There are some strange-looking cartridges out there. You have the unlicensed games on the NES and the EA-manufactured games on the Genesis. The Atari 2600 has a fair share of them, but I think the Xonox Double-Ender games are the strangest.
I wonder if these were the first multi-carts. They’re the earliest ones I’ve seen, and it would be interesting to read more about the history of multi-carts, but I’ll save that for another day.
There are a lot of reviews of the games, but there isn’t much on the company. I’ve gathered something about them, but there isn’t much out there. I’m also unsure if they were a developer or a publisher.
About the Company
Xonox was founded in 1983 and seems to have been dissolved that same year. So, yes, the North American Video Game crash took them out—no way to dance around that.
They were based out of Minnesota. I couldn’t find which city they were in, though. They started with their Double-Enders and eventually switched to the single cartridges. A few new games were released as single cartridges, but I’m guessing that sales weren’t good enough to keep the company afloat.
Xonox was a subsidiary of K-Tel. They specialized in infomercials. K-Tel had other business ventures, and in 1980, they started several video game businesses. Most of them, including Xonox, were shut down in 1983. One of their companies continues into 1984.
The Double-Enders were a marketing gimmick. The consumer would think that they were getting two games for the price of one because Xonox games were the same price as other Atari games. This approach might have worked if the games were on par with Atari. Imagic, or Activision.
These cartridges were advertised on TV and, I’m assuming, in magazines. I’ve been able to find a few of the commercials but not any magazine ads. They have to be out there; I just haven’t found them.
Edit: I found one magazine ad in the November 1983 issue of Boy’s Life. It is what you should expect from a video game advertisement. It raises questions about other potential places to find video game advertisements. Hopefully, this doesn’t send me down the rabbit hole of Boy’s Life Magazine.
What happened to them? Xonox was dissolved by its parent company. I’m not sure what the sales figures for these games were, but they seem not to have been enough to keep them going. K-Tel bowed out of the video game market, and it looks like they never tried to reenter it.
Games
There are a few things to talk about here. Xonox released games on the Atari 2600, ColecoVision, and the Vic-20. These were mostly the same games, but there were a few exclusives. There were also the Double-Enders, which are probably the most recognizable games. Anyway, here is the list:
Atari 2600
- Artillery Duel
- Chuck Norris Superkicks
- Ghost Manor
- Motocross Racer
- Robin Hood
- Sir Lancelot
- Spike’s Peak
- Tomarc the Barbarian
- Artillery Duel/Chuck Norris Super Kicks
- Artillery Duel/Ghost Manor
- Artillery Duel/Spike’s Peak
- Chuck Norris Superkicks/Ghost Manor
- Chuck Norris Superkicks/ Spike’s Peak
- Ghost Manor/Spike’s Peak
- Robin Hood/Sir Lancelot
- Motocross Racer/Tomarc the Barbarian
ColecoVision
- Artillery Duel
- Chuck Norris Superkicks
- It’s Only Rock n’ Roll (Coleco Only)
- Motocross Racer
- Robin Hood
- Sir Lancelot
- Slurpy (Coleco Only)
- Tomarc the Barbarian
- Word Feud (Coleco only)
- Artillery Duel/Chuck Norris Superkicks
- Motocross Racer/Tomarc the Barbarian
- Robin Hood/Sir Lancelot
Commodore Vic-20
- Artillery Duel
- Chuck Norris Superkicks
- Ghost Manor
- Motocross Racer
- Robin Hood
- Sir Lancelot
- Spike’s Peak
- Tomarc the Barbarian
Xonox repackaged the same eight games on the three platforms for which they published games. They would release the games on cassette tapes for the commodore computers. I’m unsure how long the format lasted before it was replaced with floppy disks.
A good resource for looking up information on Xonox and other companies is AtariAge. There is a very nice thread on prototypes like Ice Palace. It is also how I found one of their commercials.
Other Multi-Carts and PlayAround
For those who don’t know, PlayAround was a company that made pornographic games for the Atari 2600. Since I’m not planning on doing anything on those games, I’ll mention their multi-carts here. Around the same time as Xonox, PlayAround made cartridges similar to Xonox’s.
The PlayAround Double-Enders had one of their porn games on each end. I’m just now realizing this could get awkward. I won’t mention all of the games they made; that is something you can look up for yourself.
While writing this, I haven’t come across other multi-carts for the Atari 2600. I think these are where it started, but there could be others. I might revisit multi-carts at some other time.
The Most Annoying Thing About Xonox
Xonox is a frustrating company. Not because their games are bad or because they can be hard to find. The thing that bothered me the most was the Xonox being auto-corrected to Xbox. This happened all the time!
It makes finding physical copies of the game annoying, depending on the search engine I was using. I think I saw a few of these back in the 90s. I haven’t seen them in the wild in the last few years, but I haven’t been looking for them.
If you want to collect these games, you will end up with doubles. There are only eight games, and some of them can be expensive. I think it would be easier to emulate the games you want instead of trying to get all of them.
This does raise an interesting question. What does a complete set of Atari 2600 games look like? Would you need to have all the Double-Enders and the single carts?
Final Thoughts
This was interesting, to say the least. I learned about a magazine that was published by the Boy Scouts of America, a Canadian telecommunications company, and about double-ender pornographic games on the Atari 2600. This has been a strange project.
I wouldn’t have paid attention to Xonox if it wasn’t for the Double-Ender cartridges. I wouldn’t have spent so much time fighting the search engine over looking up “Xonox” instead of Xbox. I might have been happier, but I wouldn’t have learned anything. These cartridges have been a mystery to me for a while, and not knowing was nagging me.
I wish I had found some reviews from the 80s. It would’ve been nice to know what people thought about these games back then. Today, these games probably get mocked like other Atari 2600 games.
The graphics are dated, but that is to be expected with 40-year-old games. The gameplay is going to be simple, and sometimes, the games might not work at all. These games are 40+ years old and might not work as well as they used to.
I’m unsure of what the subject of the next one of these projects is going to be. I would like to look at a few more companies from the 80s, but I would also like to cover some stuff from the late 80s and early 90s. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
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