Posted by SignOfZeta on February 04, 2021 at 20:47:25 EST in reply to Googling "kof 2003 mvs cart" or "svc chaos mvs cart" brings up old, out of stock listings on places like neostore.com and arcadeshock.com that look reasonably legitimate--that would suggest there *were* MVS cart releases, just delayed, like you'd thought. I had thought they would be hard to find because they were relatively rare, and now in fairly high demand from collectors due to their scarcity. ... Ah, mvs-scans.com lists only US releases for those three. It's a little confusing, because GameFAQs doesn't list an arcade release for 2003 in the US at all; it does list a US arcade release for SVC Chaos, but the month is unspecified, so could have been delayed--same with MS5. from Paleface.
Ok, yeah, that list seems to confirm the theory that Japan only had standalone versions of 2003, Chaos, and MS5. I think what actually happened is that all exports of these games are MVS carts and were delayed by some time to get max money from (their own) arcades and protect local sales for a small window. Then they sold another wave of the games to gaijin, pirates be damned, as MVS/AES carts. Staging it like this may have made a lot more money, especially with KOF 2003 which was pretty hot looking for the time and would have gotten people more excited for MVS/AES layout.
n/t
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