Random: Counting The Screws In NES Cartridges Is A Big Deal For Collectors

I'm so sorry to hear that.

Impromptu NL competition: guess correctly what cartridge is on the banner picture and win... Internet fame!

There's a point at which game collecting takes a turn for the ridiculous, and caring about the number of screws on a cart is way past that point on my book.

Wii U owners were screwed.

@Shiryu Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (?)

Packaging is one thing (is it complete and in good condition), and its also my limit of caring. But screw counting is going too deep. More power to the collectors, but IMO...screw that!

i kind of want to drill fake screws into 3-screw carts just so a collector can complain that he got screwed

@masterLEON @jswhitfield8 Nice try chaps but no cigar.

@Shiryu Then could it be the observational answer...Donkey Kong Jr.?

@masterLEON That would make sense... but no, wrong again.

The obscure things people spend their time and money obsessing over will never stop amusing me.

@Shiryu Darn. Well, for my final guess with a tiny amount of thought...Super Mario Bros.

Seth sure is a ball of laughs. Most of my carts are probably three screw as early on, I could only acquire a game or two a year.

@Shiryu - Clearly it’s Top Gun.

@Shiryu I’m guessing (not yet Super) Mario Bros.

In Europe, the oldest NES carts have 5 screws, but no regional marking (NOE, UKV, FRG, FRA, SCN etc.), only EUROPEAN VERSION.

It's really not surprising. Collecting is all about variations. If a variation saw enough production to be relevant to track, but small enough to be considered extremely rare, that's the type of stuff collectors go nuts for.

I don't recall how long they used 5 screws over 3, but it wasn't long, so those carts are less common. For purists, you would need the 5 screw version as it would be the original.

I can say for my store though, we don't price them any differently. We cater to collectors and casuals, but I don't know a collector who shops with us yet that cares about screw count, at least not enough to pay more for it

@MarcelRguez I mean, I wouldn't care about screws on a cartridge but then again I'm not a serious collector who would notice such a thing.

If you are a collector of anything, you're suppose to know every detail of what you're collecting. Otherwise you're just a casual hobbyist that is not very knowledgeable about what you're buying.

@Shiryu That's easy. It's Rad Racer!

@GC-161 I would agree if this made a difference at the end of the day, but it doesn't. This is just plain hardware fetishization at best, and a way for sellers to up the price of certain copies in spite of the fact that they're the exact same thing at worst.

My policy is that game collecting should be about the games and not about the support of the games, is all I'm saying.

@Cherkov We have a winner! ( ... did you TinEye reverse image search?????)

Internet Fame is yours!

I believe some of the 5 screw carts have a Famicom to NES converter inside them. Gyromite maybe? You can unscrew the cart and then use the converter.

I’ve got 15 old NES games. Volleyball and Stinger are the only ones with 5 screws. Whatever.

@Shiryu Nah. I was going to try and see if I could find a product code in the picture and look that up, but it turns out it was in the thumbnail text. Lucky me!

It's basically checking if you have a first edition or not. Which is a big deal in ever medium of entertainment.

@Cherkov Well played sir.

I never knew that some games were later “patched” in subsequent manufacturing runs to fix bugs.

@Cherkov @Shiryu I just purchased Rad Racer yesterday, actually. It was shipped earlier today.

I stopped counting screws after high school.

Not the type of screw that I go nuts for

Meanwhile, I'm lucky if I can even find NES games "in the wild" for a fair price. Forget counting screws.

Yay. More nostalgia.
Ugh...

Plus the screw that is under the label on some.

I wonder how much money it saved simply removing those two extra screws? It's kind like how MacDonald's or some similar company apparently save millions by removing one gherkin or whatever from its burgers.

@Sinton For me, the music is the most memorable thing from that game. Never knew it was made by Square.

@MarcelRguez But it doesn't affect a non serious collector like YOU, tho.

Why would someone who doesn't collect care if collectors are so anal about the stuff they collect? If they wanna go hardcore with their hobby, seems to me that they can place as many arbitrary rules or demands about what they spend their money on. Go nuts, I say.

Live and let live.

In the photo example, the 3-screw cart also says "REV-A"... is that true of all 3-screw carts? If so, that makes it more different to me than the number of screws...

While I am not a collector, I find such things interesting to read about. It reminds me of production variants of action figures. It can really be quite interesting, even if it doesn't apply to me. I'm happy to leave the collecting to the collectors, though.

@GC-161 It does though? I already mentioned sellers inflating the pice of these copies even further. Maybe you live in Akihabara, but some of use usually have to rely on eBay to get a hold of a rare cart.

@MarcelRguez sellers can only inflate prices based on availability.

Much like the book discussion above, you are talking about a way to determine when in the lifecycle of the product your particular unit was produced. This is true in almost any collecting medium as you get into the hardcore crowd.

I still don't understand why more publishers don't pick up the rights and run reprints on many of these games. I know some of the issue is the licensing of music, along with tracking down the ownership of the license, but it still should be feasible (and profitable) to do in many cases.

@Cherkov Haven’t played it before, but was also surprised when I discovered yesterday that Square made a racing game.

@r4builder Nintendo could have re-released both the NES and the SNES with their own carts and made money of it. I don’t understand why I can’t buy a brand new Super Mario Bros. 3 cartidge, while I can buy ten different versions of Jurassic Park 3.

@r4builder The difference with books is that a first print is, in most cases, as close as you can get to own the original manuscript. The older the book is, the more important that first manuscript is from both an historical and a bibliographical perspective. A first print of a canonized novel has more inherent value than a first print of a digital work, these scenarios aren't as easily comparable as you're implying.

In this case (and actual software revisions aside), both versions of the cart are the same as far as the game is concerned. There's no difference whatsoever.A second print of an 80s novel shouldn't be any more or less value than the first print edition if it's the same work, textually speaking.

@Yorumi put it more succinctly than I, the value of these games is the experience they offer, any small difference between versions that doesn't affect it directly is meaningless.

About reprints, I guess the main obstacle is the physical media itself. Music hasn't seen nearly as much variety of physical media in the last 30-40 years as games have. Even a small print of NES games is something costly, nobody's manufacturing those carts anymore. Selling the games in a more modern format would defeat the purpose, might as well just put it out digitally at that point.

Personally, I think Nintendo has the right idea with their Classic Console line, they just need to add a digital storefront so more titles can be purchased.

@MarcelRguez there is a phsyical print (in this case, the ROMs created inside the plastic for the games, as well as the case itself. In book collecting the jacket and cover art can be used to distinguish releases, even when the print itself is the same.

To take the correlation even further, often in more modern printings there are no editing changes made, it's just another run of the exact same printing. Yes, in older prints they had to set back up the press for the run (and thus additional changes/edits could have been made), but this hasn't been true in quite a while. There is still a price difference on things like comic books, where the printing and artwork are identical.

@Sinton - I'm not sure we can guarantee they'd "make money", especially on a wildly successful title like SM3. You'd have to take into account the price of the insides and producing the cart. I'd have to imagine that a $20 "selects" release of SM3 would be profitable, but it may not have the $5 of margin that selling the game emulated for $5 on VC does.

@r4builder I mean, sure thing, but that's not something that's worth taking into account when you experience media of any type. Through my studies, I never had an professor recommended one or other edition based on anything but editorial changes (which are still very frequent nowadays, I might add, and are an actual reason to discourage reading some first prints). It's another thing altogether if you, in your personal collection, want to own an edition with an alternative cover, for example, even if the edition itself is considered sub-par or outdates, I'm not opposed to that. The real problem is, as you mentioned, availability, and how fragmenting the retro market even further would affect that.

Just to be clear, I'm not against using stuff like this 3-or-5-screws example to distinguish between prints with meaningful differences between them. From my knowledge of NES games (which is rather limited, I admit), only a few titles actually have more than one version (hence the whole "rev. A" you seen on ROM dumps and the like), which means this particular discerning element doesn't actually communicate anything other than a rough production date. That might be the point for some people, but I honestly believe it doesn't have any value whatsoever.

I thought about bringing up comic books, but I didn't because even if the artwork and print is mostly identical, it's also a heavily serialized medium that encourages collection in a way that videogames don't.

it’s not the value of the screws themselves, it’s that it’s a first edition. those are worth more in virtually any medium

I think Nintendo is also cutting costs with the Switch cards. There are loose parts inside (and no battery-backup). I wonder what their lifespan will be!

I'm a big NES collector, but I decided not to worry too much about 3 and 5 screw variants. It's neat, but if I have a copy of a game, I have it.

I am in Canada and there are even Canadian only variants that have CAN in their product code. I would go insane, and go broke trying to get them all.

Good stuff though, love any info for retro collectors on Nintendo Life.

@Shiryu It's Rad Racer

@Hordak Winner, winner, chicken dinner! But @cherkov beat you to it.

@MarcelRguez What rare carts are you looking for on eBay that you cannot afford? The ones that have screws like the ones collectors want them to have?

Just look for the cheaper options and avoid the expensive ones. Simple.

Flea markets are still a cheaper alternative too. eBay is for suckers looking to spend too much money anyways.

@GC-161 Not NES ones (GBA in my case). I'm advocating for a less fragmented market overall in order to open up the hobby for more people.

Just look for the cheaper options and avoid the expensive ones. Simple.

Should we tell that to the people looking for these five-screws games then? Or is it more important to uphold these arbitrary and meaningless distinctions between versions so as to not offend these "serious collectors" you mention?

Do you need to blow harder if you get more screws?

Funny video...the chase for the 5 screw cartridge. We know it well!

Collecting retro games can be a lot of fun. But this is taking it way too far for me.

@GC-161 Lots of NES carts are expensive, screws aside. The 5 screw thing is a subset on NES collecting which I personally don't care for. I just want the game! I'm hoping the market drops in the next couple of years......

@MarcelRguez Well when it comes to hobbies that depend almost entirely on NOSTALGIA you can't really expect for them to be very casual friendly. I mean let's be real here.

Even when nostalgia is not a factor you find similar hurdles, like... I'm not gonna casually go into coin/stamp collecting and expect the best coins/stamps to be affordable or easy to get a hold of. That's not how it works. Otherwise why collect stuff like that.

In a perfect world, sure... everyone would have easy access to everything. But collectors have set things up so that hunting for items is fun for THEM not casuals.

@youkoaoshi Which games are you looking for? Are you trying to find rare NES carts? I doubt those will see a price drop any time soon.

Regular NES carts are not THAT expensive, IMO. I mean some will go from $3-$5 bucks while a game like Zelda (gold cart) will go for $30. Unless you are looking for boxed carts, then sure. But then you're in collector's territory if you want that.

@GC-161 I actually tend to buy Famicom when I can because it's cheaper. But prices for NES games I want like Metal Storm, Kick Master, Power Blade 1 and 2, etc. are up there. In the hundreds for some and that's without box or instructions. That's not even counting the rare ones I'm not looking for like Flintstones Adventure at Dinosaur Peak, Little Samson, or Panic Restaurant which climb even higher.

Flea markets aren't as viable anymore because they know what they have and price things accordingly. So unless you get real lucky you usually gotta go eBay.

Screw this. Anybody counting the number of screw has a screw loose!

"Not all NES cartriges were screwed alike ...."

Someone screwed up the spelling.

I checked my small collection...and the only 5-screw game I have is the original "Super Mario Bros.", without a label. =(

I no longer have any 5-screw NES games sadly, but given that one could potentially hold a Famicom-to-NES converter, I could see why this would be a big deal to some folks, especially if they have a top loader.

@youkoaoshi Yard sales are still a viable option tho. I bought several NES games at one of them. Including a mint Castlevania III copy & Startropics. The woman that sold them to me had ZERO clue what they were (she thought they were PC games and had placed them in the same box as real PC games). She said those were from his son who left them after he went to college a decade or so prior. So whenever I see a yard sale, I'm there looking to get lucky again.