On the Intellivision you can't trust the boxes to be super helpful when being nit-picky on cartridge variations. There are often different numbers of boxes and carts for the same game. For example, there might be 7 box variants and 4 cart variants (for one game) but some of those carts might have used 3 or 4 boxes and
shared boxes with 2 or 3 cart variants.
To clarify (maybe
) a game might have shipped with carts a, b, c, d and boxes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Maybe cart "a" only came with box "1" but cart "b" might have used 2, 3 and 4, cart "c" 3, 4, 5 and 6, and cart "d" 3, 4 and 7.
I put this up in a blog of mine once because I have had some trouble cataloging my Intellivison collection and have been discovering why over time:
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5539/10848152375_4f7f2edfb6_o.jpg[/img]We were once having a discussion about the label variations on Intellivision games. There seems to be more different label variations on the carts then there are boxes. For any one game you might have one that says made in the USA, another made in Hong Kong and another that says nothing. I found this box were they put a sticker over the "made in USA" to make it be "made in Hong Kong."
Now that I re-read that, my example might be backwards
, it's more likely there are more cart variants than box variants for a particular game, but hopefully you get the idea.
What is the solution to this? The best way to find out what carts came with what boxes is to open sealed games. At least you could say for sure that "this cart came with that box." A more likely solution we would use is to look at pictures on the internet, Ebay or whatever, if you see several examples of a certain box/cart combo it's likely right.
So responding to this statement:
I have this problem with Intellivision also. I have white label cib games, but no where on the box or cart does it say 1986 and yet that is when they where supposedly released. Mine says 1982, data east etc...
It' hard to know. Unless you bought the game new you don't know if the box you have even went with the cart you have. People swap in boxes all the time to make old games CIB. Sometimes even if you know you have the right box it might have a date on it from when they were shipping out an earlier variant of the cart. What is there to do? The best you can, I guess.
Author
