GameBoy Color Spine Design Variations

[Gemini-Phoenix]

This has been bugging me for some time.

With the European (And maybe some American) GameBoy Color games, the spine on the left hand side of the front is sometimes shiny, but other times not.

Why is this?

How come some games warrant having a shiny cover, and others don't?

[joshnickerson]

I think that the first year or so of the GBC's life, all the GBC games were given a nice shiny border to really set them apart from their black and white counterparts. It might have cost a bit more to make them like that, because later editions of those games did not have a shiny border. My copy of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, which I bought when it was release, has a shiny border, while Oracle of Ages, which I bought about a year later, did not.