Super Nintendo NTSC -USA vs -LTN Releases

[Nintendopower4ever | 88]

I know this is advanced SNES collecting and no one cares, so I'll just break it down and simplify it for anyone (including grading companies) who might be confused and leave it here.
NES games are literally collected and graded by seal of quality, REV-A, hangtab, matter or gloss sticker, round or oval seal of quality, number of screws, etc. , so this deserves to be mentioned.

It''s pretty basic and any good variant collector should get it and all you have to do is read the back of the box on a sealed copy lol
They are like the Playtronic or Gradiente releases and would never count in an NTSC -USA complete set and shouldn't be grouped together or graded as such.

Aero the Acro-Bat 2 -USA was only Made in Japan and all parts coded -USA The Latin games' parts are all coded -LTN except the generic inserts which are the same and they didn't come with posters or registration cards like the -USA versions would have had.

 

[phart010 | 1,708]

Yea this one isn’t clear cut. We’ve discussed the topic before on a few other threads. Basically Central/South America was not a mature market for Nintendo, and even today it is not a very strong market. The reason for this is probably due to heavy taxation on electronics imports. When you layer heavy import taxes on top of already high prices (when you consider annual salaries and cost of living), authentic electronics are simply too expensive for the common person in that market to afford.

Sega was able to get around the import taxes by establishing a manufacturing partner in Brazil (Tectoy). Nintendo appears to have worked out a deal with Playtronic in Brazil with much less success. Venezuela may have had a deal as well, but that company could have also been a total unauthorized (illegal) use of Nintendo’s IP… it eventually crashed and burned along with the Venezuelan economy.

As with any non-mature market, standards were loose. Playtronic seems to have done some official looking stuff. It’s possible they may have also dabbled in a little bit of grey market manufacturing as well.

There’s a lot of variations in what was done to make stuff “assembled by Playtronic”… I am guessing they were experimenting with how much required before the government considered it in compliance with “assembled in Brazil” laws…

I have noticed on Megaman 6 for example, they have straight Megaman 6 -USA (not -USA-1), they also have the -USA version but on the the back of the cart they placed a Playtronic sticker on top of the original “CAUTION” sticker… I’ve also seen Megaman 6 with the the front label removed and replaced with a  lesser quality Label that bears the Playtronic logo at the bottom of the label.. they also have Megaman 6 USA-1 in circulation down there too.. I’ve seen USA-1 bundled with the Playtronic box… I’ve seen Playtronic cart variant bundled with the Playtronic box… in all cases, the pcb boards are legit.

It seems in the late NES/ early SNES days, a bunch of authentic USA NES stock got dumped into Central America. This was possibly heavily discounted because American retailers just wanted NES products off their shelves to make space for SNES products. This included the late release Taito games and a bunch of other goodies.

By the time SNES came out, it seems Nintendo had gotten a more solid process for making games that would be distributed in the Central/South American market (the LTN coded stuff). Yet it seems that Playtronic was still making games (of lesser quality) at the same time even on the SNES. 

Edited November 7, 2022 by phart010