Mystery of the SNES cart color.

[Shirotsume]

So I was looking at my SNES games and I noticed something curious- each and every single one has a small sliver of color on the top edge of the sticker.

This image shows a large number of carts that have a red sliver, along with Megaman X, which has a lavender color.

I'm trying to discern what specific colors mean.

Gold is for Player's Choice 1+ mil sold cartridges, for sure.

My first guess was that red was for first/second-party games, since it only shows up on games that don't have a third party attribution on them, but my copy of Street Fighter Alpha 2 is obviously made by Capcom, but it's red as well (though missing the Capcom logo). This is odd since MMX obviously DOES have the capcom logo, and a purple sliver.

It has nothing to do with licensing- all SNES games save bootlegs and a few religious games are licensed because of the lockout chip.

Red and purple seem to be- by far- the most common, though I have one or two blue and a white.

Thoughts?

 

[Contrabardus]

Red is in first and second party developers and purple is third party that are distributed by Nintendo, and I believe the other colors are licensed games where the publishers handled distribution [labeling and packaging] on their own.

 

[Shirotsume]

Except red isn't first/second party at all, like I specifically said

E.G. Ken Griffey's Winning Run.

 

[Contrabardus]

Except red isn't first/second party at all, like I specifically said

E.G. Ken Griffey's Winning Run.

Yes it is. SFA 2 was technically a first party game. The port was done in-house pretty much from scratch, which is why it's the version that showed up on the Wii Virtual Console and why the Capcom logo does not appear on the game's packaging. It's not even on the box the cartridge comes in. The game is the result of an unusual licensing deal where Nintendo did the work of porting it and publishing the game on their system. Hence the red tag. The Snes had no hope of running the arcade assets like the other systems the game appeared on and had to be completely remade by Nintendo to publish it on the system.

 

[Shirotsume]

Actually, I figured it out. Red is Nintendo-published. Purple is the standard color for 'other' publishers, though some customized a bit and probably got fined for it.

Has nothing to do with who developed it, only who published.