10 Crazy Unlicensed Video Games You’ve Never Heard Of

6. Kart Fighter (Nintendo Entertainment System)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hjGpg5tcL8 One genre where the NES is severely lacking in licensed titles is one on one fighting games a la the Street Fighter series. Fighting games didn't really become popular until Street Fighter II hit arcades in 1991, which was pretty late in the NES's life. The console wasn't powerful enough to handle any kind of decently representative port of any of the popular fighters, and nobody really stepped up to the plate other than Konami, whose last NES game was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters in 1994. Sketchier developers and publishers in China stepped up to the challenge, with WoGe De Industry Co. releasing the best known of the unlicensed NES fighting games, Kart Fighter. Lifting the characters and modified graphics from Super Mario Kart to be dropped on top of what looks like a weird bootleg Street Fighter II engine, it's actually fairly decent for what it is, a flagrantly infringing game that's pushing the NES to its technical limits. In foreign markets where older consoles had longer shelf lives due to the economy and other issues, it scratched the itch for a fighting game and beat Super Smash Brothers to the market by six years. Kids all over China were probably beating up Mario with Donkey Kong long before anyone else was.