AdamW

Yup, that's the newer style holder alright. The precautions booklet being -7 also matches; early copies came with -6, later ones with -7.

Sorry for the late reply, but yes, that is what I meant. Sandshrew boxes show up with black-ESRB carts just too often for me to think they're all frankensteins. It's been a while since I ran the scripts I used to research this thing, but let me dust them off and look at the raw numbers... While working I this I compiled 165 Red Sandshrew listings and 142 "Blue text" Blue listings. Of the Reds, 113 came with a white-ESRB cart, 28 came with a black-ESRB cart. Of the Blues, 94 came with a white-ESRB cart, 28 came with a black-ESRB cart. (The others had no cart, or in three cases, a European cart). A lot of the black-ESRB cart listings were 'plausible' - they had other contents that reasonably matched, and there were no other red flags that tend to indicate a frankenstein listing to me. I reckon those numbers are too high to *all* be explained away as somebody getting a hold of an empty box and putting it with the wrong cart (or friends swapping carts back in the day, or whatever). There's another big reason to consider this plausible: the manuals. The U/DMG-APAE-USA-1 and U/DMG-APEE-USA-1 manuals definitely exist; I own copies of each. And they definitely have black ESRB logos in them. The evidence is extremely strong that those manuals must go with the Sandshrew boxes. The print code for those boxes also has a U/ prefix. The prefix indicates "printed in the U.S.A." If you look at prevalence across Red, Blue and other games, U/ boxes just about always come with U/ manuals, and non-U boxes (printed in Japan) just about always come with non-U manuals (also printed in Japan). Unlike the cart numbers above, the counts of listings of non-U boxes with U manuals and vice versa are very small. So I'm really pretty satisfied that the U/...-1 manuals, which - again - have black ESRB logos, must have come in U/ boxes. But the only U/ boxes are white-ESRB Sandshrew boxes. There is no U/ box for Red or Blue with a black ESRB logo on it. So it already seems inarguably the case that there were *white* ESRB boxes with *black* ESRB manuals in them; there's no other plausible way to account for the existence of the U/...-1 manuals (and indeed in the survey, these virtually always show up in Sandshrew boxes). Given that, it's not at all difficult to believe these boxes also had black ESRB carts. On the whole I think they went on printing Sandshrew boxes for a long time, probably well into 1999. At some point they revised the manual to have a black ESRB logo, at some point they started putting black ESRB carts in them instead of white ones, but they never revised the box itself in the US plant (I really don't know why). Another reason I believe this is the fact that there are actually two different types of Sandshrew box - they are *internally* different. The design of the cartridge holder differs between the two; one has a sort of 'lid' flap and accommodates a cartridge in a protective case (I think these boxes always did contain a cart in a case), the other has no lid flap and only fits a cartridge without a protective case. I believe the second style is later (it's more commonly seen with black-ESRB manuals and boxes, plus the "Red text" boxes are always the first style). I've got examples of both here, they are clearly different. You should actually be able to tell which type of box a sealed copy is by weighing it, the weight of the plastic cartridge holder makes a sufficient difference.

I gave up on that a while back, it was just too much work - it took hours a day. AFAICS lately, sealed/graded prices have dropped like most of the rest of the market, CIB prices have held pretty steady since I was cataloguing them (but not carried on shooting upwards).

I must apologize to the group for becoming a filthy, filthy grader. What can I say, they cut the prices! My arm was twisted!

yeah, the bottom one is a pretty early one! I don't know if anyone will ever value cart PCB dates especially, but it's cool to have early ones I think

More JP trash!

Hey, they *are* sealed!

FF7 came in a few days ago, so here's my JP sealed FF collection! 1 and 3 are claimed "unopened", but I suspect they're probably opened. 6 is unopened, and all PS/PS2 ones are sealed.

Late reply, but - @Seth, yes, punitive damages would be a different story, but it just seems super unlikely to me that's a plausible result from the case. I'm not a lawyer and you are, it's just my opinion / guess. I'd be super surprised if this thing winds up in an award of punitive damages against WATA. But maybe I'm wrong! We'll find out. edit: also, judging from your twitter feed, I am confident you are familiar with the concept of "rhetorical excess", which I will cite in my defence regarding my characterization of the lawyer.

FWIW, I think Seth's dead on with these paragraphs from his post: "Needless to say, we’re a long way from even asking this question. We don’t know if this lawsuit is really intended or will be filed; we don’t know if enough people will step forward to become members of any prospective certified class (and we must be mindful of the fact that most WATA customers, especially high-volume resellers of graded video games, will be loath to publicly be at odds with WATA in any way); we don’t know if a suit of this sort can survive summary judgment given the deliberate lack of any regulation of the collectibles industry that the United States Congress has now permitted for decades (to the massive financial detriment of individual investors); and finally, we don’t know that any such lawsuit, if it successfully certifies a class and survives a motion for summary judgment filed by Collectors Universe, won’t quickly be settled prior to any in-court litigation with an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. Given that the amount any individual video game collector would be likely to receive from any such payout would be small—as it will be hard to establish compensatory damages beyond refunding some customers the monies they paid to WATA (which admittedly, for some WATA customers, will be in the many thousands of dollars)—the real question here is really whether this lawsuit is being filed so attorneys can get a fat chunk of any punitive damages awarded by a civil jury or established by an out-of-court settlement. Indeed, one imagines that the real angle for any law firm involved in this is seeking punitive damages more so than trying to calculate how much any single customer is “out” because of missed market opportunities (which is fuzzy math at best)." Seth, does the fact this has been 'filed' now mean it'll definitely at least reach the point of summary judgment? Or does the law firm still need more class members to step forward for it to be worth their time to proceed?

Late to this thread, but - @darkchylde28, the problem I see with the claims cited is, they didn't cost anyone much. If anything. A civil suit isn't a crusade of good against evil; it's a fight over money. If you "win" it, you get awarded some money to compensate you for what you lost. So let's say these lawyers show that WATA gave a turnaround time of X days for $100 but didn't honor it. Okay. What did that cost somebody? Seems to me it'd be pretty hard to show that it cost anyone more than $100. So, okay, you win your lawsuit. This means you will be awarded...$100. After you pay your lawyers you have about negative $10,000 left. If the lawyers could get a bunch of people to join a class action and win it, maybe there'd be enough bread in that for the lawyers to make out. But the class members would get, you know, a coffee each. Maybe. The only way I can see someone trying to show a substantial loss would be to argue that if their game had come back at just the right time they could've sold it for lots more money, but that seems highly speculative in such a frothy market. I wouldn't want to bet any judge would buy that line of thinking. If you want to see WATA punished by the righteous sword of justice, a civil claim by some ambulance-chasing two-bit Reddit lawyer is not going to do the job. The body that enforces FTC regulations, for instance, is...the FTC. If the FTC announces it's investigating or sanctioning WATA, that'd maybe be a big deal. This doesn't look much like one.

Finally found me a copy of SMA4! Details updated. Interestingly the box code is -2, so one of the earlier prints must have a non-sequential or duplicate code (I'm guessing it's the Walmart one). Cart is rev A. Does anyone know what the difference between the original and rev A ROM is for SMA4? I can't find anything about it on the internet. For packins it has DMG-USA-14 (health and safety), T-AGB-USG-USA (the Coral Pink DS Lite ad that's common in late GBA games), and the game-specific Nintendo Power ad AGB-AX4E-USA.

Like I said to other folks on this thread, I just think it's a mistake to believe that how things are now is how they will always be. Mario games were worth less than actually-rare games, until they weren't. Gen 6 and 7 were too new and common to be worth anything, until they were. Genesis wasn't worth anything, until Sonic started selling for five-six figures. Sports games weren't worth anything, until Madden sold for half a million. I'm not looking at how things are now, I'm making a prediction as to another thing that will change in future. Big spenders don't buy non-US games, until they do. And again as I said, I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Prices on unopened JP games are going up (did you know an unopened Mother sold for well over $2k in January?) and availability is shooting down. Small numbers of them are starting to come to market on the major auction sites (the current certifiedlink auction has several). I don't think this is being driven entirely by Japanese collectors. Of course it wouldn't be in the interests of big bidders to hype up Japanese games, but big bidders aren't the ones who do the hyping. They're the ones who get hyped to. Who hyped up Mario games, Pokemon games, Zelda games, the "black box series"? The people who stood to gain from them being sold for large amounts of money, not the people who now buy them for large amounts of money. Who's gonna hype up Japanese games? The people who want to sell them to big bidders, and the auction sites who profit from big sales, and the graders who profit from more stuff to grade (why do you think WATA wrote those blogs about the black box series and NES prints? Not out of the goodness of their hearts). There's lots of perfectly good stories to tell there. Black box series? How about the Nintendo small box Famicom set? Nice strong visual theme, manageably small set of games, obvious historical significance. It's already a struggle to buy most of those unopened, and just getting clean CIBs of some of them is getting harder and more expensive. It doesn't matter that the HA market is "not transferrable" so long as it exists; if I had an early print SMB or Zelda I would send it to HA and walk away with my giant pile of money, it would bother me not at all that I might not be able to sell it for the same amount somewhere else. In any case, though, I don't think it's as clear as that. Goldin, Certifiedlink and Comicconnect all get broadly similar results to HA for many game sales. eBay is trickier because it's so much less trustworthy for both buyers and sellers, but even there, high grade games from reputable sellers do fine.

Yes. Now feel shame!

I think we're done here.