The Origins of the Green Monster

Becoming a Greatest Hits usually requires 3 specific actions: 1) Sell a certain amount of games 2) Within a certain time and 3) have the company grant permission to release it as such. Common consensus plays into the following statistics:

1. Amount Sold in 9 Months: Apparently the requirements were quite low when Sony first started out. Originally a title need only sell 150,000 copies within the first 9 months of launch. As the PSX grew in popularity, the minimum number rose to 250,000. As of this writing, the PlayStation 2 apparently has a base level of 400,000 copies sold.

2. Company Agrees to the Change: Before any title can swap to the lower price point, the company must request the change. This way if they so choose, they can allow the game to keep selling at its higher price point and continue the larger profit margin.

The Presentation of the Hit

Pretty simple really; the side logo bar is colored green, with the spine having just the PlayStation name in green. Interestingly, there is a variant even within the spines! Most prominent are the grey-on-green text and the white-on-green text, shown below. There are also some games where the grey-on-green version has much lighter text.

When it comes to the discs, there are 4 common choices. The new GH disc will either have a black-and-white version of the artwork, clear disc with black text, white disc with black/clear text, or black disc with white/clear text. Dukes of Hazzard is the only game that breaks this mold, and instead keeps the orange tint that represents the General Lee car the game is based on.

Another Variation on a Theme

If you’re a regular reader, you know about all the various variant hunts I go on. The Greatest Hits library is no different, especially when it comes to distributions. Besides the Eidos variants, and the Collector’s Edition take, there have been several releases by different companies. While we’ll leave the brunt of that info to the various game pages, some examples I’d like to point are Die Hard Trilogy and Croc 2. They were re-re-released by Ubisoft after Fox had done the originals; if you’re going for complete collections, pay attention to the discs.

And finally…the damn ID tags

When the GH games first started re-releasing, they carried over the same ID Tags (SCUS for Sony, SLUS for 3^rd Party). Then they decided to add the GH to it to help designate the obvious. There’s also the Konami exclusive GHA designation, which were for a series of GH reprints that seemed limited to Blockbuster stores and other smaller venues.

Below are the known Greatest Hits releases. If you spot something missing and have photographical proof, please e-mail me immediately so I can update the database.

     That wraps up another section of the PSX library. Join us again when we delve even further into the giant green vat of Greatest Hits.