Odd happenings in sealed 2600 games

[JayAre]

A while back, I opened up a sealed copy of Pengo, and there was no instruction manual.  And for a sealed Bachelor Party, I found two instruction booklets.  A friend told me that he once opened a sealed Super Cobra (from PB) and discovered a small handwritten note containing numbers, letters and abbreviations.  He figures the note had something to do with the games that were being packaged that day at the factory.

 

How about you guys?  Have you ever come across anything odd when opening a sealed 2600 game? 

[jaybird3rd]

I've opened hundreds of sealed games, mostly 2600 and 7800 games from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  When it comes to Atari at least, it's clear that their quality control standards had slipped drastically by that time.  I've seen master packs with the wrong games in them; crooked labels; crumpled or missing manuals; cartridges with tabs that were broken out of the box; capacitors with leads that were too long and almost twisted around each other; shells that weren't completely closed; chips that weren't fully seated in their sockets; boards from new cartridges that were dirty, scratched up, burnt, or splashed with random beads of solder ... and so on.

[keithbk]

Oh man, just as I feared... opened my sealed Pac-Man and there was some "Aquaventure" game in it... so disappointed. Just pitched the whole lot.

[JayAre]

I wonder which aspects of the manufacturing/packaging process were automated and which ones were by hand.  I'm guessing it varied depending on the company.

[MasterMotorola]

Makes you wonder if some of the "sealed" games aren't just reshrinkwrapped.

[maibock]

On 9/22/2020 at 12:38 PM, MasterMotorola said:

Makes you wonder if some of the "sealed" games aren't just reshrinkwrapped.

Nobody ever wants to hear it, but being in the packaging industry for over 30 years, I believe it would be fairly easy to duplicate older packaging, At least the plastic aspect and how the boxes were sealed in plastic. No idea on hang tags, price stickers and the like. Personally, I would never pay extra for a "sealed" game under the impression that it would be original. 

[Steve Guidi]

On 9/22/2020 at 8:18 AM, JayAre said:

How about you guys?  Have you ever come across anything odd when opening a sealed 2600 game? 

Not too odd, but I recently bought a sealed Polaris game from a USA eBay seller for about $5.  There was a sticker on the wrapping showing it was sold to the seller for $1 via a warehouse liquidation.

 

I went to play the game and it didn't work.  I couldn't figure out why (tried on two flat screen TVs with composite and component input), but I kept telling myself that microchips shouldn't fail in storage under normal conditions.  On a hunch, I tried the cartridge on a computer monitor via an upscaler and the problem was now evident: this is a PAL cartridge and my TVs couldn't interpret the signal properly so they rendered nothing.

 

Odd that someone had a stash of sealed PAL cartridges from a warehouse in the USA!

Edited September 25, 2020 by Steve Guidi