While going through some old issues of Computer Gaming World, I came upon this little nugget and thought it would be worth sharing, as this title doesn't seem to appear in any of the standard online unreleased NES game lists. It's taken from a column called "Video Gaming World", in the June 1988 issue. This column was written by none other than Bill Kunkel, Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley, and ran for a few months in mid/late 1988. It was actually the continuation of a very short-lived column called "Video Game Update" that Kunkel and Katz did for ANALOG Computing magazine. These columns were clearly the direct predecessor to VG&CE magazine, being almost identical in style and tone. After CGW decided to drop it, Kunkel and Katz teamed up with Andy Eddy (who had also been at ANALOG) and started VG&CE. Anyway, here's the quote, from a news roundup compiled by Joyce Worley:

"Activision's runaway hit, Shanghai, will be available this summer for the NES. This puzzler, which requires players to match pairs from 144 randomized picture tiles, topped many "Year's Best" computer award lists and promises to equally entrance Nintendo gamers."

Activision was the original publisher of the various computer versions of Shanghai, but had already licensed it to Sunsoft for the Famicom port in Japan, which had been released in December, 1987. Interestingly, Sunsoft had chosen to leave all of the in-game text in English, so if Activision had chosen to bring this version over (and you would have to assume that's what they were planning) it would have been the easiest of ports. Regardless, it never did happen, and in retrospect it's not all that surprising. Activision was always one of the more prolific vaporware peddlers on the NES scene, and this game was due to be released during the peak of that whole "chip shortage" debacle. It should also be noted that they had already licensed Shanghai to Sega, who released a superior version of it for the SMS just a few months later. In any case, the real mystery here is why the announcement of this release only seems to have made it into this small CGW column, as far as I can tell.

I can confirm that this was shown for the NES at a Toy Fair, but I don't know which one (my notes say 1984, which is obviously impossible, so it must have been a typo!).

There were many Famicom games whose in-game text (and even title screens) were completely in English, such as Battle City and Dragon Buster. Which brings me to another question.

Just what were the costs for NES games? For example, how much did a publisher have to pay to get a license, and then pay for the chips to be manufactured by Nintendo? And the software licensing agreements, and how certain games (such as Dragon Buster) use a proprietary Famicom chip, and need to be reprogrammed to use an American, Nintendo exclusive chip?  Was the reprogramming all up to the publisher, or did they have to ask Namco to reprogram it, or maybe even contract an outside company for that purpose?