Originally posted by: Friendsfa26
@splain,
unless i am missing your point , that Casper listing DOES show 2 different carts.
the "Natsume" textbox in the middle is purple on the left cart, and blue on the other one...
I don't think these are variations, but differences in printing. After collecting a TON of GB duplicates (as well as other games) and placing them side-by-side, I often find that there are color variations in labels, usually for the darker colors like black or dark blue, especially when you have two carts manufactured in two separate facilities (identified by having different two-digit stamps on the front of the cart.) This just means that the labels that were printed for these games were printed at different times, or the printing facility had two printers creating the labels.
So how do we define a variant? (And I can't believe I seriously asked that question.) To me, a label variant is any label that was intentionally changed. Whether they increased the revision number or not, if the label has been obviously modified, it's a variant. Variations in printing due to printing process doesn't count. Sure, you could have multiple samples to prove that label stickers look different, but that's not something you can catalog as variant because, at a microscopic label, no two labels are alike-- they are all variants.
My rule of intentional change also covers errors. Again, I reference Bill and Ted with the borked LJN logo. They made a significant print run of those and then someone noticed and fixed it. Regardless, it was an intentional change that had to be done in design. There's also DuckTales Most of us own a "DMT" cart, which is a mispelling of "DMG". There's also a "DMG" variant which fixed this issue, but didn't increase the revision number.
Of course, there's also the impressed stamp. It's a bit further than I've taken organizing my document but there are also different facility and, of course ROM identifiers. Personally, I don't think we should count differing facility codes for each game. I mean, if someone wants to take my spreadsheet and expand it and add found facility codes for carts, as well as ROM versions, be my guest. I am interested in having each variant in my collection and when it's all said and done, I
might try to hunt down and be sure I have every ROM variant as well. I think that could be a legitimate identifier for various variants, but I don't know if I'd want to pair that with specific label revisions AND ROM revisions. That's getting to be to crazy for me, personally.
When we get that far off in the weeds, I think someone could spend a lot of time simply researching single games, hunting down 20-30 copies of the same item and comparing them all. Be my guest if you are up for the challenge but IMHO, the point of this exercise is to find the common label variations, not accounting for common (but not error-specific) differences in manufacturing.
