The constant thorn in Nintendo's side were the developers of unlicensed cartridges. They were not very numerous, but they were always there, and, as is usual in such battles, always one step ahead. Maybe the most productive and resourceful of these companies was Australian distributor Home Entertainment Suppliers, or HES (sometimes H.E.S.) for short.
When Nintendo put a seal of approval on the official games, claiming that only these would run with Nintendo hardware, they created their own seal. When Nintendo changed the hardware of the later NES revisions so that unlicensed games would indeed no longer work, HES produced a dongle that would use an official game for authentification. Read all the details in the Wikipedia article for the company. All in all they produced at least 20 unlicensed NES titles. One of them was maybe the only unlicensed Othello for this platform.
The history of the game is obscure. It is credited to a Bit Corp. A couple of years earlier, a probably German company by this name had created a few games for the Atari 2600. I found no Othello listed among them and have no idea if these companies are supposed to be identical. Since in any case HES produced the NES code, I have treated it as a HES original and listed it as an Australian game.
Since there are (probably) only two Othello games for the NES platform, it is amusing to compare them. With its playful appearance (balloons on the animated title screen, RPG-style characters to represent the players) this game is in stark contrast to the solemn atmosphere of the official offering. Unfortunately it does not play very well, but that may just be an incompatibility with RockNES.
