Sega's Play to Win promotion carts: Rarest of the rares?

[gbpxl]

Sega programmed a small number of cartridges to display an 800 number when the player finishes the game. The first person to call that number received $25k. Here's an article about a kid who won

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/12-year-old+gamer+wins+%2425,000+cash+grand+prize+in+Sega% 27s+videogame...-a017793447

Apparently it requires you to finish the game without cheat codes so itd take a while to figure out which carts contain the code, unless theres a visual difference on the PCB of a known Play to Win cart versus a regular one.

Might be worth it to play through your copy of Vectorman if you have it, could be one of the rarest known legitimate variants (opposed to error copies, upside down labels, discs containing the wrong game, etc.)

[gbpxl]

Looks like this has been discussed before and nothing had turned up then either.

I know there are at least 4 of these cartridges out there, so if 1 was sent in, there are 3 left at least

EDIT: there were 515,000 of these cartridges made and of those, only 101 have phone numbers in them. Its basically like a needle in a haystack.

[Gameguy]

This contest interested me quite a bit too. It's just hard to find any way of finding these rare cartridges without having to play through the entire game, and basically buying every cartridge possible to test them all. It makes me question if the copy I own is a winning one.

Sega stuff isn't as well documented as everything Nintendo, there's still lots of Sega game variants not properly documented everywhere.

[jb143]

I wonder if the checksum is different. It probably wouldn't be too hard to build a checksum tester.

Actually, I seem to remember wondering and thinking of this before...

Ah, here is is...
https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?130608-Vectorman-Contest-(Cart-Variations-)/page2&highlight=Vectorman

[Bratwurst]

Only 101 of the carts had the contest phone number? Most assuredly they used eprom in place of the maskrom for the difference.

[Aussie2B]

Hmm, this contest doesn't quite make sense to me. There was a single $25,000 grand prize, ten prizes of $10,000, and ninety prizes of a Sega Saturn. If there really were only 101 carts with the winning info, then that would account for all the prizes. But they also said that no purchase was necessary, so you could enter by mailing in a postcard. But then how does that work? Were they banking on some of the people possessing winning carts to never call in, so postcards would be randomly selected to receive however many prizes were unclaimed?

They also require the winning cart to be mailed in. So Sega could've very well destroyed all the winning carts they got back. Even if they returned a copy of Vectorman back to the winners, there's no way it'd be the same copy, as there would be nothing stopping the winner from passing it off to a friend or family member so they could mail it in too, unless there's some identifying factor unique to each and every winning cart.

[gbpxl]

Hmm, this contest doesn't quite make sense to me. There was a single $25,000 grand prize, ten prizes of $10,000, and ninety prizes of a Sega Saturn. If there really were only 101 carts with the winning info, then that would account for all the prizes. But they also said that no purchase was necessary, so you could enter by mailing in a postcard. But then how does that work? Were they banking on some of the people possessing winning carts to never call in, so postcards would be randomly selected to receive however many prizes were unclaimed?

They also require the winning cart to be mailed in. So Sega could've very well destroyed all the winning carts they got back. Even if they returned a copy of Vectorman back to the winners, there's no way it'd be the same copy, as there would be nothing stopping the winner from passing it off to a friend or family member so they could mail it in too, unless there's some identifying factor unique to each and every winning cart.
I was confused about the mail-in thing too