Hi,

I've been going through my games with a fine-toothed comb recently to see what variations of stuff I have, and was wondering how many of these you were planning on putting into the variations section for each game. Warning: This is long-winded.

Box variations:
Seal - round or oval
Rev. A - presence or absence, what does that even signify?
Any other changes - presence or absence of box text (specifically "coupon inside" messages), address changes, etc.

Manual variations:
Seal - round or oval
Game code - presence or absence (for early 1st party games)
Stars - the mysterious stars that may or may not have to do with TV warnings
Address changes
Text changes - i.e. Power Pad vs. Family Fun Fitness

Cart variations:
Cart ID - presence or absence (for early 1st party games). This may correlate with the 3 vs 5 screw variants.

You might need to list the matrix of these possibilities in some cases, depending on what actually exists. The address change category came to mind when looking at early Bandai games in particular, since they moved their American headquarters from NJ to CA at some point in 1987 or 1988.

In particular, the sealed copy of Athletic World I have doesn't exactly seem to fit what you have in the database. It has the newer style box and manual with Power Pad text and a round seal, but the game still has the Family Fun Fitness text with its round seal. I can't remember the address on my version, but none of the components have the -1 change flag. The database currently only shows the -1 cart with no FFF text as correlating to the new style box.

Other odds and ends:
The UPC code is different from country to country, I'm not sure the database currently allows this as I see some have the US UPC and others have the Canadian one.

Why is there no code listed for the early 1st-party titles? Sure, these were originally released with no code, but most of them were later re-released with a code on the box, manual, and cart.

I know it's currently sexier to tabulate all of the variations for unlicensed games, but there really is a lot of difference amongst the licensed ones, too. Thanks for listening. I really do love the site, just wondering how type A everyone is wanting to be about this.

Hi brideck,

It's good to see another variations collector here.

To answer some of your questions, you may want to see some earlier posts talking about variations, etc, but the skinny of it is that we are tracking everything you mentioned (and more) but it's a matter of filling in this information. There are (literally) hundreds of variations that we know about, but it's a matter of getting the info into the database. It's extremely time-consuming, and I've put the data-entry of variations on the back-burner temporarily so that I can finish up the collection tool.

The UPC code thing we just noticed the other day -- it shouldn't have US codes for non-US games, and we realized that our cloning tool was populating non-US games with the US UPC code. I've got that listed as a data scrub I'll be performing.

As far as the codes for the 1st-party titles... that's still up in the air. My original thinking was to preserve the games' original release information, then add variations to that. That said, any early release that came without a cart ID, then later with one, would be considered a variation on the original.

The only thing I hadn't considered yet was your suggestion about tracking company addresses. I'll definitely make a note of that!

All that said, stay tuned! The only reason the unlicensed games have so many tabulated variations vs licensed is because there was more demand to get that information up, so we did. The licensed variations data will be so detailed, it will drive a variations collector nuts (like me)

-Dain

Sounds excellent. I don't have a ton of games or variations yet, but anyway I can help down the road, I will.