‘Painter’
[GBC] [UK] [MAGAZINE] [2002]
Late in the Gameboy Color lifespan, 2000-2001 a batch of games reached stores from a company who called themselves called Rocket Games. While it wasn't unusual that Gameboy Color games were released, the odd part about Rocket Games' releases were that they came without a proper license from Nintendo and seeing unlicensed Gameboy games made outside of Asia is quite uncommon.
I later learned that Rocket Games was no other than Datel Design, a company based in the UK who mostly is known for making cheat devices for various gaming systems, with roots way back to the Nintendo Entertainment System. The device is known as the Action Replay in Europe and GameShark in the US.
Rocket Games were were sold both from Datel's d3world.com and American InterAct's GameShark website, Datel and InterAct had a pretty close relationship at the time as pretty much every InterAct product was manufactured by Datel. InterAct however went backrupt in 2003.
A total of 8 games were released by Rocket Games before Datel stopped the production of cartridges. All products were released February 23, 2001. The 8 games were released on 4 single game cartridges and 2 multigame carts (2 in 1) called "Mega Value Double Pack" carts.
[Painter is an] addictive game similar to Pesky Painter on the Commodore 64 or Amidar in the Arcades. written by the people at Incognito Games Limited though it says Freestylez on the intro screen.
Incognito is a software developer with roots back to the Spectrum days, now mostly producing games for cell phones but who have also been responsible for several GBA titles such as Thunderbirds (SCI), Mortal Kombat Advance (Midway), Rocky (Rage), [Samurai Jack: The Amulet of Time] (BAM Entertainment) as well as GBC titles such as European Soccer League (Virgin Interactive), Cool Bricks (SCI) and of course Rocket Games' unlicensed Painter. ~NES World (”Rocket Games”)
Source: GBX, March 2002 (#09) || Internet Archive; Jason Scott
