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Pokemon gen 1 manual variants (and yellow variant combinations)


AdamW

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Hi folks!

So I dug out my old games the other day, poked around a bit, and found the zany world of Pokemon game collectors. Instead of selling my old copy of Emerald and running away with the money like any sane person would, I decided to start buying more of them ๐Ÿ˜›

So I've been trying to do my research, and I noticed something about the
gen 1 Pokemon games that I can't find info on anywhere. This is all about North American releases, BTW - I'm ignoring all the others for now.

The variants of the carts and boxes for red and blue seem to be well understood - for each there's an original print with the older white ESRB logo and a reprint with the black logo on both box and cart. (The reprint has -1 added to the cart code, but oddly apparently *doesn't* have -1 added to the box code, even though the box changed). But I seem to keep finding different variants of the *manuals*, and I can't find information on these anywhere.

There seem to be at least three manual codes for Red and Blue: "DMG-APAE-USA" (red) or "DMG-APEE-USA" (blue), "U/DMG-APAE-USA" / "U/DMG-APEE-USA", and "DMG-APAE-USA-1" / "DMG-APEE-USA-1". I'm not totally sure whether I've seen a legit "U/DMG-APAE-USA-1" yet. Does anyone know what the differences are here? What does the U/ signify - is it perhaps related to the languages in the manual? Or is it to do with printing location (I think I saw a suggestion somewhere that U/ manuals were printed in the US)? What's the difference between the original and -1 revision? Does the -1 manual always come along with the -1 box/cart, or no?

For yellow, there seem to be three revisions of both box and manual. There are legit boxes with the white ESRB logo, the black ESRB logo, and *no* ESRB logo. There are manuals DMG-APSE-USA, DMG-APSE-USA-1 and DMG-APSE-USA-2. There do appear to be a U/ variants of at least -2: U/DMG-APSE-USA-2 (that's in https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Pokemon-Yellow-Special-Pikachu-Edition-CIB-NO-ESRB-Nintendo-Original-Game-Boy-GB/164365401215?epid=56230831&hash=item2644f0fc7f:g:ttIAAOSwnr5fT71~ for example) and the OG manual (see https://www.ebay.ca/itm/POKEMON-YELLOW-VERSION-GAME-BOY-AUTHENTIC-BOX-AND-MANUAL-ONLY-NO-GAME-PIKACHU/264932203551?epid=56230831&hash=item3daf309c1f:g:J54AAOSw53Ffqd1- ); I'd assume there's a U/ -1 variant too, just haven't definitely seen it yet. I have not seen anything that looked like a legit cart with no ESRB logo: all the listings for copies with no ESRB logo on the box have a logo on the cart. So there seem to be only two cart revisions.

I believe the box sequence goes white ESRB logo, then no ESRB logo, then black ESRB logo. Can anyone confirm? Legit white ESRB logo boxes always seem to come with white ESRB cart (DMG-APSE-USA) and manual DMG-APSE-USA or U/DMG-APSE-USA. I've seen listings for no-logo boxes with *both* white and black logo carts, and with both -1 and -2 manuals. I can't seem to find any clear pattern there; I'm not sure if there's one correct combination and the others are cut-n-shut jobs, or if there really were no-logo boxes sold with different cart and manual revisions. The black logo boxes I've seen so far have all had black logo carts (obvs) and -2 manuals, I don't think I've seen a black logo box with a -1 manual yet.

Obviously it'd be interesting to know what the relative rarity of the various combinations is. (Though if there are different combinations of no-logo yellow box and manual and cart, you have the interesting problem of proving that an open copy is original and not put together, or proving which one a sealed copy is...) It seems to me like the black logo box of Yellow in particular isn't very common, but IMBW. Any thoughts? Thanks folks ๐Ÿ™‚

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Oh, sorry, forgot there was one other thing I got curious about: box styles. It seems like there are some boxes with a bottom flap like the top flap, and some with a sort of folded bottom. At first I thought maybe only one style is legit, or one is always older and the other is always newer, but now I'm not so sure. Any insights on that would be welcome too! Thanks.

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