A Tale of Two Iridion II's
I recently obtained a second CIB of Iridion II. At first, I thought it was odd that there were some quality issues with the box and label and suspected a repro-job which seems rampant among the GBA and DS sales (whether knowingly or not sold as legit).
However, being a Majesco-published title, I shouldn't be surprised as Majesco picked up the scraps of previous generations and did additional runs of games on the Sega Genesis and SNES. Those games had lower-quality boxes (lighter colors, bad printing / mars), manuals (black and white printed on paper stock that was lighter / thinner), cart labels with lower res / fuzzy prints, and even cartridge plastic that was thinner and lighter and felt like they could be crushed like a peanut in your hand. Additionally, SNES games lost their back labels in favor of imprinted / molded license info.
This brings me to my findings on a what I believe is later run of Iridion II for GBA.
-The initial run has a box with Game Boy written in silver / slightly foil letters while the later run has Game Boy printed in white.
-The initial run has a box with a high resolution gradient on the sidebard, smoothly transitioning from gray to white, while the later run box has a lower resolution, resulting in a screen door effect.
-The initial run has a higher quality label with a sharper Majesco logo and E for everyone emblem. The photos make the later run look worse than it really is because of my hands shaking while balancing a light in one hand and holding the camera at just the right angle to get rid of glare.
-The board of the initial run has the code AGB-E01-20 while the later run has AGB-E01-30 and the Nintendo logo is different. I'd be curious to see boards of other Majesco games and re-published games to see if the logo changes match. I've seen repros which screw things up. Everything else here matches up. The code of the ROM, the four gold squares on the back of the cart, and there are factory stamped numbers on both labels.
-The precautions booklet codes differ. The initial run is DMG-USA-8. The later run is C/AGB-USA-1
Click-through the images to get a bigger pic.
However, being a Majesco-published title, I shouldn't be surprised as Majesco picked up the scraps of previous generations and did additional runs of games on the Sega Genesis and SNES. Those games had lower-quality boxes (lighter colors, bad printing / mars), manuals (black and white printed on paper stock that was lighter / thinner), cart labels with lower res / fuzzy prints, and even cartridge plastic that was thinner and lighter and felt like they could be crushed like a peanut in your hand. Additionally, SNES games lost their back labels in favor of imprinted / molded license info.
This brings me to my findings on a what I believe is later run of Iridion II for GBA.
-The initial run has a box with Game Boy written in silver / slightly foil letters while the later run has Game Boy printed in white.
-The initial run has a box with a high resolution gradient on the sidebard, smoothly transitioning from gray to white, while the later run box has a lower resolution, resulting in a screen door effect.
-The initial run has a higher quality label with a sharper Majesco logo and E for everyone emblem. The photos make the later run look worse than it really is because of my hands shaking while balancing a light in one hand and holding the camera at just the right angle to get rid of glare.
-The board of the initial run has the code AGB-E01-20 while the later run has AGB-E01-30 and the Nintendo logo is different. I'd be curious to see boards of other Majesco games and re-published games to see if the logo changes match. I've seen repros which screw things up. Everything else here matches up. The code of the ROM, the four gold squares on the back of the cart, and there are factory stamped numbers on both labels.
-The precautions booklet codes differ. The initial run is DMG-USA-8. The later run is C/AGB-USA-1
Click-through the images to get a bigger pic.
Initial run box gradient: |
Later run box gradient: |
Cart labels and boards (top is later run, bottom is initial): |
Factory stamp on each label: |
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