Unboxing 301 Nintendo Famicom Cartridges!

[TPR]

For higher res versions of the photos: http://imgur.com/gallery/uld3G


Here sits four boxes of games, which actually contained a few more than 301 games, but I wasn't counting the duplicates.

Short version of the story - While I had a US Nintendo NES since the day it was released, I started working in the video games business for US offices of Japanese game publishers and we had a lot of Japanese Nintendo hardware in the office.  I loved this stuff and always wanted to get back into it.  So I did!


I love getting boxes from Japan. I don't know why, but getting Japanese stuff from the homeland just makes it all seem more "legit" for some reason.  It also could be because it's my favorite place on earth so receiving something from there makes me miss it more.


I have to say all the games were packed VERY well!  Huge thanks to several eBay stores I bought from including pal52, hit-japan, & terryyu27


Let's unpack, shall we?


This guy even threw in a couple of bonus carts!  They'll most certainly get some positive feedback from me!


AND they included the alcohol wipes as well!  Another awesome bonus!


Ahh, nothing makes my day more than boxes full of classic, awesome, retro, Japanese video games!!!


So a couple of things to note: Famicom carts come in all different colors and sizes.  Most of them follow a uniform casing, but not all of them.  Most them also DO NOT have end labels on the top spine, which is REALLY ANNOYING and I'll probably have to put some sort of labels on them because it makes them nearly impossible to organize.  So for this exercise I'll sort the best I can.


First off, I will sort by "carts with end labels" and I'll also sort them again by publisher.  So for example here we have Namcot, Konami, Bandai, etc...


Once I've exhausted carts with end labels then I'll sort by cart color.  Sorting by color helped me find duplicates easier.  There were a few exceptions that I made.  For example, Taito carts did not have an end label, but they had a slightly different shell. So I included them with the black colored carts, but put them in their own category.


Here's the rest of the black carts.


Next we move on to more colorful carts!  Because stuff in Japan is happy, fun, and full of color!  (I'm not complaining!  I love this!)


Here's a closer look at white and red carts.  I tried as hard as I could to group colors and gradients of color together, but it wasn't always easy.  But really this helped a *LOT* sorting out the duplicate carts I had (which was only about 20)


The blue carts seemed to have the most amount of gradients and were more difficult than any other color to separate.  There were colors that were close to gray, green, purple, etc.  I'll probably re-organize these again at some point anyway.


The rest of the carts with the weird "poop colored" ones at the end!  lol


I also separated out any "Famiclone" carts as best I could.  (If anyone notices clones in the rest of the lot, please let me know.  I'm not up to expert level yet on identifying the harder to spot clones.)  I also separated out the "oversized" carts.  This just made it easier once again to spot duplicates and since all the other carts were *about* the same size, everything just looked more uniform by putting these on their own.


So there you have it!  My tubs of carts!  I love them!  They really flash me back to my early days of when I was in the video games biz (you can look me up on Moby Games!)


Here's Tub #1


And Tub #2 - I'm pretty sure it won't be long now until I start Tub #3!


Now it's time to start playing!  Might as well start, like any good story, at the beginning!  

I'm curious to know how other people sort their Famicom carts?  By company?  By color?  By alphabetical?  Release date?  Etc.  Thanks for reading and please be sure to leave comments and feedback!

EDIT!  Here's an update that adds about another 75 carts to the collection!

Here is an update!  For higher res photos: http://imgur.com/gallery/3irE0


So I almost should have waited a day before posting the "Unboxing 301 Famicom carts" as I got another box in today!  This one contained about 75 more carts.


Like with the previous lot, I started to go through them and check to see if there were any duplicates in the mix.


Thankfully only a handful of duplicates from the carts I already had and the ones that were dupes actually had better labels!  So win-win there!


Once again I sort of organized them by color so it was easier for me to find those dupes.


Here's a closer look at the carts organized by color...


Gotta love that colorful Japanese goodness!  These really are some of my favorite carts ever made!


In this lot I also picked up a few of the NAMCOT games in boxes.  I love this packaging!


Here's a look at Metro-Cross which was never released for the NES in the US.  (And it's such a fun game!!!)


And the backside of Metro-Cross...


And the inside!  If you've never played this game with either an NES or MAME emulator, check it out.  It's super fun!


This one cost me a bit more money but it was worth it.


Since I worked on the US version of Gun-Nac and I have had it in my collection since I was handed a copy right out of the cartons we had at ASCII, I figured having it's Japanese counter part would be nice to have in my collection as well!  Thanks for reading!

[UglyJoe]

My carts are not organized, but when I get around to organizing them I will probably do it by company. I like to sort alphabetically, but the Japanese titles would throw me off.  By grouping by company, I can (mostly) sort alphabetically by the cart IDs, since the companies often stuck with the same ID scheme.

Also, what game/software is on this cart?  (That is not the standard Family Basic cartridge.)

[L___E___T]

 



Nice haul!  I recognise the shipping label and blurred seller name in a heartbeat

[scaryice]

I sort by color:

black
white
red (includes pink/purple)
blue/green
yellow (includes orange/brown/gold/gray)

I don't have want to have too many categories so I throw some of the miscellaneous ones in with yellow. I also keep all my "big" carts separate from the rest.

There's a few pirate carts you missed (besides Family BASIC):

- black basketball cart (next to Takeshi's Challenge)
- Karateka cart (wrong shell)
- red Hokuto no Ken cart (next to Crazy Climber)
- Wings cart below that one
- orange Hogan's Alley
- blue Gyrodine
- blue Tecmo NBA Basketball
- blue Gomoku Narabe Renju (two below the last one)

[L___E___T]

 



I forgot to say before, but in your clone carts picture, the last 12 you have there are not clone carts those are legit carts!

[TPR]

Here is an update!  For higher res photos: http://imgur.com/gallery/3irE0


So I almost should have waited a day before posting the "Unboxing 301 Famicom carts" as I got another box in today!  This one contained about 75 more carts.


Like with the previous lot, I started to go through them and check to see if there were any duplicates in the mix.


Thankfully only a handful of duplicates from the carts I already had and the ones that were dupes actually had better labels!  So win-win there!


Once again I sort of organized them by color so it was easier for me to find those dupes.


Here's a closer look at the carts organized by color...


Gotta love that colorful Japanese goodness!  These really are some of my favorite carts ever made!


In this lot I also picked up a few of the NAMCOT games in boxes.  I love this packaging!


Here's a look at Metro-Cross which was never released for the NES in the US.  (And it's such a fun game!!!)


And the backside of Metro-Cross...


And the inside!  If you've never played this game with either an NES or MAME emulator, check it out.  It's super fun!


This one cost me a bit more money but it was worth it.


Since I worked on the US version of Gun-Nac and I have had it in my collection since I was handed a copy right out of the cartons we had at ASCII, I figured having it's Japanese counter part would be nice to have in my collection as well!  Thanks for reading!