You're A Winner! Game Carts

[8-Bit Archeology]

So I have a Vectorman game and the box says "randomly selected Vectorman game cartridges have a chance to win built right in! If you finish one of the winning cartridges a final screen saying You Win! Will gove you a secret phone number and address."

Has anyone heard of other games that did this?


Does the screen only happen once or can it say you win every time you beat it?

Also could proven winning carts be worth more?

Thanks.

[SparTonberry]

I'd imagine it probably comes up everytime, as I can't imagine you'd see it again, as you'd have to take a photo of your TV and mail the cart back to Sega to claim the prize. And you probably would want that, right?

I'm sure a proven winner would be worth a lot more money as there was only a limited number made.
(I think you had to be the first person to return a verified winning cart to Sega to claim the prize, and someone did that.)

The only thing is I'm not sure how an alternate, no-purchase entry works, which I would think be legally required since it's effectively an expensive lottery ticket with an additional requirement (finishing the game without cheating) to redeem.

[JSoup]

Also could proven winning carts be worth more?

We had a topic about this a while ago. Yeah, it would be theoretically worth more, but how can you be sure it's a "YOU WIN!" copy? I could provide a screenshot, but those can be faked. In fact, I recall seeing a topic on NeoGaf were a guy was able to fake the "YOU WIN!" stuffs and plug it into a ROM, so copies are completely fakable.

[SparTonberry]

I don't think the YOU WIN version has been dumped.

[JSoup]

I'm searching NeoGaf for the topic (it was a few years ago), I'm not sure if it was a YOU WIN ROM or now. I remember assuming it was just a faked image or something that got plugged in. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen the actually winning image aside from a grainy image in a magazine.

[Niku-Sama]

some one just needs to find it and compare it, every aspect, to a regular one.
theres bound to be some sort of physical difference

[JSoup]

some one just needs to find it and compare it, every aspect, to a regular one.
theres bound to be some sort of physical difference

Doubtful. It's just three images: YOU WIN!, NOT A WINNER! and NOW TRY IT WITHOUT CHEATING. Don't need special chips for that.

[BetaWolf47]

The only way to really check (aside from beating the game) would be to dump the ROM and look for a different checksum, right? Someone would need to start hunting different copies for that.