Top Gear 2 SNES Blue Cart

[ender5498]

5761
I found this Top Gear 2 cartridge at a local used video game store earlier today. At first I thought that it just had a sun faded label, but the more I looked at it the more I thought that it wasn't. I know that the normal Top Gear 2 carts are a completely different color. If it was sun faded then the black of the label would be lighter, but it is the same normal color. The KEMCO is the same blue KEMCO on the Top Gear 1 and 3000 carts. In the bottom right hand corner of the label where it says "SUPER NINTENDO ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM" is completely white, unlike any other SNES cart that I own. Also, the official nintendo seal of quality is still gold. The last thing that stood out to me as being strange is in the upper left hand corner (like every other SNES cart where it says "Licensed by Nintendo), the little oval where Nintendo should be it is completely blank. There is nothing there, no faded letters or anything.
I was juster wondering if I did indeed find a sun faded labeled cart, a duplicate, or something else. I tried looking on the internet but I couldn't find any information about this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Rickstilwell1]

Another possibility could be that someone replaced the label with one of their own if the original label had been destroyed.

[Ryudo]

Seen those. Thought it was just weird sun damage

[Pr3tty F1y]

I'm not an expert in cart labels, but it if it's a legit label, it looks like the printing process failed with the magenta and yellow tones and only printed the cyan tones to the label. If it truly is sun damage, perhaps there was an issue with the mix for the magenta and yellow ink that may have predisposed it to photosensitive fading. Although the latter sounds like a much more complicated/unlikely set of events.

The seal of quality may have been added at a separate time, perhaps after cart testing or maybe the metallic inking portions weren't affected.

[ender5498]

Thank you guys for the replies, I got a better quality photo. Any more help would be appreciated.5764

[wiggyx]

1001% sure that it's just faded.

[Ryudo]

^ What he said. Seen them a lot in stores

[Leo_A]

Edit - Changed my mind on making a post. But it's sure hard to believe that fading could turn this into that.

http://pics.mobygames.com/images/covers/large/1279636049-00.jpg

[djshok]

I'm gonna say it's sun fade. Black is not usually affected by sun fading the way colours are. Alternatively it could be a poorly printed label, maybe dude to some screw up at the factory back in the day, but it suuuure looks like sunfade to me.

[wiggyx]

Edit - Changed my mind on making a post. But it's sure hard to believe that fading could turn this into that.

http://pics.mobygames.com/images/covers/large/1279636049-00.jpg

Not at all. The sun will fade ANYTHING with inks/dyes/etc. over time. It happens.

http://www.puregaming.org/DSC_0039.jpg

[Leo_A]

Of course it happens. And even though I do suspect that there's some element of fading here, how do you propose how the yellow exhaust turned a shade of blue for one example?

Color fading means one or more of the colors has been damaged. Blue isn't a component of yellow, red and green are. If one of those two colors was damaged and took it away from the original yellow color, I would've expected the car exhaust to shift towards red or green.

Instead everything is turning into a match for the Kemco blue logo, including things that had no blue content in them before like yellow and orange. For instance with something I'm more familiar with, Technicolor film productions from the late 50's and early 60's started fading terribly after a couple of years in storage when they changed their product for the worse accidently. With such film, the red component is what's always damaged. So something that was yellow (A combination of red and green) would shift towards green for an example. It follows the color rules...

This Top Gear 2 cartridge to me doesn't appear like the result of one or two of the three primary colors being damaged severely by the sun. Everything seems to match the blue of the Kemco name including things that were never blue to start with. To me, that doesn't make any sense.

[wiggyx]

Of course it happens. And even though I do suspect that there's some element of fading here, how do you propose how the yellow exhaust turned a shade of blue for one example?

Color fading means one or more of the colors has been damaged. Blue isn't a component of yellow, red and green are. If one of those two colors was damaged and took it away from the original yellow color, I would've expected the car exhaust to shift towards red or green.

Instead everything is turning into a match for the Kemco blue logo, including things that had no blue content in them before like yellow and orange. For instance with something I'm more familiar with, Technicolor film productions from the late 50's and early 60's started fading terribly after a couple of years in storage when they changed their product for the worse accidently. With such film, the red component is what's always damaged. So something that was yellow (A combination of red and green) would shift towards green for an example. It follows the color rules...

This Top Gear 2 cartridge to me doesn't appear like the result of one or two of the three primary colors being damaged severely by the sun. Everything seems to match the blue of the Kemco name including things that were never blue to start with. To me, that doesn't make any sense.


It doesn't make sense because you're treating it as if what you are seeing is projected light and not reflected light.

First, the yellow portion has all but been obliterated. The blue that you see remaining was used to make the crimson colored "smoke" in the background.

Print media doesn't work like projected light. It does NOT use red, green, and blue to create an image. Instead it uses CMYK. Cyan (blue), Magenta (pink-red), yellow, & black (and possibly something known as a "spot color" to produce a color that CMYK cannot produce, such as the gold Nintendo seal). Yellow is a primary in the reflected light world, and green is made using blue and yellow. In order to make that red smoke into a crimson color there would need to be a presence of not only magenta, but blue and yellow as well. The blue and black have the most UV resistance in this label, and that's why the smoke is now blue (black will often fade to blue rather than gray or any other color depending on the composition of the inks).

It doesn't appear at all uncharacteristic of UV fading.

[BlastProcessing402]

There's a window at the local rental store (yeah it still exists!) that unfortunately hits the games with a LOT of sunlight, and I've seen plenty of game boxes that have exactly that sort of look to them, with the black and cyan still there but the other colors mostly obliterated. It's sun damage, no doubt about it.

[Balloon Fight]

100% Guaranteed sun faded.

[MarioMania]

Yeah, it's faded..

The Red Super Nintendo Logo is White

[Tanooki]

That's moderately heavy sun damage, but it was spared the final fatal death of a label I see often at this one nitwits spot at the local flea market. He ignorantly prices stuff too high and equally dumb never lowers it even as quality fails. After that label the blue and the blacks will fail, and over time the label will lose all its moisture and dry out peeling away and turning white like a bad fall out from a sunburn and just flake away. Though at that rate usually the plastics of the cart itself also has the gray leached out and they start during a light gray/white color too and depending if the heat was intense long enough the plastic warps as well. I've seen some stuff that would make people sick if they cared enough.