it's unknown what led Crossbow into video game oblivion, but it might have been a mix of the game not being "good enough" at the first attempt and then the fact that Sharedata ran out of money and therefore being unable to complete a possible re-write of the game followed by the production and marketing of the product. With that said, with this second version of Crossbow, I think they were on the right track.

Once again, thanks for reading and thanks to the Video Game History Foundation for the release of the early prototype rom.