Neville wrote:
I've been taking a look at Famicon boxes at Ebay. The carts which still have one fit into poorly made cardboard boxes, nothing more, nothing less. I wish I could directly link to their images, but they make it too difficult. Just search for "Super Mario Bros. 3" in their main page and eventually you'll be ablke to take a good look at one.
Yes there is a reason why there are so many SMS/GENESIS covers out there, you can take them out and scan them. The SMS/GEN boxes certainly make better items to look at on a shelf.
The NES online scene seems so different compared to SMS too. You seem to find more SMS people that are willing to spend their time doing stuff like scanning covers, collating them, etc. It's probably somehow related to the differing cultures of Europe vs USA.
Neville wrote:
I can't believe Nintendo has so little oversight. They could imagine their carts would eventually make good collectors items, and still they used plain cardboard boxes. I had an original Game Boy, and their carts also came in similar boxes.
It's cheaper so that's likely why. Nintendo are big on reselling you stuff you already bought. If you own the Sonic 1 Genesis cart can you play it on their Virtual Console or get a discount? Nope, but all they are really doing is selling a ROM with an emulator. It's a good business practice I guess if you can get people to do it, so companies like that hope all the carts/boxes they made quickly disintegrate so they can sell them to you again.
It's amazing how openly shonky Sega/Nintendo were too back in the day, with some guys only getting $10000/year (roughly $3/hour) to make games that went on to make millions.
http://www.retrocopy.com/sega-master-system/monopoly.aspx (trivia section)