PingvinBlueJeans, on Tue Nov 6, 2007 9:19 PM, said:
As far as I know, most if not all were released in both yellow and silver (though I don't recall ever seeing Mountain King in a yellow box). Exactly why I have no idea...it's just a variation like any other. My money is on the silver ones as being the earlier releases, but that's just a guess...perhaps it was regional.
I actually think that it was the other way around, i.e. the yellow boxes came first and then they changed to the silver ones. My reasoning is as follows:
1. The yellow boxes were printed differently for each specific system. My yellow box copies of Rolloverture and Gust Buster have "ColecoVision/Adam"
printed on the front and sides of the box. The yellow box for the C64 version of Rolloverture has "Commodore 64"
printed on the front (and I assume also the sides) of the box (
www.lemon64.com). I can only conclude that Sunrise originally printed different boxes for each system and each game - this must have been much more expensive than producing a generic box for each game that you then slap a system specific sticker on the front.
2. The silver boxes I have seen are all generic boxes for multiple systems. On the back where they cover trademarks they list all the systems the game was released on, e.g. ColecoVision, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Commodore 64 etc. Typically these boxes have a system specific sticker slapped on the front to indicate what system the game inside is for.
3. Most of the silver boxes I have seen came with carts with a gold label and instructions printed on yellow paper. These were obviously originally meant to be paired with yellow boxes to keep the yellow/gold theme going. If the silver boxes came first then why enclose carts with gold labels and yellow instructions?
I assume that it was cheaper to simplify the box printing and to just leave the gold cart labels and yellow instructions as-is. Although I do believe there are some silver cart labels floating around...........
I rest my weak case
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