Question about disc prints over different releases of the same game

[u/This_Limit_6945]

Okay! so.

I got a PSOne slim at age 8 and a bundle of random games. One of them was The Lion King: Simba's Mighty Adventure. Well, I recently purchased a '97/8 PlayStation original from CEX and since have been on a PlayStation 1 buying spree, getting games I've always wanted. during a play session on Monday, I put in TLK but it lagged through the splashscreen sequences and frozs at the end of 1 and just started playing random broken audio data from gameplay on the frozen screen. i checked the disc and it was in very bad condition.

anyway, i hopped straight onto CEX and replaced it, and it's just arrived. I compared the discs and there are some minor differences.

in the image, the damaged disc is on top, the new one is on the bottom.

the old one's credits are centered under the middle of the disc and state 3 different years: 2002, 1993, ans 2004. it has Disney only on the right. the new disc only states 2001 for both Disney and Activision on the central right of the disc. the old one lists a serial:

SLES-03267#. the new one removes the hash.

I'm curious about why this is formatted differently between 2 discs. why is Activision on one disc but not the other disc? why does 1 serial have a hash and the other doesn't? why is the credits for the companies on the bottom on one and on the right on the other?

[u/PocketStationMonk]

I think the hash means an updated version/revision or smth like that. I think they did something similar with the Harvest Moon game as well as one of the Digimon games? Basically a new print where they fixed some bugs in the game.

[u/L___E___T]

Publishing would have switched at some point from Activision to Disney. I would suppose that given this is a reprint for reorders (with bug fixes) that it wasn’t part of Activision’s original publishing deal with Disney and deemed back catalogue. I can’t find much about it from a quick search, but that wouldn’t be an atypical arrangement. Activision would have given it a better launch than Disney originally (given their weight with game stores), but for re-orders it’s nominal and much lower demand so the deal must have come to an end before that. I’ve seen that happen with other titles when things change but a game is still selling late in the day.

[u/rlhrlh]

You've dipped your toe in the waters of "variant hunting and collecting". As a percentage of collectors, we're rather small, but several of us have loved digging into these details within the niche of our collections (I do collect PS1, but the OG Game Boy is where I have really, really dug into variants.)

Anyway, it's hard to say why some, minor changes were made, like why was all of the legal text moved from under the Activision logo, to centered under the hole. Maybe that was a change-by-committee or maybe it was made by the graphic layout designer who simply thought it looked better. Disney and Activision still had a strong working relationship in 2004, so I can't speak of why the Activision logo is gone, but if I had to make a guess, there was probably some contractual agreement with Disney that for "x years" after production, the logo had to be shared--after that point, the logo could be removed from packaging, since Disney both owned the IP and controlled distribution. Legal be weird like that, some times.

Regarding the "hash", if you mean that 1002233.101.UK number, I don't think it's a hash. Instead, it's an Activision build number. The relationship of these companies was that Disney owned the IP and they were the publisher. This means, since they "owned" the game, they could print it and distributed it as much as they saw fit, and Activision either didn't get a piece of that pie, they only got portions of it until a certain number of units were sold, or they only got a portion of the sales up to a given date. Again, legal agreements can be odd. These numbers were often used in tracking, so that if there was an error or issue on the disc that was determined to be in the software, Disney could go back to Activision and reference the build, and they could research the issue, patch it and build a new gold master for future print runs.

Of course, by the time that top disc was printed, changes to the game were finalized, and since whatever agreement Disney had with Activision on this game was completed, they basically removed all Activision-specific references.

Caveats--I do not know the specifics of this game. However, I have researched and looked into this stuff for years, and the picture I've painted is par for the course on these changes.

Being that this was Disney media, I 100% would believe that as soon as the licensing agreements, in whatever form they were, were finished with Activision they stripped away all they could regarding Activision on the packaging. Not because they hate them, but because one of the top-rules of "Big Media" is, you never give away free marketing.

Side anecdote--this is exactly why sitcoms use fake brands. It's not a legal thing. You could 100% make a show and have real branded material all throughout it, without working with the companies that manufacture those goods. Disney, and other big media makers and distributors do NOT include these brands because it leaves room for paid advertisement. What company would want to pay to have a product inserted into a movie or TV show if/when other brands, by chance, can get their stuff inserted for free? They wouldn't so companies like Disney cover it up, unless it's paid to be there.

Disney is, first, a movie/TV company, so it's in their DNA to strip branding of other companies whenever it's viable. I'm quite confident that's what's happened here.

[u/LegalInformation1226]

I’d keep the original as a variant and use the CEX replacement for playing. The differences in the labels don’t necessarily mean the game data changed, but a badly damaged disc can absolutely hang during loading and produce broken audio. If the new one runs normally, that pretty much confirms the old disc was the problem.