I'm aware of the unlicensed NES games and most of the varieties of unlicensed games out there for it, especially the gold Camerica cartridges (which I'm particularly fond of being a huge Codemasters fan), but my question lies more with Genesis cartridges.
In my somewhat small Genesis collection (55 games) I have a number of games that don't have standard Sega carts. All of these come from two companies, Codemasters and Electronic Arts. I remember some of these from my childhood and always wondered about the weird shapes of them, like Fantastic Dizzy from Codemasters or NHL '94 from EA. My first assumption as I got older was that they were unlicensed games similar to the ones so common on the NES. However, all of these games featured the Official Sega Seal of Quality, so they must have had licensing from Sega.
I know that CodeMasters loves to fuck with other people's systems and come out with all kinds of awesome stuff like the Aladdin Deck Enhancer, the Game Genie, and the J-Carts for the Micro Machines games on Genesis, so I can understand them having different shaped carts even if I don't understand why. But EA? Maybe it's just because of what EA is today, a publishing giant who never really breaks the norm, but I just find it surprising that they would do anything unique. This is until I remember that EA had awesome and really interesting and creative games during the 90's.
So I guess the point I'm getting at is, what's up with these seemingly licensed yet cockeyed cartridges? Why do EA games have such tall carts, and what's with that yellow tab on all of them? And why are CodeMaster's carts so small and rounded, imagine all the extra space that must be in a regular Genesis cart if they can fit everything in that little space.
This also leads me to wonder why every licensed game (the preceding excluded) had identical (labeling excluded) cartridges. Did these come from Sega directly? Was this included in the cost of obtaining the license if they did? Or was each company responsible for manufacturing their own damn games. The same question can be posed for any cartridge based system that used identical cartridges (NES, SNES, Genesis, SMS, N64, 32X, etc.) With 2600 for example, you could tell what company made a particular game by what kind of cartridge it came in or what kind of label it had. So how did they go about having every company use the same cartridges, and why/how did these two licensed companies not use them?
As much as this may sound like hypothetical rambling, I'd greatly appreciate any answers people could give, or any theories you'd like to throw out there. It's been stumping me for at least a decade and a half now.