Metal Slug 4, region specific letter in serial #

[lithy]

Riding the coattails of the successful "Metal Slug 2, y'all still holo or nah?" thread. Here is another Slug minutiae thread to make the forums great again.

KOF02 used different color cart shells for multiple regions. Cool, wow, neato. But Metal Slug 4 uses a letter as the third digit of the serial number to signify the region, can anyone decipher what these might have been?

All labels are in English except the Japan region. Art only seems to exist in English and Japanese unlike Slug 5 which had English, Spanish, and Chinese art sets with the English label cart kit and Japanese art with the Japanese label JAMMA PCB kit.

02J = Japan (label in Japanese, all other labels are in English, regardless of region)
02A = USA
02K = Korea
02I (capital i) = Italy?
02M = Mexico?
02T = no idea, but probably Thuringia

Yes this thread is serious and very important.

 

[BeefJerky]

Mine is "K" which makes sense because it came from Korea.

 

[ratson]

I for India, maybe?

 

[lithy]

 

[lithy]

I for India, maybe?

I have found three "I" carts that sold out of Italy, so I'm kinda confident in that guess.

 

[Viewpoint]

Metal Slug 4 is a shite game. I thought this was established years ago by Tarma.

 

[bubba966]

My Slug 4 kit is a T serial. But I can't for the life of me recall where it came from

 

[BeefJerky]

My Slug 4 kit is a T serial. But I can't for the life of me recall where it came from

I'm gonna speculate wildly and say the "T" serials are for Taiwan.

 

[Teddy KGB]

Yes this thread is serious and very important.

Found a shirt for you.

 

[Tarma]

"T" is for "Trash" - where this game belongs.

 

[bubba966]

I'm gonna speculate wildly and say the "T" serials are for Taiwan.

I'll hafta go pull out my kit later an see if there's any info to better figure it out

 

[lithy]

I'm gonna speculate wildly and say the "T" serials are for Taiwan.

That could make sense if it then applied to all of China, a significant market not yet covered by one of the other letters. There was Chinese art for some SNKP releases, so they definitely were selling into China around then.

 

[BeefJerky]

That could make sense if it then applied to all of China, a significant market not yet covered by one of the other letters. There was Chinese art for some SNKP releases, so they definitely were selling into China around then.

Well I know SNK had a subsidiary that operated in Hong Kong (I have one of their reg cards from a homecart). I do not know much about SNK's corporate structure in the 90's or post-bankruptcy as Playmore, but it's entirely possible they had one in Taiwan as well. Mainland China was still pretty poor back then. It would make sense to me to operate in HK and Taiwan but not the mainland, or at least keep those markets seperate for whatever political reasons (i.e. censoring out the Taipei team in the recent-ish port of BBS2).

But then again we're talking about SNK so who knows what their thought process was or what they actually did.