DMG-TR-USA but without the "-" and Made in Japan at the bottom

found this example on ebay.  First one in 10 Years Sorry for the confusion.

again the stuff for Tetris was just for example.  of factory codes or QA Code.

You are certainly welcome here and to contribute to the variany list but, FYI, Splain started a post about Tetris Variants, cataloging every little observed detail at the thread listed below.  You guys might have more fun continuing this discussion over there, and might get a few more people to contribute to the discussion.  I'll likely be a lurker since at this time I don't have much to say.

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess...

I'm going to respond to this one since I was able to look at the photo when I got to my PC.  I don't think this is necessarily a "variant" but if there are enough without the dashes that are found, I could consider adding it.  The thing is, I think, that this might be on the fine line of an actual error.  I have 2x DMG-TR-USA Tetris games that do not have the MADE IN JAPAN stamp.  By looking at your reference image and my two carts, I'm thinking that Nintendo had a two step printing process and that the serial numbers and the THIS SIDE OUT stamp were printed after the color printing.  I say this because on both of my carts, the stamping just looks not as good quality as the color image and, honestly, not as good as most other Game Boy games.  It's my guess that shortly after game production, Nintendo might have refined their label making process and these stamps, or the provided ink was improved upon because they are Japanese and have always had high regards to the production quality of their items.

A good check might be to grab multiple copies of USA launch title games and look at there serials.  Are any of them poorly printed?  The main question is if the print process was poor, when does it go from being "a bad print job" to an actual error worth adding to the list of variants and common errors?
 

Agree on the "Bad Print Job" there are a few other carts that could be marked as "bad Print Job".

as for the serial/label debate. can/would the fact that a cart is different then the corresponding manual be up for debate? take for example
Cosmo Tank only one i have found so far

or even the cart different colors.
Killer Instinct i have one that is a black cart and multiple carts that are gray. is this a debate?

or even the cart different how "Nintendo Game Boy" is thin or thick?

Great discussion!

As for the no-dashes Tetris, I'd also chalk that one up to a bad print job; look at how some of the other letters are a bit thin/missing parts; especially on the "Official Game Boy video link game pak" logo.

That said, I'm not going to be able to resist checking for dashes now, and if I ever see one myself I'm going to buy it. Just in case  

i post a pic of the black Killer Instinct later today. as for the manual database been working on this for about 6 years and have a good grasp on this. i have just over 1000 and doubles is always a problem.

what is the largest file that can be posted here. i can share the manual db with you if you like. also have about 2000 photos too.

just saying.

Sorry, but I'm not 100% sure of what you mean for some of these.  Regarding labels, I think cataloging manuals and boxes could be a different discussion.  I'm specifically looking to catalog variations of cartridges.

If you have different color cartridges then... that's interesting.  I know this may seem obvious, but have you opened them and confirmed they are legit.  I don't think anyone on here has heard of a black KI cart, because black cartridges came to represent the GB/GBC hybrid carts and, again if memory serves me correctly, KI was a late release and should definitely have been grey.

Also regarding that Tetris, I'm quite skeptical.  I'd like to see a close scan of the label, and inspect the quality.  I've never found a legit (US/Japanes) Game Boy cartridge without the QA stamp on the label.  I don't look at a lot of non-US stuff but from what I've seen, it's there.  Again, Nintendo is really big on quality control, so i can't imagine legit carts wouldn't have it.

Also regaring thickness of plastics/etc, I've never really seen that.  GB carts are pretty consistent, though label quality (whether printing or the paper used to print on) are quite different, though that tends to change from game to game or publisher to publisher.

I'd love to see that db. I'm also interested in your list of 3000 total GB games and what it includes. I'll send you a PM.

Sorry to sidetrack the thread rlh.  

Black cart Killer Instinct for consideration

DB  https://docs.google.com/spreadshe...

re added photos that were deleted

Whoa. The label matches the common grey cart label, it has a USA region code, and it's stamped. Do you know anything about where this came from? I can't find anything at all about it online.

Any chance it's a label swap? Not trying to be skeptical for skeptibility sake but this just doesn't make sense. There's no reason why there should be a rare, one-off black cart game that's not a CGB title. It also seems confusing to consumers (they'd think it was a color game and it wouldn't behave as such.)

I'm not saying you are lying, I just doubt the legitimacy of the case with the label.

EDIT

The only way this seems viable to me is if this was a game from a giveaway and maybe only 100 or so were ever created.  That’s a possibility.  The black cases already existed at that time and I wouldn’t think they’d want to print new labels for such a small batch.

I picked it up on ebay a few years ago. the seller was unaware of the item and had it for sale for $9 so i jumped on it, and hoped it was not a fake. when i got it in, i went over it with a fine tooth comb and could not see any signs of tampering and the inside case was correct even down t the marks and numbering on the inside plastic. as for this being a one of not sure. but i have not seen anything about this anywhere.

Well if I ever see one myself, I'm going to pick it up.

I said that about the no-hyphen Tetris, and, well, I found one and picked it up. It doesn't have any hyphens, that's for sure, but the thinness and incompleteness of the surrounding letters suggests a printing problem more than anything else. It's a little odd that both hyphens are completely gone, and I haven't seen any "nearly gone" copies, but I wouldn't call this a variant.

https://imgur.com/7QnL1lU...

I doubt there’s any chance what I’m about to ask is remotelt possible but have you tested this.  Does it have a color palette?  It would have a different label/should but, I don’t know, maybe it’s a production proto. Also, what’s the stamp on the label.  Does it have an “A” after the two digits?
 

not sure how to test the cart.  but the pcb is a reg production board.

i was able to find 2 copies and picked both up the letters are think but the the hypens was never placed.  i tested the lable and the lable are screen printed.  the reg production are photo gloss print. so in my opeion it is a variant that is untraced or identified.  looks like some work needs to be done on this one.

Ok guys, it's time for a discussion and I wouldn't mind actually taking one of these to a new post so others not following this thread can chime in. Regarding the Tetris game, I've looked through my copies of Tetris, Tennis and Baseball and I can definitely say that printing was poor for those early runs. Keep in mind, the Japanese games didn't have these silver bars so this was a new process and I imagine after printing a few hundred thousand to maybe even a million labels, QA was slightly less than pleased and changed the font or thickness of the lettering. I know on my carts, some of the letters appeared to have small bit missing, toward the tips of some letters. This isn't profound but it's obvious that the lines were just to thin for the ink that was used and variation in ink-flow caused some of these to have poor printing. I also speculate that the hyphens were probably some of the thinnest lines used in printing the text, so that's why they were missed. If/when ink was running toward the end of the print cycle, or maybe if they tweaked the print-speed for faster production, this is the first area of the print job where ink tends to not show up. Just a guess.

That said, if we want to put this in as an error, and we generally agree, I'm going to add it but mark it as a variant. But, if we choose to do that, let's check out or Tennis, Baseball and Alleyway carts and see if they have any with missing hyphens. Those were all the initial release games (did I miss one?) so I'm guessing there's a moderate chance they might be missing hyphens too, but that might not be the case because far more Tetris labels were needed at released than any of those games. The point is, they may have rush-printed the Tetris labels but not the others.

Ok, now regarding Killer Instinct. Yes, I've expressed my concern that someone could have monkeyed with this and heat-removed the label and put it on a GBC cartridge case. All pieces would be legit but it wouldn't be an actual release. There are a couple of ways this game could have come into existence, because I don't doubt that the shell or board is real. I've not gotten out my magnifying glass to compare the label but at a glance, it seems legit. I think the best tell-tale sign is if this game has the facility stamp on the label and does the pressure level and font style actually match other GB carts. If so, I'm willing to believe all components are legitimate.

But is it a true variant? This is where we still need more questions answered, and hear me out. Who knows. Maybe this is something Rare made for a few, select employees. They took the components, hand assembled them and game them out to 5-20 people. Maybe there was a competition packed in with a game, or printed in a magazine where 100 or of these games were given to lucky winners. If we can find a copy of the promotion, then that verifies it's a "variant". And, last and probably not the case, maybe someone at Nintendo was a HUGE fan of the game, so they made their own. They would have had to have had connections directly to the manufacturing plant so they could at least get a label and a blank black cart shipped to them. The other, last option I can think of is that before final assembly, Nintendo/Rare requested 1-5 batch sets of "final production" carts where one set was standard gray and the other was black. At some point, before actual production was started, the idea of going with a black cart was rejected and this is one of those final production prototypes. Or, another spin on it, Rare ordered a sample production of Black carts, which they wanted, but being that it'd cause confusion as to whether it was a GBC cart or not, Nintendo halted the idea and told them they couldn't do that.

There are a multiple possibilities of where this could legitimately have come from, but I hesitate to call a final-production prototype a "variant". TL;DR, we don't really know where this came from. Until we can find more information, we can't verify if it's a legitimate variant or a prototype. Still, I'm willing to add it to my list and at least add a special not that it's not officially counted until more details are found but, variant hunters should keep a sharp eye out for this one. If this had limited run and considering that none of use have ever seen or heard about it, it likely is the absolute rarest, legitimate cart for the GB.

Kudos to jvoss and I too would have snatched it up the moment I saw it. For I sake, I hope you have something really special, but for the sake of my collection I hope it's just a proto. Regardless, let's all agree to not let this break on Kotaku that it's a rare variant until the 3-5 of use hunting for this thing have our copies.  

Been googling. It's hard to google this when the SNES version had a black cart, but it would make sense for Nintendo/Rare to consider making the GB version black as well.

This site makes it sound like it was planned to be black, but then the plans were canceled: https://everything2.com/title/Kil...

"Contrary to common belief, however, this was not the only home version of Killer Instinct. Released in 1995, Nintendo published Rare's adaptation of Killer Instinct for the short-lived Super Game Boy. (Luckily for the longevity of this title, Super Game Boy titles also played on the Game Boy.) The is game is now fairly uncommon, but it's not worth even the $10-20 price tag it generally recieves. The cartridge, as well as the box, are much like the SNES version, with black plastic and the same cover and label art. (The black cart is less notable on the Game Boy, as many other Gameboy titles had cartridges other than grey. However, this was the only black cartridge that was not a Game Boy/Game Boy Color hybrid game, as this game predates the Game Boy Color and the practice of giving hybrid games black carts.)

Um, nevermind that. The Killer Instinct GB cart is, as with all other GB/SGB titles, made of grey plastic. I've found no evidence that the originally planned black carts ever made it to market, or that they were even originally planned, beyond one source that is now looking pretty suspect. Anyone who has any more info on this is invited to /msg me."

Well, it would at least be interesting to know what his "one source" was. This page was written 17 years ago, and the guy's profile says he hasn't been online for 2.2 years. But I gotta try, right? I signed up and sent him a message. I was very polite. I'll report back if I hear from him.

ill go back and see who i bought it from and see if they can answer the questions.

That would be really awesome.  If they happened to have picked this up from someone in Seattle area or while in the UK, there's a chance this is a rare production prototype.  That'd be kind of awesome.
 

You all just talking crazy now.....

Good to see you posting though jvoss!

I'm interested to see what the end results comes up on this as KI has always been one of my top three most memorable games from youth on the GB. (other = Link's Awakening, duh and Bart v the Juggernauts)

just looked for the history of when i got this cart and no luck.  it must have been before 2015-2016  ebay deleates history older then 3 years. 
 

Yeah dude, same here. When I was a kid I got my GB with KI as a pack-in. So KI was all I played until I made it to a used game shop and got Tetris and Super RC Pro-Am.

For those needing the Elctrobrain version of Trax, there's one on eBay.

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/e1...

I hope the link works because I copied it from an email. Looks nice but there may be sticker residue on the label. That's easy to clean off with out damaging it if it's a glossy label.