DaddyMulk

Bumping this because I have an orphan Registration Card that matches none of the above. Fan Club type rather than Contest. System order (Question 3) matches the card for Splatterhouse 2, as does the Namco logo on the reverse side, but it doesn’t have the game’s name printed in the lower right. Any ideas?

I preordered my copy a few weeks before release and picked it up on 6/23/91. Mine is South SF, Printed in Japan.

Sonic & Knuckles had a unique tray because it also has a larger cartridge hole than standard trays to hold the bulkier cart. Boxes for S&K by themselves aren’t too hard to find on eBay.

I always assumed this was a later release (and thus wouldn’t have the Thriller music). Do all of them have Thriller? I have both my launch copy (Thriller music) and a copy of the later revision, and both have color manuals/the labels going the correct way.

Warspeed on Sega Genesis. Compared to anything else published by Accolade (or their Ballistic label), there seem to be a disproportionate number of these out there that are either trashed or covered in rental stickers.

Doreen (mentioned earlier by Dain) isn’t real, right? I mean, this must have been written by a bot, right? https://www.watagames.com/learn/blog/

No worries. The second one was an attempt at humor, but yeah, mixing actual info with the jokes can be deadly.

As a translator with 20 years of experience, I’m well aware of this. I was trying to explain it to the non-native speakers out there.

UN Squadron: SNS-E8-USA (“Area 88”, which begins with a short E sound of sorts in Japanese). With UM, I assume they’d run out of letters at the point and didn’t know how to abbreviate it until some kind soul said, “Uh…Mario?”

A couple of interesting mistranslations I don’t think many people are aware of (as a translator, I love this stuff): *Completing Super Monkey Ball without dying gives you a message that says, “You didn’t miss a thing!” “Miss” (a borrowed word pronounced more or less the same in Japanese) often refers to dying in video games. The intended meaning of the source text was “You didn’t lose any lives!” *”I always wanted a thing called ‘Tuna Sashimi’!” from the opening section of Darius II: According to an interview with someone who worked on the game, whoever translated this line for them kind of botched it due to a lack of context. What they wanted to say was more akin to, “Let’s make sashimi out of ‘em!” Unrelated to translation, but something I’d like to know even more about: A friend of mine interviewed Chris Tang for his podcast a while back, and one thing he mentioned briefly is that a lot of Sega of America’s early production runs of games (when they started shifting manufacturing over here) were actually done at Tengen’s facilities where he worked at the time, including a pretty big chunk of launch copies of Sonic 2.

I wouldn’t say so. Sega didn’t manufacture all of the third party games on its system, and not even all of their first-party stuff was manufactured using their facilities. Off the top of my head, Tengen, Namco, Konami, EA, Accolade, Acclaim and Majesco all manufactured some/all of their own carts. Here you go. Looks like mine was made around May, 1994.

My phone? I took pictures of all of my PCBs last year (roughly 850 or so counting variants). I did it mostly for my own research, but I’ve thought about setting up a site someday with photos and the like. But if you have a board in particular in mind, just post it here, and I’ll be happy to compare it to what I’ve got on file.

Right, the development was 95% handled by GCC. But up until this interview, it was a fairly commonly-held belief that Midway released Ms. Pac-Man without Namco’s knowledge.

The myth about Namco being unaware/uninvolved was actually debunked several years ago in an interview with the creators conducted by Benj Edwards (“The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man: A 35th-Anniversary Oral History”). Here’s part of it:

Just a quick update: I obtained another copy of the numberless WSB95 CIB. It has the same chip dates as my other copy/isacin’s. Again, I’m hesitant to jump to conclusions with limited data, but it certainly looks like this batch came after the numbered ones.