A Guide to Every Famicom Cartridge Style
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- Опубликовано: 27 дек 2024
- The Famicom is one of the very few video game platforms where the style of the packaging is a big selling point for collectors. So what kind of Famicom cartridges are out there?
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i just woke up thinking about famicom cartidges and playing them as a kid. thanks for the vid
It’s cool that Kermit the frog has interests outside of the muppets
Miss Piggy? Is that you?
Damn it, now I can't unhear it 😆
Harsh, but funny! 😆
As for the hole on Konami cartridges. This part seems to have migrated from their MSX cartridges, where the hole was functional and served as a locking mechanism from being pulled out of the computer if it was turned on.
Konami themselves give the "put your carts on a string" story. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a story.
@@RndStranger cart reuse with bs to cover it
Yup, those unique cartridge shells are a major factor in wanting to collect these things. That, and they are sort of cheap... sometimes cheaper to get the Famicom version. Unfortunately, that cheapness comes with increased shipping costs which have not come down since the pandemic... and that happened shortly AFTER I started collecting them.
It's hard to pick favorites. I would say Irem's little LED carts are fun. I do not yet have one of those. I am a big fan of Jaleco's tall carts with the dust covers. I only have one, Pinball Quest. That's one of my favorite NES games so I had to get it when I saw it on sale locally. Namcot's carts are fun for having those stickers you can apply yourself. I have one complete-in-box Namcot game with the sticker still unpeeled, Pro Yakyū: Family Stadium, because it cost almost nothing... but wow, that clamshell case came with EVERYTHING! I also enjoy Namcot's tall carts, despite the fact that they NEVER used that extra space. It was the same, cheap PCBs with the black blob chips.
Atari 2600 is also fun to collect for this reason, tons of variety, but considering almost all of those were unlicensed, it's not too surprising. For Famicom, it just feels so special. It was something we would truly never see again.
I had a Dendy as a kid in Ukraine which was a Pal Famiclone. Most of the games we got came on yellow/orange-ish multicarts. The only good thing about them besides the price was that we got to play a lot of Japanese exclusives like Transformers. Fun side fact; instead of Mario the warranty sticker had an elephant in a basball cap.
The best example was Battle City. We in the pirate regions got this exclusive gem from. Japan 😊
@@intel386DX Battle City!!! I loved that game. I remember taking turns tank hunting and protecting the base when playing two player. It got really crazy in the latter levels.
It would have made a perfect early NES title. Between the gameplay and the small cartirdge size I have no idea why this wasn't brought to the west.
@@Sashko_Dee I do not know eather. But they missed very much fun. About 10 years ago one of my dreams come true. There is a Battle City hack for 4 Players made by one Russian dude. And it works with NES and famicom splitters (they using different protocols)
Try it. It is crazy fun.
unbelievably underrated channel
taito's first shell seems to have been the inspiration for the most common of the pirate cart shells. jaleco's also served as the basis for the "t.v. game cartridge" shell
We had a lot of orange Jaleco's big shells in Russia. Yes, branded by "TV. Game Cartirdge" =)
Pirates rare used even standard Nintendo shell shape or Konami with that hole on it 😊
can't thank you enough for all this history, this channel is such a goldmine
I looked for a video who had to be made exactly like this for YEARS! THANKS!
I did, many years ago. But, it on russian language, so you can switch on subtitles. =)
I have to say, you are the first person to describe the SMB carts as orange.
Yes I was like “those are clearly yellow”
My only complaint about Famicom carts is the absolutely traumatizing process of trying to open one up. No screws. Just tabs on the inside that you have to squeeze without shattering the 40 year old plastic.
Can only imagine how many cartridges got glued back together after archiving the circuit boards inside...
I agree
this was definitely something that makes me prefer famicom stuff over NES stuff design-wise... I did like the gold color on stuff like dragonbuster, probably the only famicom game I owned that's like that!
I'm more into the pirate carts myself, possibly because most of the official ones I have use the generic Nintendo shell. Those can't compare to bootleg Taito cart shells with names like "TOYOT" or "TAITD".
Wow that Salamander cartridge at 3:30 is gorgeous! I don't think I've ever seen translucent housing on any commercial famicom games and only with US homebrew releases. Thank you for showcasing and highlighting the variations with the famicom cartridges. We didn't have any variation here in the US except for both Zeldas and the unlicensed Tengen/Color Dreams/Codemasters games. 😎
I imported a copy of Salamander as a gift for someone once just because they were a huge fan of translucent electronics despite not caring for 8-bit games at all. Last I heard, they stll had it on display.
I also own that cart although the label has a tendency to delaminate at the bend and collect dust and debris underneath which is absolutely not gorgeous.
I love these bonus non-famidaily videos
Closest we got was the dozen or so N64 games in alternate colors. It makes me sad that not even Nintendo DS games could have alternate card colors.
The GBA had a few special colored cartridges, notably with the Pokémon cartridges, as well as the NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk series. A few other cases I can remember in Japan are the bit.Generations cartridges, and games with special oversized colored or translucent carts: Bokura no Taiyō, Yoshi’s Universal Gravitation, Screw Breaker and Mawaru Made in Wario.
The Genesis/Mega Drive is the only other console I can think of that did have alternate cartridge shells (besides the standard US/EU and JP ones), and even then not to the same level as the Famicom. You had the famous EA carts with that yellow tab on the side (which they also used for their Japanese releases, with some games having either a pink or light blue tab instead), the Accolade carts (which in some ways look rather similar to the EA ones), the Codemasters ones with their kinda odd shape (plus the still genius J-Cart with the extra controller ports built-in), the Stormlord cart, the Japanese Sunsoft carts (which are largely the same as the standard Japanese MD carts anyway) and of course both Virtua Racing and Sonic & Knuckles (and also the Sega Channel carts and the entire 32X library, if one wants to count those)
@@chazmaru9583 Pokémon is such a mainstay it barely counts haha
@@M4R14NO94 and in that case accolade and codemasters were unofficial
I love your pfp :)
Also, Irem's «Zippy Race», «10-Yard Fight», «Spelunker» and «Sqoon» was re-released in the same cartridge shell but without LED.
No other system I've seen has this much variety in their cartridges and that's one of the many reasons why the Famicom is one of my favorite systems aesthetically
My favorite cart style were from Konami, Taito and Namco
I loved the video. I finished my personal Famicom collection a few months ago, about 200 cartridges. Well, a few days ago I had to make room for a cartridge that I was unaware of and that is rare to see. It is the Sqoon but with the peculiarity that it does not have a Led since Irem decided to make a last run with very few units without Led to make it cheaper and that makes the game more special and more expensive. I store them in some Daiso cases where 15-16 games fit depending on their size and the covers are visible on both sides, it is the best way I have seen.
Do you have Mario USA?
All this will come back, generally people are not interested in recreating reality so I see all this beauty in simplicity coming back at some point
now the question for most collectors is do you organize the cartridges by name, release date, or color?
I went with organizing by color and there is a distinct Famicom rainbow on one row of my shelf and complete darkness of Famicom black right under
I have to keep things organized by date. It's the only way to keep things straight.
I have the N8 PRO for my Twin Famicom but have been grabbing repro cartridges in different translucent colors for rom hack and english translations.
What a solid piece, stuff like this, and just the dedication to the daily update makes me stumped why your sub base is almost non-existent. You're doing something unique and it's under the radar for some reason. Keep it up.
But what's next? You're running out of FC games of the legal sort. Famiclones, Taiwanese, HK... Japanese Gameboy, Super Famicom?
I'm already working on the next two series which will be Epoch. Then I'll be doing FDS games.
Game Boy and Super Famicom will probably come up in videos but I won't catalog them. I won't be doing another daily series on the scale of Famidaily and anything with a massive library like those would become a ten year project as a result. But that doesn't mean I won't make videos highlighting things I find interesting from the libraries.
As for my subs, well, I might be able to boost things if I wanted to put some effort into promotion. But there's a pretty small upper limit on what I could get from that since I am so niche and I've never worried about trying to run up those counters. If it ever happened because the algorithm decided to bless me someday, I wouldn't complain since everyone wants to get their stuff seen, but I'm not going to chase it.
Argus is also a two tone cartridge. Blue and Green
Did you buy the little turn-y stand just to make this video? Also that Seta game safety warning, specifically the alligator, gave me a nice chuckle.
I did and it also broke down before I finished getting all of my footage. 😁
I did use it for a couple of very late episodes of Famidaily, though.
You mean it's _not_ a good idea to feed your game pack to an alligator?!
What do you use for storing the games, do you have any on display?
Yeah, the variations of packaging on the Famicom really interested me in to the system, I'm not sure why later consoles refused to follow the Famicom lineup of cartridges. I'm guessing that after the 1983 video game crash, console makers like Nintendo and Sega wanted everything to follow the uniform to prevent the tragic game crash from happening. It is important, but at the same time the fun of collecting them would not be the same as collecting Famicom games.
A couple of cartridge variations may also provide the consumer's intention to buy the game. I'm guessing modern Japanese people saw the Bandai ridges in their Famicom games the same way as how Westerners saw the LJN logo on the cartridge, except a bit loose.
Speaking of Bandai cartridges, sometimes there were multiple top labels included in the package and they served the same way Namco did, except there weren't any blank labels.
There are a few additions that sadly have not been touched on and that is Re-Releases of games. Namco re-released 5 of their cardboard packaged games later in a plastic clamshell. Irem re-released their first 4 games with a LED in a version without LED. Nintendo had their original Pulse Line releases and the later Silver Line re-releases (but Nintendo was not consistent at all = several games exist only as Pulse Line, several only as Silver Line and many of them in both versions). Nintendo also re-released Zelda 1 as a Cartridge since the original release was on the Disk System.And Konami re-released 3 Famicom Disk games as Cartridge versions.
This video is about cartridge styles.
Fantastic video. The fun fact is that Konami used their's stile shell for Contra 1, but for Contra 2 they used standard Nintendo shell
Nice video, I move to Thailand a few years ago and recently started collecting Famicom, since is not that hard to find and still cheap. This was helpful.
BTW the most common color for the porste famicom cards is orange/yellow, so I am not sure why they did not pick black as the sheeper option.
super informative, thanks!
Excellent video! Watching Nintendo’s own recent video on red Famicom cartridges, it may be fun for Famidaily to have a tier ranking / draft about which color group of Famicom carts had the best roster of games. Obviously the black group has an advantage in numbers, as per your video, and Kemco alone probably sank the entire blue group at the bottom…
Gameboy homebrew gives Famicom carts color a run for their money. The colors are all over the place
Very neat! Of note is that Konami actually made a few different styles of their foldover carts - I'm not sure how many varieties, but some have their old logo molded into the plastic above the warning sticker on the back.
Awesome video.
User replaceable battery backups is SO SICKKKK
I believe the first 8 Namco games actually did come with the stickers already placed.
My childhoods ❤😊
5:47 why didn't more companies do this???
10:17 Lock-on technology!
6:55 so Bandai put more effort into their packaging than they did their games?
Something that I'm still curious is why Konami cartridges have that hole on the side...
I was just about to feed a Famicom cartridge to my pet alligator. Thank goodness for that warning!
No punch out golden cartridge?
2:22 blud that's not orange but yellow
Came to say the same! It’s definitely yellow
"Why are so many songs about Rainbows"
Where did you get the budget to have Kermit the frog narrate your video? Great job and awesome content!
but why european cartridges are so gigantic? i know that nintendo wanted it to look like a video tape, for consumers to feel familiar with the design.
This video is exactly what i was looking for! Thanks!
Seeing those different colored famicom cartrides at different shapes just makes me sooo sadly that or western nes cartrides only came into boring dark gray color with a few exceptions (why not light gray or white?🥲)
And about that large famicom cartride from konami i found it hard to get it out of the famicom because of it’s bumped edges on it’s side wich may could potentially damage your famicom if you are not becareful.