Sachen ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of all the companies that produced unlicensed games for the NES, Sachen is the largest and arguably most confusing for collectors. Sachen, also known as Thin Chen Enterprise, was founded in Taiwan in 1988 and has 68 NES titles in their catalog, many of which were also licensed to other game publishers all over the world. That makes Sachen's catalog of NES games more than twice as large as any other publisher. While Sachen games were never distributed in the United States by any major retailer, they could be found in smaller independent stores throughout the country, and eventually even ordered from Sachen's own web site. The rarest game in the Sachen library is Padillon Gais (which is a misprint of Padillon Gals). The game is a different version of Galactic Crusader that features some added adult content. Their final NES game, Huge Insect, was sold exclusively online. Sachen continued producing games for multiple consoles well after the end of the NES, but eventually went out of business in 2007.

 

The Sachen catalog has games that range from young children's educational titles to adult-themed casino games, and includes several multicarts as well. With the exception of the Super Cartridge series, all of the games have an ID Code that starts with either TC (Thin Chen) or SA (Sachen), although some label variants do not include the codes. Generally speaking, compared to all the other unlicensed games that were produced, the overall quality of the Sachen carts, labels, and boxes give the impression that they were made at least in part by hand, out of whatever materials were less expensive at the moment. If you think some of the pictures below look blurry it's because the game labels actually are blurry, apparently very low resolution and printed out on a less-than-professional printer. Not many collectors specifically go after Sachen games because so many of them are hard to find, and the staggering number of variants that exist in the cartridges, labels, and packaging is overwhelming.