Type Video game console Media ROM cartridge | Release date 1992 | |
 | ||
CPU 1.66-1.79 MHz emulating 8-bit MOS 6502 | ||
Terminator 2 (Chinese: 终结者二; pinyin: Zhōngjié zhě èr; real console name Super Design Ending-Man BS-500 AS) is a video game console sold in Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Montenegro, India, Kenya and Hungary (where it was known as Sárgakazettás nintendo - Nintendo with yellow cartridges). It was also sold in Italy with the name "top consolle". In Spain it was usually received as a marketing gift for those assisting sales conferences organized by different companies, usually by assisting to a hotel as a promotional tool. It is a hardware clone of the Nintendo Famicom.
Contents
Background
This particular Nintendo-clone was hugely popular in Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Pakistan, India, Kenya, Iran and Bosnia, where it has gained cult status, and was widely available on flea markets. Due to economical restraints, the fourth generation consoles such as the Sega Genesis or SNES were not popular in these countries except Bulgaria, where Sega had an official distributor of the Sega Mega Drive. The previous generation remained highly popular, particularly Terminator 2 which was the one of most successful Famicom clones. It left a mark in pop culture and 1990s-2000s youth, establishing itself as antonomasia for 8-bit video gaming, to the point of being more popular than the original.
Terminator 2, like most known Famicom clones, was compatible with 60-pin Famicom cartridges, and partially compatible with some NES games, which could be played using a special converter. Original Nintendo games were not popular however, due to mass copyright infringement and lack of officially licensed products on the market. The majority of the games sold with and for the system were cheap unlicensed copies, manufactured mostly in Russia and China. Games for the Terminator 2 were still widely available in Eastern Europe in 2000s, mostly on street markets and in small toy stores.
The typical retail set included the system, two detachable controllers (both with "turbo" buttons, which meant 4 buttons in total), a light gun, which also resembled the original Nintendo gun accessory except for a sleeker and more futuristic design, power supply and RF cable. The console had a built-in RF modulator, as well as audio-video RCA connectors. The system itself didn't include any built-in games, but most versions were bundled with cartridges such as "1,000,000 in 1" or "9,999,999 in 1", supposedly featuring a million games, only a small number of which actually being separate games and the rest just renamed versions of the latter. Usually these were popular games such as: "Super Mario Bros." or "Duck Hunt". They were renamed though, possibly in an attempt to avoid lawsuits.
Popularity
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Terminator 2 system gained massive popularity in Eastern Europe, probably due to the fact that until the late 1990s there was no official distributor of Nintendo products in that area. The Terminator 2 consoles were mass-marketed by most of the major and smaller electronic stores. It is difficult to determine an exact price for the system, but in place like Gabrovo, Bulgaria in the mid 90s, one could buy it for the rough equivalent of 10 euros. In Romania in 2015 it costs about 10 euros. In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina after the Bosnian war, it was 15 euros equivalent. Some went for about 90 Deutsche Marks in Serbia. In Poland it used to cost 30-50 PLN which is now about 10€ and the games used to cost 4-6 PLN (1-2€).
From 1998 until 2000, the Terminator 2 console was worth 30 to 50 German marks in Serbia. A normal price for a copied cartridge was 50 dinars ($0.40 - $0.50 USD) part of witch were unauthorized "1,000,000 in 1" cartridges, containing up to 10 games, it was barely profitable to buy more cartridges. After the 2000s, the Sony Playstation was highly available in Serbia, and the price of the Terminator 2 fell sharply. In 2013 a regular price for the console was 11 euros, and it was still sold in Chinese shopping malls throughout Serbia.