It may sound strange to current gamers, considering that pretty much every game today comes in
its own case, or jewel case, or other storage solution, but back in the day, there wasn’t
this level of forethought.
You wanted a game?
It came in a CARDBOARD BOX.
And if you had the space to keep this increasingly precious specimen safe, you were a wizard
or something.
Most of the time these boxes went straight to the trash.
I preferred cutting the fronts out and sticking them to the walls of my room.
Over in Japan, the scene was much the same... except for Namco titles.
Realizing the extreme collectibility of games like Quest of Ki and Karnov, they decided
to outfit their players with something a little more durable.
Each Namco game - in addition to a superfluous T - came in a hard black case, sometimes needing
a crowbar to wrest open, which locked the game into a snap-down compartment and included
a holding bar for the manual, obligatory registration card (frequently re-purposed as a password
sheet), and advertising materials.
Oooh, Rolling Thunder!
Better tell Mark about that one.
And Quinty, AKA Mendel Palace, AKA What Game Freak Did Before Pokémon.
And, of course, the super-cute Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti.
Anyway.
Since there wasn’t absolute standardization among Famicom carts like there was with NES
carts, the games aren’t completely transferrable between cases.
If your vicious attack Shaymin gets a hold of your case for Wagyan Land 1, you can’t
just slap it into a spare Wagyan Land 3 case.
A little less convenient, but a little more interesting.
It’s a darn spiffy idea, exceptionally resilient - these games are in fantastic shape for being
up to 23 years old - it’s kind of a shame we never got this treatment in the states.
Well, for NES games, anyway.
Best we had were after-market solutions like those big clear mabobs that everyone had,
and which could hold Genesis games... if Genesis games (and, indeed, Master System carts) didn’t
already know which way was up and got on board the big ‘ol case wagon.
And then Sega decided they needed to save money and these awesome protective devices
went POOF.
There went that.
So let’s celebrate a historical outlier: A well-designed case for an 8-bit Nintendo
game, proving that, back in the day, Namco were so awesome they could just jam a T at
the end of their name and NOT look pretentious.
And that’s something.
I’m still gonna take ‘em to task about constantly dropping the Y in Wagyan, though.