Mario Bros/Duck Hunt Variations

[tpugmire]

I was browsing at my local Play N Trade a few days ago and noticed something that I had never seen before. Among the 20+ SMB/DH carts I saw one that had a different label on it. Instead of the usual red line between the pictures, it had a Nintendo logo between the two pictures, and the pictures seemed to be a bit smaller. Did I stumble across something rare or does anyone care about such things?

[Baloo]

http://www.mathpirate.net/log/wp-con...009/09/NES.JPG

Like this?

[portnoyd]

There are a fair amount of variants for both this and SMB/DH/World Class Track Meet. Variant crazy people will be interested but they are not in any way rare or valuable.

[tpugmire]

Yep, that the one Baloo. I didn't figure it was particularly valuable, I just had never seen one before. While we're on the subject of variations, is there any market for NES manual variations? I recently won a lot of manuals on eBay and I already had a couple of the ones that I won. When I got them and was comparing them, I noticed a few differences. Nothing too major, but I was just curious.

[portnoyd]

Even less of a market than for that versus the SMB/DH variant.

The only variants that people fuss over are licensed/unlicensed variants (ex. Tengen Pacmans), blatant art redesigns (ex. Gun.smoke), 3 screw backs versus 5 screw backs (ex. a lot of early titles) and cart color variants (Color Dreams titles). I'm probably forgetting a category or two, but that's most of what you'll find people have at least some interest in.

[TRM]

The only variants that people fuss over are ... 3 screw backs versus 5 screw backs (ex. a lot of early titles) ...

Ugh, could never figure out the desire.

But yeah, as some of the others have stated already, SMB/DH has several different varieties, I guess you could say. Kinda cool, but some of the varieties just get really nit picky.

[BetaWolf47]

That's confusing. I can't figure out how a different screw amount is more desired than a difference like that. My guess is that people do actually care about the SMB/Duck Hunt variation, but it's so common that there's no value to it.

There's a more subtle difference that tpugmire didn't catch: the variant doesn't have the Seal of Quality on it, which means it's probably an early print.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Ugh, could never figure out the desire.

But yeah, as some of the others have stated already, SMB/DH has several different varieties, I guess you could say. Kinda cool, but some of the varieties just get really nit picky.

I'm nit picky about variations, but I don't go out of my way to collect them. It's amazing how many different variations there are for NES games that I've come across:
Seal of Quality (Oval, Round, White, None...)
Screw variants (3 vs 5)
Artwork variants (4-player logo comes to mind for Super Off Road)
Copyright variants
Back label variants
Cart color variants (blue/gray/black/etc.)

Just to name a few...the only one really worth any money that I've seen is the screw variant games. There's a thread on NA detailing some of the more rare screw variants, such as 5-screw Mega Man.

[j1e]

^ Yeah, the folks at NA are gung ho on those NES variants. I never knew much about it either until going through some threads about them.

I recently came across one of those SMB/Duck Hunt variants like you did. I've probably gone through 50 or more of those carts and that was first one I've seen.