Also, a fair amount of these EU vs US differences are simply Europe receiving the same stuff that originally came out in Japan. Boxarts, localized game names, "bland" spine art, even the thicker PS1 game cases were originally like that in Japan. It becomes less about Europe games being different, but rather US is different from the other regions
Yep, same with stuff like SNES cartridges, even how the console itself looks. Same with Mega Drive being called that instead of Genesis. It's really inconsistent, though. DS games only have the thick cases in Europe, not Japan or the US, and with boxarts, it's usually a tossup whether we get the Japanese or the American version... or rarely, a completely unique one. Nintendo is probably the weirdest about all this, even recently. Like calling the last few Mario and Luigi games "Dream Team Bros" and "Paper Jam Bros", like WTF, the latter one makes less sense than "Dream Drop Distance".
yeah, especially with his issue with the name project zero, despite that being more in line with the JP name over the US name. (The Japanese name is "Zero" which is a play on words. The kanji used for zero in the title (零) is pronounced "rei" which is also how the word for spirit/soul/ghost (霊) is pronounced.)
I think JP game devs focused more on the NA market because all they would have to do is translate to English and that covers all of the U.S. and most of Canada. Theoretically, the U.K. could have benefited from this, but you have the NTSC/PAL conversion and regulations. One of them being the requirements to support other European languages in the manual. IIRC, it's part of CE certification. They often struggled to localize American games due to how different English and Japanese are. So localizing for all of Europe must have been a daunting task.
@@19Szabolcs91 Someone else owned the "Mega Drive" name here at the time, so they changed the name for the U.S. Reigon. As for the SNES being different. I think this because Nintendo still felt like they had to make their game console look less like a game consol. The stigma from the video game crash still lingered in the American market. So, Nintendo would opt for a more boxy shape to fit in with other consumer electronics and computer components of the time. This was their reason for the NES being way different from the Famicom. Basically, they didn't want the NES to look like a toy compared to other electronics of the era.
Regarding the languages: The rule of thumb is that if you want to translate for Europe, the best case is EFIGS. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. This "rule" probably originated from the 90s so countries like Poland were not considered an option yet (much wealthier country now) or the language is small enough that you can reasonably expect the population to be fluent in another language. These are also the countries that generally prefer dubs (except the UK I guess) in movies. Videos like this are important because they put things into perspective for me as a European (although having translations as a German is probably a different story than what some other Europeans experienced). Especially now with the annoying DLC season pass online requirement buggy mess nonsense a lot of games pull, I get really nostalgic for the times when you could just grab a game off of the shelf at a store and that's it. But I completely forgot how much we were second class citizens compared to the Americans. No wonder people here get hyped for Gothic and not Final Fantasy if the 2D Final Fantasy games just never made it to Europe. The 50Hz thing is a mess as well.
It is still so weird to see Nintendo translating games to Dutch (30 M speakers) and not Polish (45 M speakers), when including that a lot of Dutch speakers know English, but not a lot of Polish speakers. But I could be wrong, maybe Nintendo isn't popular in Poland, but maybe also due to the lack of Polish as an option.
Well he didn‘t explain that in the video but it‘s not like companies chose to make the games slower for Europe, they had to adjust because in Europe PAL CRT-TVs operated at 50hz (Australia too btw) while Japans and Americas NTSC CRT-TVs ran at 60hz.
@@Liggliluff Poland has historically been shafted by Nintendo for many, _many_ years. We were still behind the iron curtain when the NES came out and once we left it, the average person was too poor to afford either a SNES or a Mega Drive so we all resorted to a Famicom bootleg called Pegasus. And soon after that, Sony dominated the console market and a large majority of people moved over to PC (mainly due to the huge piracy market) while the publisher did pretty much nothing to market the Nintendo stuff in our region, focusing on their main German branch instead. I can't say I've seen a single Wii in the wild in my life, and that console was huge elsewhere. Feels like Nintendo only really had _some_ staying power because of Pokémon, since if you had a Nintendo system, it was probably because of that (although PSP was still undisputably the king of handhelds here). It only really started to change when we got a new publisher in '15 and now the Switch is getting some actual marketing.
I've noticed that even a lot of European TH-camrs tend to only talk about the US game market/gaming history. Like talking about the "Gaming crash" even though that only happened in the US, or claiming that SEGA weren't successful until the Mega Drive (despite the Master System being more popular than the NES in Europe) and they tend to never talk about the home computers that were far more popular than consoles at the time like the Amiga.
yeah true. On top of this, because of the different countries with different distributor there are alot more variety on "leading" system. For example the ZX Spectrum is not very important in continental europe, while in UK it was the best selling home computer, while West Europe was C64, East Europe was in favor of the Atari Homecomputer system. Same is true for the 16bit-home computer. I had a discussion with a group of colleague at work which system they had in the youth some of them from foreign countries which gave an interessting mix. some licenced system were "exlusive" for the country. Like SABA videoplay or Philips Videopac. Also east bloc stuff like Vector-06C, shady clones like "Dendy" in post soviet era or exlusive european console Amstrad GX4000.
So true. I had megadrive as it was waaay more common here. Nobody I know had snes or nes. Most people had 8 bit computers. Some had Amiga. Then of course I became PC guy.
The unfortunate reality of US defaultism on the internet. Sure its a big coountry with a big market etc. It just isnt the only one and shouldnt be taken as the default.
In France we had what was then the French branch of GameStop : Micromania. But the price for second hand was usually not good... People would call them Escroc Mania (Scammer Mania) instead 😂 !
I think the differences in translation for the european games is because they most likely translated more accurately the game from Japanese to the european languages rather than over-localizing like they often do in US releases
I can't claim to be super familiar with this because I primarily play my games in Japanese, but there have been times I've launched a Switch game in Dutch out of pure curiosity, and I've noticed that often times, translations of names or dialogue tend to feel closer to the Japanese script than the English. This kinda caught me by surprise, because there probably aren't many people aside from me that fluently speak both Japanese and Dutch in order to translate, so I guess I just assumed they'd base the translation on the English version.
There's a similar phenomenon with manga and anime, the Americans had a tendency to change characters' names, remove harsh language and erotic elements, but always keep the violence. Here in Europe, depending on the country the violence may be censored, but everything else was kept as close to a direct translation.
The reason Fatal Frame is called Project Zero is because the original Japanese name is "Zero". In Europe they tend to be more respectful to the original material, and I honestly prefeer that.
This is also in media. Especially german media will have all of the wordplay in sentences/cultural things kept in. Very prominent is characters saying “sir” or “ma’am” in german translations of American media. Only example I can find of this in any American translation is how the exclamation “Yes!” is used like it is in Japanese in The Great Ace Attorney.
Gex used localized actors in each region. The American VA would be completely unknown in the UK, but Leslie Phillips was pretty well know and is still alive today at 98 years old. He was replaced by Danny John-Jules (Cat from Red Dwarf) who would have been more well know to the target demographic of the game.
This was such an awesome and informative video. It always felt dissonant that I'd hardly played any ultra influential nintendo games but it's just because they were never released/nowhere near as popular here. The most confusing part is that even European based youtubers talk from an American perspective of video game history, making Nintendo seem much bigger than it was here, so this whole time I thought it was just a weird coincidence I'd never heard of Chrono Trigger until a few years ago. Thank you for making this video that finally made me realise my experience was typical of pretty much everyone else in Europe.
Swedish person jumping in here to go "not EVERYONE else in Europe". Due to some very peculiar quirks of our game history and market, Sweden and Scandinavia was a lot closer to the American market experience, as we were in fact one of the first European nations to import Nintendo games due to the person behind THE big Nintendo importer here, Bergsala, being a businessman who sold electronics who picked up a Game & Watch on a business trip to Taiwan when they were new, and got so hooked then and there that he thought he just HAD to become their salesman in Europe. There's a pretty long video I saw once that described the lengths he went to in order to court Nintendo and make them take the European market seriously, but as a result of that at least up here in the North Nintendo got a VERY strong foothold. Sega too, Master System was a thing over here as well, but the NES beat it back in the day, and so did the SNES. But according to most of what I've read, Nintendo WAS very slow and reluctant to enter the European market, and it was apparently considered a "rich kid's toy" in many European nations, particularly great Britain, whereas Master System / Mega Drive were the kings. But at least in one part of Europe, Nintendo were just as big and important as they were in the US... then again I have no idea if the TH-camrs you watched were Northern Europeans, so maybe they still don't have a reason to revere Nintendo that much.
As, others have said, great video. It's nice to see the European region of video games focused upon. The big gaming channels on TH-cam often feel American centric. It seems hard to believe but as a European i only knew Mario through the cartoon & didn't see him in a game until Mario 64 which i played at a friend's who was the anomaly & owned Nintendo consoles. I'd grown up with an Amstrad & a Mega Drive so i was a Sonic kid.
Same here. I remember Bad Influence having to explain what the NES had been when they did a joke about the Power Glove as part of their 12 Days of Christmas parody. I only knew about it by implication that something must have come before the SNES.
In Poland people having Nintendo home consoles used to he a rarity as well (but a lot of people had game boys though, including gba), playstation was extremely dominant here during the ps1 and ps2 era. It still is, just not as much as it used to be, Nintendo finally got more popular here thanks to Switch and Xbox was pretty popular during the 360 days.
@@hcsnake I have to disagree with rarity of Nintendo consoles in Poland. Yes, official ones, made by Nintendo were rare indeed. However, in the 90s before PlayStation if you owned a console, it most likely was Pegasus or other type of Famiclone (even into the mid 00s they were still popular). People played Mario, shot ducks and so on. It was just like NES boom in US, but a decade later. Except that one anomaly, Poland is just like rest of Europe with microcomputers/PCs outweighing consoles (and since PlayStation launched name became synonym of "game console").
(3:05) The 50/60 Hz difference is often ignoring more factors, which you also ignored: - Games are sometimes adapted for 50 Hz. So the game progress stuff 20 % more per frame, so the speed of the game is the same, just with 83 % of the frames. - 60 Hz is 20 % more than 50 Hz, but PAL 576p is 20 % more than NTSC 480p. So games adapted for or developed in Europe also had a sharper image. This makes it have a nicer looking image back in the SD days.
I can tell you about the gaming culture in Eastern Europe. PC gaming + piracy was pretty much the one and only way to game for us until around the mid 2010's, when I started noticing that more and more people could afford buying games now. Only the more well off kids would sometimes have consoles, which weren't that many. I still have some of my pirated game CD's from 13+ years ago, though I didn't keep them in good condition and I don't need then anymore, but they carry memories.
@@Mallerd ain't that much to tell. Back in the day we were trading pirated game CD's, that's kinda how it worked here. And PC gaming was and still is king. Although I think PC gaming was king across all Europe.
@@Mallerdin the 90s there were only bootleg taiwanese consoles in the post-soviet market, same goes for pc games because the copyright law was basically nonexistent until very late 90s - early 00s, even movies studios refused to sell movie licenses to theatres here. In the 00s, as those countries became wealthier and more integrated into global economy, official games began to appear but prices were quite high and the piracy was so developed that you could download for free basically anything without problems (there's still a ton of pirated games websites in russia, not so much in ukraine where I live but still it's very easy to pirate). Collecting physical releases became a thing only recently, as the first generation of people that experienced gaming since childhood grew up and started making money. There is a gradual but growing cultural push among younger generation for the ethical consumption of media (meaning buying games officially) and I believe that this shift can popularise the collecting hobby but still it's too pricey for many people to adopt as a hobby.
Yeah, In Hungary the mid 90's was all about the famiclones and the mysterious yellow casettes with 900games in 1.. sold on the flea markets.. For majority of the children it was their first gaming console. Heck before the fal of the iron curtain there were not really any arcade games here as well, even things like flipper were a rare thing ,and arcade game places only started to open in the 90's. Even having a knock of walkman, was a new thing in the late 90's. Also very few people had computers, in the communism, university's had more, than regular people. The whole comodore like computer phase was left out here, people's first computers were usually a dos or win95 ones in the late 90's, as the first commercial internet provider began to provide internet to homes in 1997, as before internet was only for universities, and big companies. This whole thing caused us to lagg behind the west like a whole generation. After the millenium things fastened up. People could afford to have vhs players, supermarkets were filled with empty tapes, and the flee markets with pirated copies from the video library. What also were no blockbuster, or any big chain, just sume small shops like in the Clerks, and also most of the movies there were also pirated, from the original ones sold by tesco. And if you were a cheapstake, everyone had an uncle in the family, who had his whole livingroom filled with shows recorded from the tv. Thanks to a government funded program started in 2003, if you had a child in school age, you could buy a pc, and get tax return up to 250usd (418 usd adjusted to inflation). This was effective, as for 2005 22% of households had internet, and 40% had a pc, as in 2000 only 15% had pc. Torrent sites started to appear too, offering movies, series, and games. the first ps2 and xbox appeared in the shops, and after you bought them in the supermarket, your first trip was to the local pc shop, to chiphack or jailbrake it. The flea markets faded away, as the schools became the main market place, selling and changeing the home burned torrented copies of games. My highschool IT teacher had a room full of cd burners, cannibalizing a pc, he could burn 40 disks at a time. from the late 90's to the mid 2000's the police tried to crak down on the large scale copiers and torrent site operators, but after 1-2 days they were back, and the whole crackdown was incompetent. Once my friend showet up with a van full of boxes of dvd's, around 15-20 thousand, to store at my hone for a week, as he got a mail fom the tax agency, that on the next week, they will held a house search at him, for pirated copies. And even if the police found pirated copies, the charges were minimal, mostly fines, and the funiest thing is that the copies seized by the police, was used as a private video library until the court case didn't finished and took them do destroy the police kept, storing the dvd's and vhs casettes as evidence on the corridors, and keeping a booklet on, which policeman took home which casette, and when they returned it Console gaming was still for the more wealthier families, we bacame a majority pc gaming country, followed by PS and XBOX. Nintendo was a preaty unknow company here. The Diskman didn't really took off, for home use there were pleanty of cd's, of course most pirated copies, even if you bought it in a shop, but for portable media, we went from walkmans straight to mp3 players. not apple, just random chinise stick ones. for the late 2000's the police gave up on fighting the pirates. As the vhs casettes dissapeared, and people listened to mp3, the act of larg scale copying of media to sell it in shops or flea markets seized existing. it left the police unpowered as the law only punished the act of copying in phisical terms, an As tfor the torrenting it was thin, only criminalizing the act of seeding, but not the leeching and keeping a pirated copy. for a final solution they put out a tax for every empty data medium sold, burn ready disks, pendrives ahdd's... and the collected tax was redistributed to the media companies and music artists. Such as the mentality was that you already payed the price, when you bought the hard drive to your computer, so yoou can torrent without guilt. The early and mid 2010's was the golden age of torrenting. Everybody cracking his torrented cod2 and cod4, and searching for servers through xfire, or registering to a random hacked wow server. having a ps3 or xbox360 at home, maybe a wee, if you were the weird kid, who left theirparents to shop alone, and they bought the cheapest console in the supermarket, thinkin all dooes the same, better get the most value option. But it came to a halt, as the new ps4 and xbox one arrived, as they were robust againts jailbreaking. At the same time multiplayer games began to unsupport 3rd party servers, and or requreing always online connection,. As the first generation who was introduced to games in the 90's, grow up, and began to earn, money, didn't felt weird for paying some digital thing on a screen for themself, or their children. They were not that old commie, as their parents who thinked about this whole thing as a child's only play. It took a long time for netflix to break throug, as they only offered eng dub in the begining, and not many of the people uunderstood it, or cared to read the subtitle, as their children could get the same movie in 10 minute, and plug it to the tv them with a usb stick, with Hun dubbed, but they slowly rolled out dubs, and took over the streaming market as lone monopole first comers. And as for now past 2020, here we are, most of our burned game amd movie catalogues somewhere in a landfill, as the cheap plastic disk chipped away in 5-8 years. the only thing remained, is our steam and psn catalogue of games. Pc gaming still rules, the console market is dominated by sony, around 2/3 as the xbox is looked as an unfavoured option. And even the nintentdo switch got a preaty decent market share as well. For audio, spotify is the king, as it offers students discount, and people stick with it after that, either paying, or bearing the ads. For movies netflix had to share with hbo go disney+ and amazon, also friends sharing the acount amoong 10-20 of them at a time. But they loosing subscribers, as people grew bored with the woke agenda, and the prices going up. The population is divided to 3 distinct group. Thoose who used torrent since the 2000's, and still does for movies, and programs, uses youtube vanced for free music streaming, and only buys games for the convinience of steam and the always online mechanic. Thoose who too young to learn torrenting ,and they pay for everything, games netflix..., and if they are curious they try to learn the old forgotten ways of torrenting. ANd the ones, who didnk't care for gaming at all, but can't afford to pay, so searches 'insert film name" full film online into google, and watching a 360p version uploaded to a local video sharing site. the 2-3 remained torrent sites are seeing a grow of new users and activity from month to month since the pandemic. And the biggest joke is that they even got government funds simetimes, runing ads for government organizations.
@@twodivisionstill pleanty of pirating in Hungary too, but mostly for movies now. The biggest drop for games, were that they became always online, and most of the popular games now are fully multiplayer. As they closed of the possibility to create local servers, pirating like cod warzone became pointles, without servers. also many of them are f2p now, as microtransactions are a more gready way to get your child, to stole your credit card in the night, and spend your money on fancy skins.
I really enjoyed hearing the perspective from across the pond it's really cool hearing how the market was so different. I'm actually very interested in digging into this myself now, thank you!
Italy's history with gaming is quite odd - with Italian being seldom spoken beyond Italy, parts of Switzerland and Malta, Italian translations of games were not a thing until the mid-to-late '90s, with games like Pokémon even advertising that they were in Italian as a selling point (despite the original game's translation being made by two people who were told they had to translate from German, but actually had to translate from English, and without any context given to those words). On the other hand, once games started getting translations, Italy's rich and varied tradition of voice acting got involved. While some early dubs, such as Metal Gear Solid, were voiced on the cheap with Italian actors who lived in London (and some being dubbed at Abbey Road Studios, of all places), starting with late PS1 games and early PS2 games, Italian voice acting in games skyrocketed, often surpassing English voice acting in terms of quality. There are also, of all things, a few Italy-only releases, the most famous of all being a PS2 Lupin III game that only ever came out in Japan and Italy, "Rupan Sansei - Rupan ni wa shi o, Zenigata ni wa koi o" (which came out as "Le avventure di Lupin III: Lupin la morte, Zenigata l'amore" in Italy), and featured the cast of the series' Italian dub, being the last ever project on which Lupin's historic voice actor ever worked on.
Here in Latin America games were rarely translated into Spanish or Portuguese. The only major Japanese game that had a Spanish/Portuguese translation were SNK fighting games, and even then they had plenty of errors since it based on the English translation. Pokémon Red/Blue got a re-release into Spanish, but it was just the European Spanish translation repackaged, with all the difference in dialect intact Sometimes people would in Hispanic America would play some PC and pirated PSOnes in European Spanish, it was kind of weird but it helped a little. I think that's a reason why JRPGs are more niche here, there's a joke among Latin Americans that Final Fantasy VII is only talked by gaming TH-camrs from Spain, while the whole series is niche here. Ironically, Final Fantasy XVI became the first game in the series to receive a dub into Spanish, and it was done in Mexico Microsoft was the first publisher that tried to dub a game into Latin American Spanish, there were some minor games before, but Halo 2 was the first AAA game dubbed into Neutral Spanish, but unfortunately the was made in Miami with plenty of inexperienced actors from different countries. It was so bad that a Mexican voice actor who worked on anime like Digimon and Sakura Cardcaptor sent a complaint to Microsoft and surprisingly they took all the criticism and hired him to overlook Halo 3's dub which was made in Mexico, where most dubs are made. Ever since the 360 generation games started getting translations for the Latin American market, Zelda Phantom Hourglass was Nintendo's first game translated into Neutral Spanish. Sony began dubbing games like Uncharted and The Last of Us in Argentina, though since they switched to Mexico. Nintendo has dubbed many games into Neutral Spanish, Star Fox 64 was dubbed in Los Angeles, Kirby's Epic Yarn in Argentina, and since the release of Breath of the Wild almost all of their major releases are dubbed in Mexico by well known actors, though games like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem are sub-only
I remember reading something not too long ago about licensed manga/anime games getting released in certain European countries. You mentioned the Lupin III game, but there was a Yattaman game on PS1 that, similarly, only got a release in Japan and Italy. During the SNES era pretty much every Dragon Ball game got released in France and the UK got that Grappler Baki PS2 game (Although it was renamed to “Fighting Fury”).
@@DEVTHRVY I believe a Saint Seiya game was released for the NES in France due to the popularity of the anime there. Here in Latin America, Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul is one of the few non-Nintendo Japanese games that got dubbed into Spanish, with almost all of the original anime dub actors reprising their roles, and in the case of Seiya it was the last time his original VA, Jesús Barrero, dubbed him before his passing
@@pablocasas5906 Just out of curiousity, what exactly does "neutral Spanish" mean? Like, do LATAM and European Spanish just differ in common proverbs/figures or speech, select nouns and how a few verbs are used, or are there actually more fundamental differences in thing like genus (grammatical gender), tenses or sentence structure which would be really irritating to unify?
@@pablocasas5906 Yeah it was the very first Saint Seiya game for the Famicom that got a NES release only in France. I’m surprised a lot of those games didn’t get releases in Latin America since, to my understanding, Saint Seiya (And Dragon Ball) are insanely popular in your parts of the world to the point the characters are borderline cultural icons.
You know that the size differnce of the boxes has it's roots in the pallet sizes being different between USA and Europe? The boxes need to fit (as many as possible) on a shipping pallet when you add the protective cardbord boxes. EU pallets is 1200x800mm and US pallets is 1219x1016mm.
Im a video game collector from Poland, and finding games here is quite interesting too, as its a ex communist country, there were simply no games available back then. Well there were, in the form of Pegasus (a communist copy of a NES). But it all changed when CD Projekt started to distribute (and translate) video games in the mid-to end 90s. However the PS1 never really catched on, i guess it was still a bit too new and too expensive. But from the PS2 onward, there would be many games with Polish translations, cover text and booklets. And sadly retro games are more expensive than most other European countries. Funny enough the Polish version of certain games are high valued at times than the English ones..
I love getting all these comments from people experience collecting in the EU. There are so many small differences between countries that it was impossible for me to catalogue them all and put them in this video so receiving info life this is so awesome
Pretty funny how polish versions of some cheap games like God of War in our language are like twice the price. That's why I buy only english cover games, but at the other hand German games are rather cheap but most of people don't speak german so its pointless for many of game collectors in Poland. For example you can buy Obsucre for PS2 for like 3 times less than english version.
In Croatia nobody really cared about Famiclones, as home computers were available even in Yugoslavia, though you had to go to Austria or Italy to get one and sometimes you had to jump though hoops like buying them component per component. The PS1 was very popular in the early 2000s as the budget option, as was the PS2 slim in the late 2000s. Nintendo stuff was mostly relegated to those who had family members in Germany, Sweden or Austria. I suppose because Nintendo stuff was considered nerdy and niche much like anime was outside of areas with Italian TV reception. Sony was considered the cool and premium brand.
If I recall, Sony entered Poland in the PS1 era (and Czech, Turkish and Russian markets too), but 4-language PS1 cover games (RU PL CZ TR) are extremely rare today. I'm a Russian national and I can relate to a lot of facts in this video since we had our games imported from Europe. Piracy was still a major factor, too, and, despite genuine games being available, though rare, since around mid 90s, bootlegs were only phased out by late 2000s (PS3 era). Sony had been an absolute winner in Russia for generations from 5 to 8, but even Playstation is always second to PC here.
Indeed! Sometimes I feel that It would be cheaper to buy a sealed copy of NES game on Ebay than some Polish releases of rather common games. I also wish we could have more stores with retro games. Maybe one day. :)
This is super cool! Here in Australia our stuff was pretty inconsistent, we'd get the American versions sometimes and European versions other times haha. Some of my DS games have the bigger European boxes and others have the thinner America ones despite them all being Aussie copies. Our region-lock region is also the same as Europe's so if games weren't released here, or are cheaper in Europe, we can grab the European copies and they'll work on our consoles.
Fatal Frame's European name of Project Zero is actually closer to the Japanese games, which are just called Zero. And Project Zero was what the first game was known as in development. Also surprised Xenoblade wasn't mentioned here. Yes, it was released worldwide, but... the only reason it came out in the US in the first place is because the European release led to a large demand for it and because localisation was really cheap and easy (since the hard work was already done). And there's also some other games that released in Europe before the US that were made in Japan. Tales of the Abyss 3D came out in Europe a few months before the US, for example. Although in very limited quantities at first. There were only like 5K made for all of Europe in the beginning, I think. Then the next print didn't release until like January. I was lucky enough to be able to obtain a copy at launch of the game.
@@Fermin-hw5pd There's A LOT of games that release worldwide before they do in Japan. Unless you're specifically talking about games made in Japan that release worldwide/out of Japan first. I do think those are pretty rare. I think there was also a JRPG that actually released a few days earlier the US and Europe before Japan, but I can't recall which one or for which system it was.
@@Fermin-hw5pd It depended on the market, if the game was popular with overseas markets then sometimes publishers would prioritize releasing where it would sell best first. A big example I know of was Silent Hill which sold much better in Europe and America then it did in it's home country of Japan. After the poor domestic sales of SH2 in Japan, Konami turned to making the next game cheaply and releasing in Europe first which meant Silent Hill 3 came out in May 2003 about 5 weeks before it's Japan release which blew my mind at the time since I had grown up in the era of Japanese games taking almost a year to come to Europe.
I only play on PC now so I have not bought a physical copy of a game in since 2011, Battlefield 3 was my last physical copy of a game that I ever bought. Thanks for sharing your video, really cool that you have a hobby that makes you happy.
On the PAL vs NTSC issue, it goes both ways when you take a lot of retro computers into account. If you're a US collector of Commodore 64, Atari ST, or Amiga games, then the domestic releases are only a fifth or so of the total software library for those systems. Many of the best games on those computers were developed in Europe and designed to run at 50 hz, which means they're often a headache to get working on an NTSC system.
Yep, it's the same problem in reverse of what the consoles had, but in this case, games run too fast for the US market on the Amiga. Also, Pal could deliver a higher resolution, which likely didn't matter for consoles but for home computers like the Amiga, it allowed games to have a higher resolution. Personally, it's probably best to get the game that runs at the correct speed it was designed for, so a lot of home computer games usually run best at 50hz whereas most console games run best at 60hz, but there are many exceptions, many games from Japan ended up being released in the EU market but didn't get a release in the US, you could get the Japanese version of the game that will run fine at 60hz but it will be in Japanese, being as the same game was also released in the EU market at the time, it's got English, so in that case, the PAL version is better. In any case, the market back then was a mess, some games being released in the EU, some in the US, many of which having all sorts of changes from each other and even from the Japanese version and in any event, there are many games that made it to the EU market but never made it to the US market and vice versa and one example was a fireman game for the SNES, forgot the name of it but it was released in the EU and Japan only, I know this because I was looking for the US version a few years ago and it never got released over there, it's the same for countless others.
@@paul1979uk2000 _> "Also, Pal could deliver a higher resolution, which likely didn't matter for consoles but for home computers like the Amiga, it allowed games to have a higher resolution."_ Why wouldn't it matter? Higher resolution is a nicer looking image. Plus I've seen games developed for PAL having to change things to fit on the lower resolution NTSC.
In Balkan region, Serbia specifically, due to political circumstances we were pretty much closed to the rest of Europe so original video games were both very expensive and very difficult to find to the extent that the only way was to find someone going abroad, or living abroad to buy games as well as consoles. In the first year of PS2 era, I was visiting my cousin in Vienna and a store had a bunch of PS1 games for something really cheap, so I bought a bunch of games that I either played previously and liked or wanted to play only to find out that like 75% percent of games were available in either in German or in almost every European language other than English, which was the only language other then my own I spoke. Was really a bummer, but the times I spent with my cousin playing X Files together, him translating it for me, is something I'll always cherish.
The thing with Contra / Probotector: Back in the 80s and 90s, Germany had extremely strict laws regarding violence in video games. While the contra games are anything but graphic, Konami just went with the safe route and censored the games heavily, as to not get hit with the deathsentence that is "18+" ratings or being set on the index of banned games outright. ( where they would not have been allowed to be sold visibly, and you were not allowed to do any marketing ) - In the case of Probotector, I think it is a change for the better! Those robots are way cooler than some Rambo looking dudes, IMO.
yes please have a look at "Command & Conquer" - in the us release all are humans. In the german (and european?) release all a robots with black "blood". There were alot of cut down version due to be afraid to be only allowed for adults (18+). Back in the day those games weren't allowed to be on the shelf (the person had to ask the store clerc) or needed a seperated room for 18+ - which most stores didn't have. Also it wasn't allowed to advetise those games.Thus resulting into lower sales. Some games are even banned like games with Nazi symbols (original Wolfenstein 3D), excessive brutality or sexuality. I think this changed with the introduction of the USK (german PEGI/ESRB-style system)
@@DoomWarriorX I am aware of that. C&C2 even cut out the somewhat comedic appearance of Hitler in the intro from the game. the USK changed a lot to the better.
Man, you gave me a nostalgic trip with that Koningsdag. When I used to live in the Netherlands, I actually was dragged by relatives to take part in selling their junk, but the best part was going around and buying other people's junk.
Dutchman here. Love to see your take on European, and in particular Dutch, game collecting. Very recognizable. I just used Marktplaats to sell some old, but valuable games. A complete copy of Pokemon Emerald went for 200 euros and a sealed copy of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for 180. I quite undercut those prices, but whatever. People definitely know about game value here.
I don't think it's people knowing game value, rather it's people looking at what others are asking and pricing similar and not just for gaming stuff. Even most thriftshops I visit do this. I even seen this happen in action with some mid 90's PC cards, as I had a search thing for email on it. ~2 years ago Voodoo cards went for around 20~30 euro each with often 2 or 3 cards on marktplaats and was way below eBay price. At some point someone offered their Voodoo 3 for 80 euro (around eBay price at the time), which stayed on the site for around 2 months but at some point he was the only one offering a Voodoo card on the site. After that point every Voodoo card went for around the 70~80 euro mark and still does. (which at this point is again below eBay price)
I've always thought that European versions having simpler language was for translation purposes. "Nice" is WAY easier to translate than "Booyah"! This was awesome to see talked about! I love learning about the difference in UK/European versions, it was crazy to learn that Star Fox was called Lylatt Wars here at one point...
It's not that it's easier too translate, translators typically know the languages well enough to understand puns and the like, but rather that players who play in English are quite likely to be non-native speakers whose languages don't get official translations and they might not understand uncommon words.
It's also that in most(not all tho) cases, the european localization is more direct from japanese. At least it used to be like that, the US/EU-split in english settings still technically exists, but much less games make use of it these days.
In Germany I was surprised by the giant "giveaway culture" people have. It still amazes me how many good appliances and furniture you can get here for free, but sometimes that applies to videogames as well. Last year I got my hands on TloZ: Collector's Edition, MGS: Twin Snakes, Mario Strikers, Red Steel, Street Fighter IV 3D, Rayman 3D and Metroid Prime Hunters - for - free... Other times I've spotted other gems on small antique shops for really low prices (Star Fox 64 aka. Lylatwars for 7€ for example). This is something I would never see on the other side of the Atlantic, it's mindblowing
Woooow those are amazing finds!!! And yeah I went video game hunting in America a few times and you can really notice the huge differences in prices and general atmosphere about selling something of value
As a Moroccan, I mainly collect from Europe using eBay, we don't have Shops for retro games here, only flea markets with very used games (European versions).
fun fact: PAL runs at a higher resolution (20% more horizontal lines), compared to NTSC which was the intended way for devs so its like PAL is the original version while NTSC are the "modified" ones.
@@HammerStudioGames no the argument still stands, some games were intended to be on PAL and there were even documentations about some games had issues to release an NTSC version since they uintentional made the game harder as it should be, therefor the EU had some games that ppl find pretty easy to beat while US had way smaller window to react and made it "frustrating" to play. so some games even changed the pacing. Also your argument was the same i said, it ran slower. so said: still higher res over fps. Games that were developed from the ground up for NTSC had obv no problem, common sense. - but it seems i have to include that everytime and write a assay about useless facts
Great video. I just wanted to mention a few things though. The first thing I would like to add is that in European game collecting language variants make a pretty massive difference in prices and therefore, aside from general language variants like English, local markets decide the prices. If you look at pricecharting for a game like pokemon xd gale of darkness for example you will see a price of 210 usd for a pal cib copy. However if you look at the actual listings this is based on you will find that English copies tend to sell in the 250-270 range, while German copies go for 150-170, same for French ones etc. The Netherlands has a very active game collecting market and thus you will find that generally for popular titles the prices of HOL variants will be on the higher end. This price difference in language variants is not only affected by the demand of certain variants, but also by rarity. This whole system obviously creates a game collecting market where some variants will be printed less than others. In some cases you can see FAH variants of games be very expensive. This is especially the case for Konami published titles for the gamecube for example. You also have some rare ITA variants for gamecube, UK variants for ps2, region exclusives like many bad ps2 games that only came out in Italy etc etc. It's pretty fun to get to know the variants when diving into a specific console. Nintendo games also have the region code on the cartridge/disc so make sure to check if the game and box/manual have the same region code, though there are also many cases where the disc or cartridge ir just EUR or just UKV while the packaging is different. Another thing I would like to mention is that In the Netherlands, we have 'rommelmarkten,' and there are 4 kinds (broadly speaking). You have the ones that happen every few months in the same location with mainly semi-professional vendors, which are generally picked through and priced accordingly or high, but tend to have more expensive stuff. You have the 'buurtmarkten,' which you mainly see in cities. These are usually annual and have people from around the area come and sell their stuff. It's a bit more organized as compared to garage sales, but they are generally pretty close. You have the massive King's Day markets that you mention, which speak for themselves. And then lastly, you have the 'buurtmarkten' in communities outside of the city, usually hosted by a local organization to raise funds, a church, for example. These tend to be annual, but there are many communities in the Netherlands. For these sales, stuff is gathered by the organization by asking people to bring whatever they no longer want or wish to donate to them, and they somewhat organize it all and have general pricing. These are absolutely the ones to go to and have the most potential for good finds since nothing is really looked up usually. I have basically given up purely looking for game stuff myself, but other avenues like audio or other electronics are fantastic for sales like this, and if you get there early you can find a ton of game stuff as well, it's just a lot more competitive IMO. I haven't gone in years, but these are definitely super unique to the Netherlands and are super fun. There is usually a line and mad rush to get inside at opening time, especially at the known good ones. I used to go to like 4/5 on Saturday and sunday every single week about 5 years or so back, and thinking back on it I actually did find quite a bit of gaming stuff, as mentioned you just gotta get there early.
The Spyro music being mono in Europe was definitely because of all the language files, though the series just had weird stuff going on with its music in general, with the first game having some completely different tracks between NA and EU versions, and the third game having four different versions (original and 1.1 in both regions) that had messed up music in all but one - tracks missing or playing in the wrong levels and one release even playing peaceful hubworld music during the final boss.
@gomam0n702 Ah, C3 Racing, developed in France for PAL made for 50 Hz, with tracks all over the world. Ported to USA where the cars are pickups, and the tracks are now said to be different parts of USA, because USA, despite using the exact same graphics. Then also running the game at 60 Hz with no compensation so the game runs too fast. they also changed "km" to "m" (miles) without applying any modifier, so C3 Racing will say a distance is "1.0 km" and the US port will say "1.0 m" (miles).
14:03 The reason was for this, is that because Europe has so many languages and people especially kids may not understand everything from the text like playing with words.
I'm from Sweden and game collecting here has become difficult in the last few years, with basically all physical game stores closing down and prices in second hand marketplaces going up significantly. I actually used to order a lot from The Netherlands (Marktplaats specifically) in the last 6-8 years because it was much cheaper, but it seems prices have caught up there too.
I am curious though, how does the access to Marktplaats work for you as a Swede? I thought it was an 'internal' second hand website, primarily or basically solely focused on the Netherlands, made and start-up by Dutch people. How does the importing and delivery to another country work, does that on its own cost much more too?
@@robinmank3158 Yes, I should clarify that I have a friend in the Netherlands who used to handle it for me. Buying and sending it to me, or personally delivering it when visiting Sweden.
As a fellow swede, I agree. Game collecting here can be a lot more tedious here than it is the US. Places like Tradera doesn't always have the games I want, and the shipping on Ebay costs a lot more, and if i'm buying outside of europe I have to pay import fees. For example if i'm buying something from the US, the shipping and import is on average 500-600kr (~50-60$) for a game that costs 100kr.
I’ve been to Game Mania when I was in the netherlands and while we have Gamestop in germany, they’re the exact same. Insane used game prices, a focus on merch and the overall feel of the store are identical
As a UK citizen, I find collecting PAL games to be the only nationalistic/jingoistic aspect of my personality. I love collecting PAL games and proud of it for no other reason than they're PAL.
I like collecting the exclusive European games that only came out here since its something that not a lot of collectors based in the US would have. It makes me feel that my game collection is somewhat special and unique despite a lot of uk collectors probably having the same version. There's some games that I could just import from Japan as it would be cheaper than buying a PAL copy, mainly being the PS2 Persona Games but I still save up and buy the PAL version. I tend to also emulate the PAL versions of older games and a lot of people would say is just because I'm patriotic about the UK that I'd rather have 50hz or 60hz but to ke it feels natural playing the game how it was intended to play here.
i've heard of cases where an American game being ported to a PAL was retooled to fix the 50hz problem. for example, the creators of the first Crash Bandicoot were very involved in the PAL version, and Crash runs faster in those releases because of it
So many things I took for granted about gaming over here I did not realise were different in the US. The ps2 spine art especially surprised me, they look so weird to me with art on the spine.
Over here in Ireland collecting retro games is surprisingly accessible (in my experience!) Stores like Cex sell a lot of obscure titles for dirt cheap (but if its in any way in demand the prices are inflated to absurd levels). But there's plenty of "car boot sales," as I know em by that I've picked up entire consoles for good rates! I got a gamecube for €80 euro once :) Not to mention just how many obscure things you can find second hand here. I've got an obscure Mario 3 vinyl from a car boot sale, and got a professor layton movie for €2! If you're on the hunt for retros, you're usually not too far from em here :)
Cex is pretty good in the UK, but you're right about stuff in demand being overpriced. If you're not fussed about buying cartridges loose you can still pick up bargains though. Glad I bought a lot of my retrogames about 15 years ago before the market heated up.
My experience in Ireland is that you see very very few retro games, but I wouldn't have looked into things like car boot sales as much. I feel like CeX is very limited though, you might only see a few PS1 and N64 games in a shop, and practically nothing from before that. It compares unfavourably to something like Gamescash (game shop franchise in France) where I've seen several shelves of Master System and NES games, a respectable number of Saturn games (more than the number of N64 games I've ever seen in a CeX) and even a bunch of Super Famicom imports. The really frustrating thing is that there's been a very noticeable increase in GameCube games in CeX shops nationwide recently: I have a strong feeling CeX has had GameCube game stock that they've been keeping in storage for some unfathomable reason, same might be true of stuff from other consoles.
@@conorneligan7694 with Cex your experience varies by the store. Naturally the stores in the more dense spots like malls and cities have more varied stock! They've always got a solid Ps2 stock, though! Recently I picked up Mario Sunshine from one of the city mall stores, too! You're right about the more obscure consoles, their stock for those is certainly much smaller, but if you do some digging and lookin through stores (and online, since you can get it shipped from another store to your local one, or your door) you can find good stuff :) But i'd suggest looking through car boot sales here, theres rarely treasures, but when you find em its worth it!
Definitely NOT accessible. CEX have only been doing PS1 for a few months, and there are a very very limited number of retro gaming shops here. Marketplace and donedeal overflates the prices on the rarity of items. Rage are selling Suikoden 2 at a laughable €375 and its in average condition. Ireland retro collecting is frustrating
Not sure about in Ireland but the carboot sales in the UK atleast in the area I'm in has had such an increase in dealers selling games now who will sell loads second hand for near what people charge online
I'm so glad this came up on my recommended. Been collecting in the US for 15+ years and its so fascinating seeing how much the hobby is similar and different overseas. New sub from me :) Also, my favorite "same game, different name" is Yoshi's Universal Gravitation. I guess they thought that was too wordy so they called it Yoshi Topsy Turvy for us dumb Americans to get lol.
In the 90s, EU/UK would get the shit end of the stick when it came to games. First up, it would take 6 - 12 months to hit our shores after they came out in the US and Japan. Games would also run slower to their NTSC counterparts. Finally, we'd pay the higher prices for our games compared to the US and Japanese folks as well. All in all, it really did feel like we was loved the least when it came to gaming.
Great video!! The part about weirder games coming to Europe is interesting, Europe was more big on PC games in general than consoles which made it easier for small companies and solo nerds to create games on their own if they owned personal computers so it's generally where a lot of old more "artsy" games came from at first, I wonder if that's why those games that weren't published in the U.S. came to Europe? Either way, really interesting video!! Very well made too! Good job!
I was really contemplating on whether or not I wanted to include a talk about PC Games and specifically the MSX since that was such a big computer for the game market over here but decided to keep it to console games since the video was specifically about how these changes effect game collecting in each region. There was a version of the script that kinda started changing into a video about the history of the EU Game market but that began feeling like its own rabbit hole so I wanted to limit that a bit.
This was extremely interesting and very imformative. My own personal game collection consists of 80% PAL versions of games since that's what I was brought up with (I'm from Scotland) but as time passed, I learned about the slower speed thing and I started collecting US/JP versions of my favourites to get the best playing experience as possible. Not only that but I'm a sucker for the different box art so I collect the different versions for that too. I also love that some games have noticable gameplay differences between regions too.
Neat. There are a couple of other notable things about the European market/collecting I’d like to bring up. The popularity of consoles sometimes could differ between Europe and other markets. The NES for example was an absolute juggernaut in America/Japan but in Europe, not so much. How well the NES did in Europe depended on the country but especially in places like the UK, the NES played second fiddle to the Master System, which was a failure in America/Japan. The Master System lasted way longer in Europe due to just how successful it was (Sonic 1 was the last game released for the Master System in America yet, Europe got many more games years after Sonic came out, hence the insane price difference for the game in the different regions). Meanwhile, the NES had to fight an uphill battle which it simply did not have to do in the other major regions, hence why Europe missed out on quite a few NES games. There are of course more examples of this (the TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine was basically non existent in Europe for example) but the NES/Master System is probably the most notable distinction. Regarding the whole 50Hz making games slower, this was very much a case by case basis depending on the game. Yes, European consoles had to run at a lower frequency/framerate but it was possible for developers to adjust their games to 50Hz so they would play at their intended speed. The problem was that this was entirely down to the developers and in a good chunk of cases, developers did not optimise their games for 50Hz, resulting in games literally running slower. There was no consistency with developers optimising their games, it was simply a roll of the dice. Also, while the 6th gen consoles did start including 60Hz options in Europe as mentioned, it was not consistent at all. Some games had 60Hz, some didn’t and even at that point, you could still have unoptimised 50Hz games (without the option for 60). It wasn’t until the 7th gen when it was the norm to include 60Hz for games in Europe. One last thing I think which is worth mentioning was the 80/90s computer market. Back in the 80s and early 90s, the 8/16 bit computer were a big part of the European gaming market. Commodore and Atari computers were significantly more successful gaming platforms in Europe and Europe had its fair share of its own computers for gaming, like the ZX spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The computer market was a major part of Europe’s early gaming market with how cheap games were and how easy/cheap they were to distribute. Europe got tons and tons of exclusive games on these kinds of computers, there was a ton of stuff for them. Europe of course moved on to Windows for gaming in the late 90s onwards but that early European PC gaming market is quite notable in terms of Europe’s history with gaming. It’s not for everyone of course but it’s still a notable thing worth mentioning.
@proudofyourroots9575for Xbox it wasn't really on the developers, Microsoft just didn't care a bit about the European market and just decided that any console they sold as pal wouldn't get the output resolution menu
Yeah some PS2 games were still unoptimized for 50Hz. Spyro Eternal Night for example is really choppy performance wise or the GTA games in general but there was no music slowdowns like in the Mega Drive anymore. Then you had others like Silent Hill 2 where it almost feels like 60Hz despite still being 50Hz. We call it PAL optimized games. Then some games like Haunting Ground or Black offered 60Hz and even progressive scan, the so called PAL60 games. The PAL original Xbox also supports 60Hz and 480p but you can only unlock it with soft/hard mod. Even some PAL exclusive games can do progressive scan like Hello Kitty, it was really dumb of Microsoft to lock this feature by default in PAL regions. As for the Gamecube, I don't own one so I'm not sure of the capabilities of a PAL Gamecube. Regardless, I'm glad this nonsense went away in the 360/PS3 era and now the NTSC/PAL versions are equivalent with only some language support differences.
@proudofyourroots9575 I literally own both consoles and you're saying things I didn't even say so get sober before you speak to me. The only part of your 3 comment rant that makes any sense is that yes, some - a minority of OG Xbox PAL games support 60hz without 480p and modding which I should have clarified. Everything else is gibberish or correcting things I didn't even say.
@proudofyourroots9575 I honestly don't know the amount of games that had pal60 support, but from what I know using a modded og xbox had they just kept the resolution menu for pal territory it would've allowed any pal xbox to play 60hz out of the box with just the pal copy of a game, so it was an unnecessary omission
@proudofyourroots9575 Where did I say the majority of PS2 games supported 60hz? And why did you bring up the Xbox sales to say Europe loved Xbox when that wasn't even the topic? Again... I will try to make your 2 braincells work. My mistake was not clarifying that a minority of PAL OG Xbox games supported 60hz out of the box. However a good chunk of them supported progressive scan and therefore 60hz which was impossible to enable without modding. Did you understand this? Do you want me to make a drawing next time? Anyway I'll stop replying because you'll probably make more crap up until you sober up.
(8:00) It is weird that games didn't come with Spanish and French translations in North America since there are Spanish and French monolinguals. If they're going to translate the game to Spanish and French anyway for Europe (at least for games they know they'll release in Europe), then that would reach a wider audience without any extra work (it was already going to be translated).
So im gonna butt in here with what its like down here in australia (from my own experience) because we are weird, my main gripe here is with the ds library because it changed from the pal boxes to the north american ones leaving your library with this weird half massive boxes (that don't require the massive boxes because nearly all of australia speaks english) and the north american ones and we also get a weird mix between north american and europen names and box arts and spines like for the wii we got the actual game logos on it like in north america but we also usually get the europen names for games and systems now i could have gotten a lot of that wrong because i am just starting collecting but this is how i have noticed it.
1:57 Oh you have NO IDEA how prevalent this is here in Europe. Sonic 1, 2 and 3 were a completely different type of game here because of this. For one, the speed was slower. We didn't quite associate it with a "fast" game, it was simply a cool platformer, that's it. The _MUSIC_ also played slower. Whenever I hear the Sonic 1 music (diru-diru-diru-diru...) in a video, it sounds like it's being sped up like in a TH-cam Poop. 17% slower, it just sounds like a pleasant jingle, not like the "GOTTA GO FAST KID" song it was meant to be. Edit: Look at me. I was so excited about this that I paused the video and made this whole comment before seeing how you addressed this.
Nice touch with the PAL star light zone music. We also have a weird history in the UK with Electronics Boutique - they purchased GAME, a British retailer, then rebranded as... GAME. Most people think GAME ruined eb but it was the other way around, and then they ruined gamestation.
Do you remember when blockbusters had gamestation inside it? Nobody else seems to remember, but i swear towards the end of gamestations life they teamed up with blockbuster in some way or another.
A lot of the differences you talk about are cases of the European version being closer to the Japanese version. Project Zero is way closer to the original name of the series, not some random thing they came up with for Europe.
ive been collecting games in the Netherlands for about 3 years now and never have i related more with a youtube video, Im not kidding. Thank you for making this it was very fun ! :)
Another neat part of the European market is also the bootlegs we got. A lot of them were just as good as the original and we got a lot of unique games made here that you might not find in the NA market. In Portugal it was pretty easy to just go to a local Chinese general shop and grab some bootleg yugioh cards and PS2 games when I was growing up. Especially now with the ease of jailbreaking these old consoles, it can be a cheaper alternative if you just want to try out a game but aren't too fussed about buying the official copy.
Interesting. What you said has made me think of another notable point about the European gaming market. Europe has many different countries and different countries will have different markets. The UK for example was big on computers in the 80s/early 90s for games and as for consoles, Nintendo was dragging behind to either SEGA or SONY right up until the Wii. Even the NES struggled to keep up with the Master System while the NES completely dominated the American/Japanese markets. In Portugal however, bootlegs were a lot more common (whereas they were not in the UK). That’s the neat thing about the European gaming market. You have many vastly different countries and those countries naturally have differing gaming markets. The NES might have struggled in one European country but it could have done a lot better in another European country. You even sometimes have games which only came out in specific parts of Europe. You might have UK exclusives, French exclusives, German exclusives and so on.
Yeah, we also used to have a bunch of Gameboy and Gameboy Advance bootlegs on the Chinese shops. It was even possible to find bootlegs at street fairs until about 15 years ago.
@@bigbangbot-SuperSqankto your point about Nintendo, the NES wasn’t even labelled as a “Nintendo” Entertainment System when first released in the UK. They sold the marketing rights to Mattel toys and the original UK systems were labelled as the “Mattel Entertainment System.” Someone on my street had one growing up, I had no idea how rare it was (neither did he), because they didn’t sell many. Nintendo took the rights back and started marketing with another partner (or by themselves, I don’t remember), but weren’t successful. The UK was SEGA country as far as consoles were concerned until the Playstation was released. The PSX was massively influenced by Liverpool-based Psygnosis after Sony bought them and the British bedroom coding scene from the 80s more generally. SEGA’s early success in the UK has a lot to do with Virgin, as their subsidiary Virgin Megagames had the rights to market SEGA in the UK (and a lot of europe too). They’re why the Master System was so successful in Europe and SEGA bought them out in the end as they’d done a great job establishing SEGA in europe and especially the UK.
I think when it comes to gaming in Europe you have to go back to the start. It was predominantly a home computer market, your spectrums, c64's Amstrad cpu's and the like, then into the 16bit era with Atari St and Amiga's. By the time I had even heard of the NES let alone seen one it had been and gone as a thing and I was on an Amiga. The SNES made a minor impact, and the mega drive/Genesis a little more (I had at least seen both those systems 'in the flesh'), but even then they were rare to see at a mates house compared to any of the home computers of the era. Consoles were just not a thing really until the PlayStation came along when many were looking to upgrade from their 16bit computers but the emerging pc market was to expensive an alternative. The combination of consoles having much improved graphics over the 16bit home computers and the lack of viable alternatives is what drove a large part of the console market in Europe into being. And it was similar for European software companies like RARE or the emergent Rockstar (still DMA Design then) who also began moving more and more from the home computer market in Europe into developing for the new consoles.
Am from Belgium and had An Atari Pong , Phillips videopac , Nes , C64 , megadrive, SNES , N64 ,gamecube ,Gameboy and a Neogeo pocket color.I come from a normal workerfamily ...so gaming was a thing in Europe
What you describe is Britain. For example here in the Netherlands it's more Atari, Megadrive, SNES, C64, Videopac, MSX, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy and Amiga. Spectrum wasn't popular here, Amstrad is basically unheard of (and was licensed by a German company here), SNES was significantly more popular than the megadrive, Atari 2600 became the budget system till the early 90's, Playstation toke the Atari spot late in the 5th generation. CDi's are also relatively common, though mostly due to the their adoption by businesspeople as their original inteded design, being functionally powerpoint machines (Which is also why when you find them here you tend to find the earlier luxury models with the IR remote rather than the newer consolized version with the game controller).
The BoTW box art was changed to look like ‘Wonderer above the sea of fog’, a famous German painting which really matches the game well. Maybe the Euro team there are classical art fans or the rest of the world isn’t expected to recognise the Mona Lisa of Germany.
I can respect it, but honestly I do think the 50hz problem is at least a little overblown, everyone loves to bring up the sonic 1 example, but that is only because it is one of the worst cases, very few games were as bad as sonic 1. A lot of the major titles on the Nes and Snes for were actually somewhat optimized to run on Pal systems, all Mario and Zelda games for example run pretty well. Every game that Rare developed for the Snes and N64 as well should run perfectly. All the PS1 Crash and Spyro games as well run perfectly on Pal systems. There are a ton of examples of games actually running pretty well on Pal consoles. But it is very much on a case by case basis tho, and some developers (looking at you Capcom and Square) almost never optimized the gameplay of their games, even as far as on the PS2... But the one thing that almost every developer did after the at least th Snes was released was to at optimize the music and sound of their games, which is the big reason why the sonic 1 example is as jarring as it is. When the music at least plays correctly, I honestly find it somewhat hard to even tell if a game has optimized gameplay or not.
What I find so interesting with collecting here in Europe, is that on the spine of Nintendo games at the bottom, you can see a colored triangle. This actually shows from which country/region the game is! Here in Belgium, we don't really have a color associated to us, so you will find TONS of different colored ones! We can sometimes have some from Netherlands, but also from the UK, France, Germany, etc. This is ESPECIALLY apparent when it comes to used games here in game stores or retro stores. I really like to look at my collection and see all the different colors, trying to find out which country/region it's associated to! - Light Blue is the Netherlands - Green is the UK - Red is for France - A very dark Purple/Blue/Indigo is from Germany - Purple is usually the color you'll find on games that come from Limited Editions/Collector's Editions, so they're for all of europe. - Pastel Purple seem to be for Spain and Italy? (Maybe Portugal aswell?) - Marine Blue seems to be the same as Purple, this being for all of Europe, but not for limited editions? Still not 100% sure about this one xD These are all the colors i know of so far! You can check this yourself on any box in Europe, check the color of the triangle and then look at the product code on the box, usually right above the barcode! For example, my copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Limited Edition is: DOL-GZLP-HOL The DOL is to indicate which system it is for, which i find really cool that this is called DOL, which is the codename for the Gamecube, that being Dolphin. Thats why you also have RVL for the Wii for example, this standing for Revolution. The next couple of numbers indicates a unique code that identifies the game. Fun fact: Seeing as Breath of the Wild is the first release on switch, this is why it's unique code is "AAAAA" seemingly the beginning of the alphanumeric code! "TRA-HAC-AAAAA-HOL" in full for example and the HOL showing which country it is from, this case it being Holland/Netherlands. You won't find the colored triangles on cardboard gameboxes like for GB(C) and GBA for example, instead, you'll find these on the instruction manuel! :D I think this is super fascinating and always something I pay extra attention to!
This is great stuff. I'm a Brazilian game collector that moved to Sweden about six years ago and befriended a Swede that is really into game collecting too. We learned a lot from each other on how to get good deals on hard to find or expensive stuff, it's one of my most treasured friendships nowadays because of this cultural exchange aspect. I specifically try to go for the Brazilian edition of the games released over there and my friend tries to go for the Swedish edition, sharing the differences between releases of two extremely niche places that hardly ever talk to each other is such a pleasant experience. You can do a deep dive on the specifics of each european country by talking to locals over there, I feel there's a niche for it, Lady Decade and the Top Hat Gaming Man usually talk about this stuff too and I love their content. Str1ka is a portuguese guy that also covers a lot of the lusophone market which means Brazil too but his channel is quite obscure, probably because of how thick his accent is. The main thing is that you don't have a european accent, you could proooobably bring this sort of global content to american audiences if you tried ;)
Of course one connection between European and Brazilian gaming is the Master System being popular in both. I was genuinely shocked to learn that 8-bit Sonic 1 was the last game released in the US for the Master System - it's the first console game I ever played and only the start of my journey with that console.
(12:45) One reason for changing names can be similar to changing covers, to find a title that overall works better for the global European market. Sometimes titles are changed to be more basic English, and a great example is "Squeak Squad" which is changed to "Mouse Attack"; words that non-English speakers are more familiar with. "Huge Adventure" being "XS" and so on. But "Ripto's Rage!" being "Gateway to Glimmer", no idea. However, sometimes titles are changed in Europe from North America to be similar to the original Japanese title. In Japan, a game known as Kuri Kuri Mix was renamed to The Adventures of Cookie and Cream in North American, and then titled Kuri Kuri Mix in Europe.
Would y'all be interested in a similar video but focused on NZ within the PAL region? Cause we have a lot of differences to European collecting and US collecting
Mario RPG also didn’t release in Europe because it used a special graphics chip called the sa1 chip and at the time it was very expensive so not only would it would take to long to translate it, it would also cost to much.
It still baffles me that Nintendo didn't release a Mario game in Europe while they did release Lufia II (even the only RPG that got a Dutch translation) here. That chip must have been very expensive.
@@Ruudos what’s even weirder is Kirby Superstar (which used the same chip)released in Europe in January of 1997, 2 months before the n64 released there. Although Mario RPG is more focused on dialogue and the translation would probably take longer.
I am also Dutch and a game collector i didn't know there whas so much difference between the American and European games i just didn't see it so thanks for making this video
Great video dude! Im from the UK so is nice to see someone talking about the differences in Regional games. Dropped a sub and look forward to seeing more ^_^
Hey ! Just stumbled upon your video and you earned yourself a new sub. I’m a video game collector from Portugal and it was so refreshing to watch this. Game collecting is indeed so much different here in the old continent. As someone who collects exclusively PAL region games, I loved watching your video through the end and I can’t wait for more content. Thank you !!!
Biggest difference for most European localized retro games being the frame rate, 50 Hz (EU) vs. 60 Hz (NTSC), is probably why I would never collect European games. And also because they are region locked, so my console would probably never even be able to play them.
Great topic. I have to mention that Australia is a PAL region and a lot of the games described as 'European only' were also released in Australia. I find myself playing only NTSC versions of older games nowadays. The speed difference wasn't an issue back in the day but you do notice it if you try to go back. Something you didn't really touch on was a lot of games were optomised for PAL so that the speed of the gameplay and/or music was altered to resemble the 60Hz timing.
I kinda wanted to mention it but in actuality there are relatively few games optimized for 50hz. More so around the 2000's just before the 60hz option became available. EU Game companies like Rare did always optimize their games though
@@Mallerd It really was company to company but a lot were at least partially optomised. I also wished you had talked about the coloured triangles on the spines of Nintendo games, that would have been great for the topic.
@@goatbone there is like 5 versions of this script with one of them having that included by GVG already has a super indepth video on that topic and I didnt want to rethread that ground. (Fun fact I was actually in that video because I send in a picture of my Wii collection for it haha)
The Sega Saturn had some great PAL optimisation. VF 2 and Sega Rally run full screen and speed. The Dreamcast was the big one as the 60hz option on 99% of the games was great. PS2 was hit and miss. Later era mega drive games some of them were optimised.
@@Mallerdmore games than you would think were actually Pal optimized or at least somewhat optimized. A ton of first party Nintendo games on the Nes and Snes, including the Zelda and Mario games had at least some optimisations. Since Rare is a European studio all of their games run perfectly on Pal systems. All the PS1 Crash and Spyro games. Also once the Snes came out almost every single game at least fixes the audio to play at the correct speed, which imo was the biggest and most noticeable problem with the 100% unoptimized games.
Was always super jealous of the PAL version of Luigi’s Mansion for the GameCube as it had a different Hidden Mansion mode that we never got in the US or in Japan. Great video, and love seeing TWRP fans!
Hey, I came across this video on my homepage and I really liked it, I also checked out some of your animations and they look sick (another artist here, hello!) I'm from Turkey and game collecting, especially for Nintendo consoles, is almost impossible here, as Nintendo stopped selling in Turkey in early 2010s, so most stuff you can find is really damn expensive. Thankfully, I'm moving to the Netherlands next year (to study) so it's nice to hear that I'll get more options to shop for my nerdy Pokemon games and merch xD
Loved this video! As an American, I’ve never really thought about what game collecting was like in Europe. I knew your DS cases were different, but I didn’t know Dreamcast cases were as well! I also remember hearing that those little colored triangles on your game spines have something to do with what countries or languages are supported? Something like that. Either way, thank you! I hope to see more videos from you about games :)
About Project Zero, the Japanese games are called Zero FWIW. Also on Splatoon 1: The slang in that game often dated itseld very quickly. I remember foe one Splatfest the line "Team Snowbae is so fleck that I literally cant even". The booyah/cmon situation meant players didn't know what those inputs were intended for.
Another annoying aspect of collecting in EU is finding the game you want but it turns out to not be the english version. Plenty of JRPG and adventure games in the PS1/PS2 era would get a separate release for just the english, german, italian etc. version I didn't realise that was still the case even on some PS2 games, so I ended up owning extra french copies of Final Fantasy X and X-2 :) (I don't speak french)
It does actually make sense with disc space being limited for large RPGs to Release in Different languages. (esp. If voice acting is involved, which wasn't that often iirc)
@@keit99 I wonder though, how much space does text take up. Sure it makes sense for something like a gameboy Pokemon game, where space on the cartridge is already super limited. But PS2 games? For example, the Sly Cooper trilogy. These games are fully translated and voice acted in 11 different languages, all on the same disc.
When it comes to JRPG and their multiple, lengthy cutscenes, There simply might not be enough space to fit 5 or more languages unless they have to cut corners.
Always see the packaging language and the possible game product IDs, if the back cover is in English, so will be the manual and the game has English as an option, if it's not the only language. Frenchies, Italians, Spanishers and Germans like their own language variants depending on the game. Us Scandinavians usually have the packaging in Fin/Swe/Nor/Dan (or sometimes just one of those) and the game in English, unless multi-language, which is usually Eng/Fra/Ger/Ita/Spa but sometimes there's different languages as well.
I'm from Portugal, and I can understand your point of view. Collecting video games in Europe is a truly enjoyable experience and not as bad as some people make it out to be. Thank you for representing our European perspective.
Great video! Love to see more! I'm also from Europe and I always wished our market would be documented too or more frequently on the internet. I also wanted to mention a certain aspect I don't know whether the NA market struggles with. So as you mentioned, the boxes are bigger so they could display the text in different languages. But in some cases, some games only carry 1 specific language instead of multiple languages. Or it does contain multiple languages (including English) but the boxart & text is in another language but English, which is still ok! But I feel like this makes the PAL/European English boxes very wanted and, in some cases, more expensive than the games in a native language of a random European language.
One of the interesting things about living in the PAL Asia belt is that whenever Bandai Namco drop an anime game of some kind they always give us a bunch of really cool rewards whenever we go pick up a. Preorder whether it’s digital or physical. I remember when I went to pick up a copy of DragonBallZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and the dude behind the counter gave me this code sheet for five extra characters including Emperor Pilaf and Demon King Piccolo. And I was like “TF is this?” And he was like “BN Asia gave us a bunch of these with the delivery. Apparently they’re only exclusive to this area and Malaysia and I was like dang, that’s pretty cool. Then they added everyone to BT3. But when I picked up BT3 I got a bunch of exclusive costume colors you can’t get on other versions. I’m not sure why it’s a thing that exists but there you go.
Toffe video en logischerwijs heel herkenbaar. Ik ben ondertussen ruim 28 jaar bezig met verzamelen en de meeste van de dingen die je aanhaalt ben ik gaandeweg wel tegen gekomen. Wat ik daarentegen niet wist is dat Amerika een andere box art voor Breath Of The Wild heeft. Ik denk dat ik die zelfs mooier vind dan de europese. Je ziet wel vaker dat de europese en japanse box art ongeveer of precies hetzelfde is, maar de amerikaanse volledig afwijkt. Ik heb een aardige verzameling japanse games, veelal puur voor de box art en als je daar van houdt, dan zit daar een hoop moois tussen, met name voor de Super Famicom, de japanse Super Nintendo. De PS2 spines zijn altijd wel wat saaiig met alleen maar zwarte tekst op een witte achtergrond. Zo had het gaaf geweest als de .hack spellen in Europa net als in Amerika een plaatje vormden als je ze alle vier had. Tegenwoordig ga ik eerder naar Nedgame dan Game Mania. Het aanbod is wat uitgebreider met betrekking tot retro games en ik heb het idee dat ze daar net wat meer verstand van zaken hebben, al kan dat natuurlijk verschillen per werknemer of filiaal. Ook ga ik graag naar de kleinere retro game winkels, zoals Joydo en Press-Start. Ik kom daar soms dingen tegen die ik nergens anders vind. Bij Joydo haal ik wel vaker japanse spellen en Press-Start heeft meestal wel een doos met amerikaanse comics staan die ik altijd even doorspit. In 2017 ging ik voor het eerst naar een retro gaming beurs. Daar heb ik een wijze les geleerd. Opletten wat je aan wil schaffen. In tegenstelling tot de gewone winkels kom je van alles uit verschillende regio's tegen. Dat wist ik toen nog niet en helaas kwam ik daar pas achter toen ik thuis kwam. Twee van de spellen die ik daar had gekocht bleken amerikaanse versies te zijn. Whoops! De ene was voor de Nintendo DS die regiovrij is, dus die was gelukkig gewoon te spelen, maar de andere (en veel duurdere) was voor de Gamecube. Gelukkig zijn daar in dit geval nog opties voor, zoals emulatie of een Freeloader, maar op het moment dat ik erachter kwam, baalde ik toch lichtelijk. Aan de andere kant heb ik op zo'n beurs een amerikaanse PlayStation 2 gekocht, waardoor ik PS1 en PS2 games die Europa niet hebben gehaald toch zou kunnen kopen en spelen. Live and learn.
Watching your video I was like: damn, this dude sounds like he could live next to me. And then you said you're from the Netherlands and I'm like, makes sense lol. Great video! The King's Day part hit.
Although we also have Gamestop here in Germany, I would argue that it is similarly awful to your Gamemania in the Netherlands. Gamestop has a really bad reputation among gamers here because the prices were always much higher, the used games too and because purchases brought incredibly little money. For example: a game that had only been on the market for 4 weeks was bought there for 10€ and was resold by Gamestop itself for 50€. Nowadays Gamestop is only a marginal phenomenon where you can buy cheaply processed merchandise.
It's funny because I've been in Gamestops in Italy, Germany and Denmark and they are very different then the ones I've been to in the US. You're right in that EU Gamestops feel like Gamemania
One of the best games that only released in Europe and Japan that never got released in North America was Deep Fear on the Saturn. I believe it was the last Saturn game released in PAL regions and the used price is ungodly because of that, but it's a very unique survival horror game with a sci-fi nautical setting. I was surprised it didn't get mentioned here but it's worth checking out on an emulator or watching a playthrough online, it's a wild swan song for the European Saturn.
Not so Fun Fact: The N64s only way of region locking games is a small piece of plastic in the cartridge slot. This piece can be easily replaced to play any regions games. Unless you have a European N64, That one has an actual region locking chip makeing this impossible. This fact isn't super well known and led to me unknowingly buying a unplayable Japanese game. Always make sure you specify Pal N64 when Google searching. 😭
A decent reason I can think of for why the European version of Splatoon has less personality in it's dialogue, is because it was a more direct translation of the Japanese release, that's why "Booyah" was changed to "Nice", since it's a more direct translation of 「ナイス」
Great video, man! Collecting games in Europe is a mess as many games got several releases based on languages. You often had 5 or 6 different releases of the same game with the following sub region : UK Scandanavia, Germany, France + Netherlands, Italy & Spain. Fun fact, Nintendo box has a small coloured triangle for each version. German use purple, France red, Italy sky blue and so on. When collecting games here, you may choose to stick to one.language version making it harder to find the copy of your game.
(11:45) European collectors tend to say they overall prefer European covers, but not all. North American collectors tend to say they overall prefer the North American covers, but not all. It's either due to nostalgia, or that they just know their audience when it comes to changing the covers.
Good video :3 I find this kind of stuff interesting. Especially about the GameCube since each region has their own game cases. In Europe they are rather simple, in the USA with some thicker disc nest or whatever these are called and in Japan they are very small with cardboard sleeves. The Japanese case design is also used in Korea but with the European-like UK colored triangle on them lol
Nice to see a video about game collecting that's close to home. Here in Belgium (Flanders) it's pretty much the same as in the Netherlands. Marktplaats is 2dehands (which is owned by Marktplaats), and we also have GameMania. I really like the ending by the way xD
I bought a copy of Lufia on a dutch flea market this year, and discovering that it actually has dutch text kind of blew my mind. Guess I'll now have to learn dutch properly if I want to play Lufia. Also the upside down german flag on snes lucky luke will never not be funny. Great video!
Great video. I’m an American collector in England, and you are spot-on with a lot of your observations. I love the big differences like Starwing & Contra.
Two localisation changes that stood out to me were Advance Wars Days of Ruin being changed to Dark Conflict, with all of the characters having different names; Will became Ed, Brenner became O'Brien etc for some reason. The other was FFX having loads of extra postgame superbosses in europe - the dark aeons and penance. Although the american HD remaster added these back in.
I'm originally from the Netherlands, moved to Japan almost a decade ago. Game collection in Japan is very unlike both Europe and America. Sadly I don't have most of the European games anymore, because I had to sell them to fund my first months of stay while waiting for my visa to be approved, 3 months without a job or other means of funding. I've been game collecting here in Japan for quite a while now, mostly Super Famicom (aka SNES) and Nintendo 64, but eventually branched out to the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance, Playstations 1, 2, 3, and 4, Nintendo DS and 3DS, Gamecube, and all the SEGA consoles. I want to add Famicom (NES) too, but I have yet to find the original console anywhere. I never owned anything from Sony or SEGA back in Europe, so can't really compare them though. But the biggest differences in gaming overal is actually outside of console gaming. Arcades are still thriving with new games being released to them to this day, Gundam being among the biggest game franchises here, which is one the entire rest of the world doesn't care about, visual novels are massive (and sadly DRM protected too), and more or less everyone is into gatcha "games" on smartphones. PC gaming isn't as big apart from smaller dojin games or bigger Steam games, but it's steadily growing since the Japanese found out that Discord exists back in 2017. My collection isn't as extensive as yours, due to how shit the economy has been. But one game I really want to have in my collection is Conker Bad Fur Day, but I will probably need an import console from the US or Europe, since that game never released in Japan.
Yo, ook een verzamelaar in Nederland hier. Ik verzamel sinds ik 13 was ongeveer, dus dat zou nu 6 jaar zijn. Leuk om te zien dat iemand een keer aandacht geeft aan hoe anders het kan zijn hier in Europa. Ik gebruik vaak Marktplaats voor alles wat ik koop tweedehands, en koningsdag kan je altijd hele goede deals vinden. Ik hou van deze hobby, ook al ben ik soms wel jaloers op wat de Amerikanen krijgen
Hello, I'm a game collector from Hungary. I have been collecting video games for 20 years now. My biggest problem with collecting games in my country before I had internet access was that I ran into games with german covers quite often, and I don't speak german, so I don't like game packaging with only german language on it, in fact in my country the used market value is lower for games with german cover than that of an english one. Nowadays it's easy to sort out shops that are selling games with only german covers, so I avoid them. For local game stores we had a quite a big shop brand across the country called 576 kbyte, they even had their own video game magazine which was very popular in the 90s and early 2000s. I really liked them back in the days, but unfortunately they went out of business in 2010. Now days there a couple video game shop brands across Hungary, but I really don't favor any of them, one of them changed their shop's names like 3 times within 10 years.
Also, a fair amount of these EU vs US differences are simply Europe receiving the same stuff that originally came out in Japan.
Boxarts, localized game names, "bland" spine art, even the thicker PS1 game cases were originally like that in Japan. It becomes less about Europe games being different, but rather US is different from the other regions
American exceptionalism really gone crazy
Yep, same with stuff like SNES cartridges, even how the console itself looks. Same with Mega Drive being called that instead of Genesis. It's really inconsistent, though. DS games only have the thick cases in Europe, not Japan or the US, and with boxarts, it's usually a tossup whether we get the Japanese or the American version... or rarely, a completely unique one.
Nintendo is probably the weirdest about all this, even recently. Like calling the last few Mario and Luigi games "Dream Team Bros" and "Paper Jam Bros", like WTF, the latter one makes less sense than "Dream Drop Distance".
yeah, especially with his issue with the name project zero, despite that being more in line with the JP name over the US name. (The Japanese name is "Zero" which is a play on words. The kanji used for zero in the title (零) is pronounced "rei" which is also how the word for spirit/soul/ghost (霊) is pronounced.)
I think JP game devs focused more on the NA market because all they would have to do is translate to English and that covers all of the U.S. and most of Canada. Theoretically, the U.K. could have benefited from this, but you have the NTSC/PAL conversion and regulations. One of them being the requirements to support other European languages in the manual. IIRC, it's part of CE certification.
They often struggled to localize American games due to how different English and Japanese are. So localizing for all of Europe must have been a daunting task.
@@19Szabolcs91 Someone else owned the "Mega Drive" name here at the time, so they changed the name for the U.S. Reigon.
As for the SNES being different. I think this because Nintendo still felt like they had to make their game console look less like a game consol. The stigma from the video game crash still lingered in the American market. So, Nintendo would opt for a more boxy shape to fit in with other consumer electronics and computer components of the time. This was their reason for the NES being way different from the Famicom. Basically, they didn't want the NES to look like a toy compared to other electronics of the era.
Regarding the languages: The rule of thumb is that if you want to translate for Europe, the best case is EFIGS. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. This "rule" probably originated from the 90s so countries like Poland were not considered an option yet (much wealthier country now) or the language is small enough that you can reasonably expect the population to be fluent in another language. These are also the countries that generally prefer dubs (except the UK I guess) in movies.
Videos like this are important because they put things into perspective for me as a European (although having translations as a German is probably a different story than what some other Europeans experienced). Especially now with the annoying DLC season pass online requirement buggy mess nonsense a lot of games pull, I get really nostalgic for the times when you could just grab a game off of the shelf at a store and that's it. But I completely forgot how much we were second class citizens compared to the Americans. No wonder people here get hyped for Gothic and not Final Fantasy if the 2D Final Fantasy games just never made it to Europe. The 50Hz thing is a mess as well.
It is still so weird to see Nintendo translating games to Dutch (30 M speakers) and not Polish (45 M speakers), when including that a lot of Dutch speakers know English, but not a lot of Polish speakers. But I could be wrong, maybe Nintendo isn't popular in Poland, but maybe also due to the lack of Polish as an option.
Well he didn‘t explain that in the video but it‘s not like companies chose to make the games slower for Europe, they had to adjust because in Europe PAL CRT-TVs operated at 50hz (Australia too btw) while Japans and Americas NTSC CRT-TVs ran at 60hz.
@@Liggliluff
Poland has historically been shafted by Nintendo for many, _many_ years. We were still behind the iron curtain when the NES came out and once we left it, the average person was too poor to afford either a SNES or a Mega Drive so we all resorted to a Famicom bootleg called Pegasus. And soon after that, Sony dominated the console market and a large majority of people moved over to PC (mainly due to the huge piracy market) while the publisher did pretty much nothing to market the Nintendo stuff in our region, focusing on their main German branch instead. I can't say I've seen a single Wii in the wild in my life, and that console was huge elsewhere. Feels like Nintendo only really had _some_ staying power because of Pokémon, since if you had a Nintendo system, it was probably because of that (although PSP was still undisputably the king of handhelds here). It only really started to change when we got a new publisher in '15 and now the Switch is getting some actual marketing.
@@Liggliluff I think most Polish people either play on PC exclusively or know English and or German
@@rellagnaj Maybe he is not familiar with how electricity works
I've noticed that even a lot of European TH-camrs tend to only talk about the US game market/gaming history. Like talking about the "Gaming crash" even though that only happened in the US, or claiming that SEGA weren't successful until the Mega Drive (despite the Master System being more popular than the NES in Europe) and they tend to never talk about the home computers that were far more popular than consoles at the time like the Amiga.
The megadrive was also much more popular in europe than the snes, with only france as an exception
The Mega Drive was designed in London :)
yeah true. On top of this, because of the different countries with different distributor there are alot more variety on "leading" system. For example the ZX Spectrum is not very important in continental europe, while in UK it was the best selling home computer, while West Europe was C64, East Europe was in favor of the Atari Homecomputer system. Same is true for the 16bit-home computer. I had a discussion with a group of colleague at work which system they had in the youth some of them from foreign countries which gave an interessting mix. some licenced system were "exlusive" for the country. Like SABA videoplay or Philips Videopac. Also east bloc stuff like Vector-06C, shady clones like "Dendy" in post soviet era or exlusive european console Amstrad GX4000.
So true. I had megadrive as it was waaay more common here. Nobody I know had snes or nes. Most people had 8 bit computers. Some had Amiga. Then of course I became PC guy.
The unfortunate reality of US defaultism on the internet.
Sure its a big coountry with a big market etc. It just isnt the only one and shouldnt be taken as the default.
In France we had what was then the French branch of GameStop : Micromania. But the price for second hand was usually not good... People would call them Escroc Mania (Scammer Mania) instead 😂 !
Gamecash is so much better tho
Do they have CEX in France?
@@JohanCruyff-wj4pf no, but we have stuff like "cash converters", it's kinda the same thing (but more messy and not focused on electronics)!
I remember Micromafia instead.
@@adrienplazas554 that's a better one indeed!
I think the differences in translation for the european games is because they most likely translated more accurately the game from Japanese to the european languages rather than over-localizing like they often do in US releases
if you play fire emblem, even in 2023, they over-localized everything in every language. It's a disaster.
I can't claim to be super familiar with this because I primarily play my games in Japanese, but there have been times I've launched a Switch game in Dutch out of pure curiosity, and I've noticed that often times, translations of names or dialogue tend to feel closer to the Japanese script than the English.
This kinda caught me by surprise, because there probably aren't many people aside from me that fluently speak both Japanese and Dutch in order to translate, so I guess I just assumed they'd base the translation on the English version.
There's a similar phenomenon with manga and anime, the Americans had a tendency to change characters' names, remove harsh language and erotic elements, but always keep the violence. Here in Europe, depending on the country the violence may be censored, but everything else was kept as close to a direct translation.
The reason Fatal Frame is called Project Zero is because the original Japanese name is "Zero". In Europe they tend to be more respectful to the original material, and I honestly prefeer that.
Sure, it's more respectful, but Project Zero is still a terrible title even in its original language
@@nisnastits a good title in japanese because its atleast wordplay
This is also in media. Especially german media will have all of the wordplay in sentences/cultural things kept in. Very prominent is characters saying “sir” or “ma’am” in german translations of American media. Only example I can find of this in any American translation is how the exclamation “Yes!” is used like it is in Japanese in The Great Ace Attorney.
Unironically the PS2 spine design for europe makes reading the names easier, so you spot the game you want faster.
Gex used localized actors in each region. The American VA would be completely unknown in the UK, but Leslie Phillips was pretty well know and is still alive today at 98 years old. He was replaced by Danny John-Jules (Cat from Red Dwarf) who would have been more well know to the target demographic of the game.
Scott the Woz would be proud
He died last year
No, Danny John-Jules is still alive.@@FlavioCrusiGrisari
@@sacrificiallamb4568 I was referring to Leslie Phillips
Oh.@@FlavioCrusiGrisari
This was such an awesome and informative video. It always felt dissonant that I'd hardly played any ultra influential nintendo games but it's just because they were never released/nowhere near as popular here. The most confusing part is that even European based youtubers talk from an American perspective of video game history, making Nintendo seem much bigger than it was here, so this whole time I thought it was just a weird coincidence I'd never heard of Chrono Trigger until a few years ago.
Thank you for making this video that finally made me realise my experience was typical of pretty much everyone else in Europe.
Swedish person jumping in here to go "not EVERYONE else in Europe". Due to some very peculiar quirks of our game history and market, Sweden and Scandinavia was a lot closer to the American market experience, as we were in fact one of the first European nations to import Nintendo games due to the person behind THE big Nintendo importer here, Bergsala, being a businessman who sold electronics who picked up a Game & Watch on a business trip to Taiwan when they were new, and got so hooked then and there that he thought he just HAD to become their salesman in Europe. There's a pretty long video I saw once that described the lengths he went to in order to court Nintendo and make them take the European market seriously, but as a result of that at least up here in the North Nintendo got a VERY strong foothold. Sega too, Master System was a thing over here as well, but the NES beat it back in the day, and so did the SNES.
But according to most of what I've read, Nintendo WAS very slow and reluctant to enter the European market, and it was apparently considered a "rich kid's toy" in many European nations, particularly great Britain, whereas Master System / Mega Drive were the kings. But at least in one part of Europe, Nintendo were just as big and important as they were in the US... then again I have no idea if the TH-camrs you watched were Northern Europeans, so maybe they still don't have a reason to revere Nintendo that much.
As, others have said, great video.
It's nice to see the European region of video games focused upon.
The big gaming channels on TH-cam often feel American centric.
It seems hard to believe but as a European i only knew Mario through the cartoon & didn't see him in a game until Mario 64 which i played at a friend's who was the anomaly & owned Nintendo consoles.
I'd grown up with an Amstrad & a Mega Drive so i was a Sonic kid.
Same here. I remember Bad Influence having to explain what the NES had been when they did a joke about the Power Glove as part of their 12 Days of Christmas parody. I only knew about it by implication that something must have come before the SNES.
Well, most of the games you’re talking about are in other countries then just America, just not in Europe.
There are a few Brittish based channels, but they don't tend to cover the rest of Europe.
In Poland people having Nintendo home consoles used to he a rarity as well (but a lot of people had game boys though, including gba), playstation was extremely dominant here during the ps1 and ps2 era. It still is, just not as much as it used to be, Nintendo finally got more popular here thanks to Switch and Xbox was pretty popular during the 360 days.
@@hcsnake I have to disagree with rarity of Nintendo consoles in Poland. Yes, official ones, made by Nintendo were rare indeed. However, in the 90s before PlayStation if you owned a console, it most likely was Pegasus or other type of Famiclone (even into the mid 00s they were still popular). People played Mario, shot ducks and so on. It was just like NES boom in US, but a decade later. Except that one anomaly, Poland is just like rest of Europe with microcomputers/PCs outweighing consoles (and since PlayStation launched name became synonym of "game console").
(3:05) The 50/60 Hz difference is often ignoring more factors, which you also ignored:
- Games are sometimes adapted for 50 Hz. So the game progress stuff 20 % more per frame, so the speed of the game is the same, just with 83 % of the frames.
- 60 Hz is 20 % more than 50 Hz, but PAL 576p is 20 % more than NTSC 480p. So games adapted for or developed in Europe also had a sharper image. This makes it have a nicer looking image back in the SD days.
The end result isn't exactly the same, even if it's optimized the framerate will be 25 or 50fps in PAL instead of 30 or 60fps in NTSC.
@@DanielAyy I know I should have included that the speed of the game is the same, just with less frames.
@@Liggliluff gotcha, just wanna be thorough
lol PAL cope
@@Gamez4eveRproblem?
I can tell you about the gaming culture in Eastern Europe. PC gaming + piracy was pretty much the one and only way to game for us until around the mid 2010's, when I started noticing that more and more people could afford buying games now. Only the more well off kids would sometimes have consoles, which weren't that many.
I still have some of my pirated game CD's from 13+ years ago, though I didn't keep them in good condition and I don't need then anymore, but they carry memories.
I'd honestly love to see someone do a video like this on East Europe and it's video game market.
@@Mallerd ain't that much to tell. Back in the day we were trading pirated game CD's, that's kinda how it worked here. And PC gaming was and still is king. Although I think PC gaming was king across all Europe.
@@Mallerdin the 90s there were only bootleg taiwanese consoles in the post-soviet market, same goes for pc games because the copyright law was basically nonexistent until very late 90s - early 00s, even movies studios refused to sell movie licenses to theatres here. In the 00s, as those countries became wealthier and more integrated into global economy, official games began to appear but prices were quite high and the piracy was so developed that you could download for free basically anything without problems (there's still a ton of pirated games websites in russia, not so much in ukraine where I live but still it's very easy to pirate). Collecting physical releases became a thing only recently, as the first generation of people that experienced gaming since childhood grew up and started making money. There is a gradual but growing cultural push among younger generation for the ethical consumption of media (meaning buying games officially) and I believe that this shift can popularise the collecting hobby but still it's too pricey for many people to adopt as a hobby.
Yeah, In Hungary the mid 90's was all about the famiclones and the mysterious yellow casettes with 900games in 1.. sold on the flea markets.. For majority of the children it was their first gaming console.
Heck before the fal of the iron curtain there were not really any arcade games here as well, even things like flipper were a rare thing ,and arcade game places only started to open in the 90's.
Even having a knock of walkman, was a new thing in the late 90's.
Also very few people had computers, in the communism, university's had more, than regular people.
The whole comodore like computer phase was left out here, people's first computers were usually a dos or win95 ones in the late 90's,
as the first commercial internet provider began to provide internet to homes in 1997, as before internet was only for universities, and big companies.
This whole thing caused us to lagg behind the west like a whole generation.
After the millenium things fastened up.
People could afford to have vhs players, supermarkets were filled with empty tapes, and the flee markets with pirated copies from the video library.
What also were no blockbuster, or any big chain, just sume small shops like in the Clerks, and also most of the movies there were also pirated, from the original ones sold by tesco.
And if you were a cheapstake, everyone had an uncle in the family, who had his whole livingroom filled with shows recorded from the tv.
Thanks to a government funded program started in 2003, if you had a child in school age, you could buy a pc, and get tax return up to 250usd (418 usd adjusted to inflation).
This was effective, as for 2005 22% of households had internet, and 40% had a pc, as in 2000 only 15% had pc.
Torrent sites started to appear too, offering movies, series, and games.
the first ps2 and xbox appeared in the shops, and after you bought them in the supermarket, your first trip was to the local pc shop, to chiphack or jailbrake it.
The flea markets faded away, as the schools became the main market place, selling and changeing the home burned torrented copies of games.
My highschool IT teacher had a room full of cd burners, cannibalizing a pc, he could burn 40 disks at a time.
from the late 90's to the mid 2000's the police tried to crak down on the large scale copiers and torrent site operators, but after 1-2 days they were back, and the whole crackdown was incompetent.
Once my friend showet up with a van full of boxes of dvd's, around 15-20 thousand, to store at my hone for a week, as he got a mail fom the tax agency, that on the next week, they will held a house search at him, for pirated copies.
And even if the police found pirated copies, the charges were minimal, mostly fines, and the funiest thing is that the copies seized by the police, was used as a private video library until the court case didn't finished and took them do destroy the police kept, storing the dvd's and vhs casettes as evidence on the corridors, and keeping a booklet on, which policeman took home which casette, and when they returned it
Console gaming was still for the more wealthier families, we bacame a majority pc gaming country, followed by PS and XBOX. Nintendo was a preaty unknow company here.
The Diskman didn't really took off, for home use there were pleanty of cd's, of course most pirated copies, even if you bought it in a shop, but for portable media, we went from walkmans straight to mp3 players. not apple, just random chinise stick ones.
for the late 2000's the police gave up on fighting the pirates.
As the vhs casettes dissapeared, and people listened to mp3, the act of larg scale copying of media to sell it in shops or flea markets seized existing.
it left the police unpowered as the law only punished the act of copying in phisical terms, an As tfor the torrenting it was thin, only criminalizing the act of seeding, but not the leeching and keeping a pirated copy.
for a final solution they put out a tax for every empty data medium sold, burn ready disks, pendrives ahdd's...
and the collected tax was redistributed to the media companies and music artists.
Such as the mentality was that you already payed the price, when you bought the hard drive to your computer, so yoou can torrent without guilt.
The early and mid 2010's was the golden age of torrenting.
Everybody cracking his torrented cod2 and cod4, and searching for servers through xfire, or registering to a random hacked wow server.
having a ps3 or xbox360 at home, maybe a wee, if you were the weird kid, who left theirparents to shop alone, and they bought the cheapest console in the supermarket, thinkin all dooes the same, better get the most value option.
But it came to a halt, as the new ps4 and xbox one arrived, as they were robust againts jailbreaking.
At the same time multiplayer games began to unsupport 3rd party servers, and or requreing always online connection,.
As the first generation who was introduced to games in the 90's, grow up, and began to earn, money, didn't felt weird for paying some digital thing on a screen for themself, or their children.
They were not that old commie, as their parents who thinked about this whole thing as a child's only play.
It took a long time for netflix to break throug, as they only offered eng dub in the begining, and not many of the people uunderstood it, or cared to read the subtitle, as their children could get the same movie in 10 minute, and plug it to the tv them with a usb stick, with Hun dubbed, but they slowly rolled out dubs, and took over the streaming market as lone monopole first comers.
And as for now past 2020, here we are, most of our burned game amd movie catalogues somewhere in a landfill, as the cheap plastic disk chipped away in 5-8 years.
the only thing remained, is our steam and psn catalogue of games.
Pc gaming still rules,
the console market is dominated by sony, around 2/3 as the xbox is looked as an unfavoured option. And even the nintentdo switch got a preaty decent market share as well.
For audio, spotify is the king, as it offers students discount, and people stick with it after that, either paying, or bearing the ads.
For movies netflix had to share with hbo go disney+ and amazon, also friends sharing the acount amoong 10-20 of them at a time. But they loosing subscribers, as people grew bored with the woke agenda, and the prices going up.
The population is divided to 3 distinct group.
Thoose who used torrent since the 2000's, and still does for movies, and programs, uses youtube vanced for free music streaming, and only buys games for the convinience of steam and the always online mechanic.
Thoose who too young to learn torrenting ,and they pay for everything, games netflix..., and if they are curious they try to learn the old forgotten ways of torrenting.
ANd the ones, who didnk't care for gaming at all, but can't afford to pay, so searches 'insert film name" full film online into google, and watching a 360p version uploaded to a local video sharing site.
the 2-3 remained torrent sites are seeing a grow of new users and activity from month to month since the pandemic.
And the biggest joke is that they even got government funds simetimes, runing ads for government organizations.
@@twodivisionstill pleanty of pirating in Hungary too, but mostly for movies now.
The biggest drop for games, were that they became always online, and most of the popular games now are fully multiplayer.
As they closed of the possibility to create local servers, pirating like cod warzone became pointles, without servers.
also many of them are f2p now, as microtransactions are a more gready way to get your child, to stole your credit card in the night, and spend your money on fancy skins.
I really enjoyed hearing the perspective from across the pond it's really cool hearing how the market was so different. I'm actually very interested in digging into this myself now, thank you!
Comments like these really makes me happy I made this video :D
Italy's history with gaming is quite odd - with Italian being seldom spoken beyond Italy, parts of Switzerland and Malta, Italian translations of games were not a thing until the mid-to-late '90s, with games like Pokémon even advertising that they were in Italian as a selling point (despite the original game's translation being made by two people who were told they had to translate from German, but actually had to translate from English, and without any context given to those words).
On the other hand, once games started getting translations, Italy's rich and varied tradition of voice acting got involved. While some early dubs, such as Metal Gear Solid, were voiced on the cheap with Italian actors who lived in London (and some being dubbed at Abbey Road Studios, of all places), starting with late PS1 games and early PS2 games, Italian voice acting in games skyrocketed, often surpassing English voice acting in terms of quality.
There are also, of all things, a few Italy-only releases, the most famous of all being a PS2 Lupin III game that only ever came out in Japan and Italy, "Rupan Sansei - Rupan ni wa shi o, Zenigata ni wa koi o" (which came out as "Le avventure di Lupin III: Lupin la morte, Zenigata l'amore" in Italy), and featured the cast of the series' Italian dub, being the last ever project on which Lupin's historic voice actor ever worked on.
Here in Latin America games were rarely translated into Spanish or Portuguese. The only major Japanese game that had a Spanish/Portuguese translation were SNK fighting games, and even then they had plenty of errors since it based on the English translation. Pokémon Red/Blue got a re-release into Spanish, but it was just the European Spanish translation repackaged, with all the difference in dialect intact
Sometimes people would in Hispanic America would play some PC and pirated PSOnes in European Spanish, it was kind of weird but it helped a little. I think that's a reason why JRPGs are more niche here, there's a joke among Latin Americans that Final Fantasy VII is only talked by gaming TH-camrs from Spain, while the whole series is niche here. Ironically, Final Fantasy XVI became the first game in the series to receive a dub into Spanish, and it was done in Mexico
Microsoft was the first publisher that tried to dub a game into Latin American Spanish, there were some minor games before, but Halo 2 was the first AAA game dubbed into Neutral Spanish, but unfortunately the was made in Miami with plenty of inexperienced actors from different countries. It was so bad that a Mexican voice actor who worked on anime like Digimon and Sakura Cardcaptor sent a complaint to Microsoft and surprisingly they took all the criticism and hired him to overlook Halo 3's dub which was made in Mexico, where most dubs are made.
Ever since the 360 generation games started getting translations for the Latin American market, Zelda Phantom Hourglass was Nintendo's first game translated into Neutral Spanish. Sony began dubbing games like Uncharted and The Last of Us in Argentina, though since they switched to Mexico. Nintendo has dubbed many games into Neutral Spanish, Star Fox 64 was dubbed in Los Angeles, Kirby's Epic Yarn in Argentina, and since the release of Breath of the Wild almost all of their major releases are dubbed in Mexico by well known actors, though games like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem are sub-only
I remember reading something not too long ago about licensed manga/anime games getting released in certain European countries. You mentioned the Lupin III game, but there was a Yattaman game on PS1 that, similarly, only got a release in Japan and Italy. During the SNES era pretty much every Dragon Ball game got released in France and the UK got that Grappler Baki PS2 game (Although it was renamed to “Fighting Fury”).
@@DEVTHRVY I believe a Saint Seiya game was released for the NES in France due to the popularity of the anime there. Here in Latin America, Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul is one of the few non-Nintendo Japanese games that got dubbed into Spanish, with almost all of the original anime dub actors reprising their roles, and in the case of Seiya it was the last time his original VA, Jesús Barrero, dubbed him before his passing
@@pablocasas5906
Just out of curiousity, what exactly does "neutral Spanish" mean? Like, do LATAM and European Spanish just differ in common proverbs/figures or speech, select nouns and how a few verbs are used, or are there actually more fundamental differences in thing like genus (grammatical gender), tenses or sentence structure which would be really irritating to unify?
@@pablocasas5906 Yeah it was the very first Saint Seiya game for the Famicom that got a NES release only in France. I’m surprised a lot of those games didn’t get releases in Latin America since, to my understanding, Saint Seiya (And Dragon Ball) are insanely popular in your parts of the world to the point the characters are borderline cultural icons.
You know that the size differnce of the boxes has it's roots in the pallet sizes being different between USA and Europe? The boxes need to fit (as many as possible) on a shipping pallet when you add the protective cardbord boxes. EU pallets is 1200x800mm and US pallets is 1219x1016mm.
Im a video game collector from Poland, and finding games here is quite interesting too, as its a ex communist country, there were simply no games available back then. Well there were, in the form of Pegasus (a communist copy of a NES). But it all changed when CD Projekt started to distribute (and translate) video games in the mid-to end 90s. However the PS1 never really catched on, i guess it was still a bit too new and too expensive. But from the PS2 onward, there would be many games with Polish translations, cover text and booklets. And sadly retro games are more expensive than most other European countries. Funny enough the Polish version of certain games are high valued at times than the English ones..
I love getting all these comments from people experience collecting in the EU. There are so many small differences between countries that it was impossible for me to catalogue them all and put them in this video so receiving info life this is so awesome
Pretty funny how polish versions of some cheap games like God of War in our language are like twice the price. That's why I buy only english cover games, but at the other hand German games are rather cheap but most of people don't speak german so its pointless for many of game collectors in Poland. For example you can buy Obsucre for PS2 for like 3 times less than english version.
In Croatia nobody really cared about Famiclones, as home computers were available even in Yugoslavia, though you had to go to Austria or Italy to get one and sometimes you had to jump though hoops like buying them component per component. The PS1 was very popular in the early 2000s as the budget option, as was the PS2 slim in the late 2000s.
Nintendo stuff was mostly relegated to those who had family members in Germany, Sweden or Austria. I suppose because Nintendo stuff was considered nerdy and niche much like anime was outside of areas with Italian TV reception. Sony was considered the cool and premium brand.
If I recall, Sony entered Poland in the PS1 era (and Czech, Turkish and Russian markets too), but 4-language PS1 cover games (RU PL CZ TR) are extremely rare today. I'm a Russian national and I can relate to a lot of facts in this video since we had our games imported from Europe. Piracy was still a major factor, too, and, despite genuine games being available, though rare, since around mid 90s, bootlegs were only phased out by late 2000s (PS3 era). Sony had been an absolute winner in Russia for generations from 5 to 8, but even Playstation is always second to PC here.
Indeed! Sometimes I feel that It would be cheaper to buy a sealed copy of NES game on Ebay than some Polish releases of rather common games.
I also wish we could have more stores with retro games. Maybe one day. :)
This is super cool! Here in Australia our stuff was pretty inconsistent, we'd get the American versions sometimes and European versions other times haha. Some of my DS games have the bigger European boxes and others have the thinner America ones despite them all being Aussie copies. Our region-lock region is also the same as Europe's so if games weren't released here, or are cheaper in Europe, we can grab the European copies and they'll work on our consoles.
Fatal Frame's European name of Project Zero is actually closer to the Japanese games, which are just called Zero. And Project Zero was what the first game was known as in development. Also surprised Xenoblade wasn't mentioned here. Yes, it was released worldwide, but... the only reason it came out in the US in the first place is because the European release led to a large demand for it and because localisation was really cheap and easy (since the hard work was already done).
And there's also some other games that released in Europe before the US that were made in Japan. Tales of the Abyss 3D came out in Europe a few months before the US, for example. Although in very limited quantities at first. There were only like 5K made for all of Europe in the beginning, I think. Then the next print didn't release until like January. I was lucky enough to be able to obtain a copy at launch of the game.
There are also games that release worldwide before they do in Japan, it's super rare but I think a Mario game did it
@@Fermin-hw5pd There's A LOT of games that release worldwide before they do in Japan. Unless you're specifically talking about games made in Japan that release worldwide/out of Japan first. I do think those are pretty rare. I think there was also a JRPG that actually released a few days earlier the US and Europe before Japan, but I can't recall which one or for which system it was.
@@thenonexistinghero Well, yeah, I meant games made by Japan, it's not gonna be rare otherwise
@@Fermin-hw5pd It depended on the market, if the game was popular with overseas markets then sometimes publishers would prioritize releasing where it would sell best first. A big example I know of was Silent Hill which sold much better in Europe and America then it did in it's home country of Japan. After the poor domestic sales of SH2 in Japan, Konami turned to making the next game cheaply and releasing in Europe first which meant Silent Hill 3 came out in May 2003 about 5 weeks before it's Japan release which blew my mind at the time since I had grown up in the era of Japanese games taking almost a year to come to Europe.
Yeah, Project Zero actually is the better name.
I only play on PC now so I have not bought a physical copy of a game in since 2011, Battlefield 3 was my last physical copy of a game that I ever bought. Thanks for sharing your video, really cool that you have a hobby that makes you happy.
On the PAL vs NTSC issue, it goes both ways when you take a lot of retro computers into account. If you're a US collector of Commodore 64, Atari ST, or Amiga games, then the domestic releases are only a fifth or so of the total software library for those systems. Many of the best games on those computers were developed in Europe and designed to run at 50 hz, which means they're often a headache to get working on an NTSC system.
For example, the Commodore Amiga port of Pac-mania flickers heavily on NTSC systems (I think this port wasn't released outside Europe).
Yep, it's the same problem in reverse of what the consoles had, but in this case, games run too fast for the US market on the Amiga.
Also, Pal could deliver a higher resolution, which likely didn't matter for consoles but for home computers like the Amiga, it allowed games to have a higher resolution.
Personally, it's probably best to get the game that runs at the correct speed it was designed for, so a lot of home computer games usually run best at 50hz whereas most console games run best at 60hz, but there are many exceptions, many games from Japan ended up being released in the EU market but didn't get a release in the US, you could get the Japanese version of the game that will run fine at 60hz but it will be in Japanese, being as the same game was also released in the EU market at the time, it's got English, so in that case, the PAL version is better.
In any case, the market back then was a mess, some games being released in the EU, some in the US, many of which having all sorts of changes from each other and even from the Japanese version and in any event, there are many games that made it to the EU market but never made it to the US market and vice versa and one example was a fireman game for the SNES, forgot the name of it but it was released in the EU and Japan only, I know this because I was looking for the US version a few years ago and it never got released over there, it's the same for countless others.
@@paul1979uk2000 _> "Also, Pal could deliver a higher resolution, which likely didn't matter for consoles but for home computers like the Amiga, it allowed games to have a higher resolution."_
Why wouldn't it matter? Higher resolution is a nicer looking image. Plus I've seen games developed for PAL having to change things to fit on the lower resolution NTSC.
@@Liggliluff People scoff at 50fps but the resolution was always better.
In Balkan region, Serbia specifically, due to political circumstances we were pretty much closed to the rest of Europe so original video games were both very expensive and very difficult to find to the extent that the only way was to find someone going abroad, or living abroad to buy games as well as consoles. In the first year of PS2 era, I was visiting my cousin in Vienna and a store had a bunch of PS1 games for something really cheap, so I bought a bunch of games that I either played previously and liked or wanted to play only to find out that like 75% percent of games were available in either in German or in almost every European language other than English, which was the only language other then my own I spoke. Was really a bummer, but the times I spent with my cousin playing X Files together, him translating it for me, is something I'll always cherish.
The thing with Contra / Probotector: Back in the 80s and 90s, Germany had extremely strict laws regarding violence in video games. While the contra games are anything but graphic, Konami just went with the safe route and censored the games heavily, as to not get hit with the deathsentence that is "18+" ratings or being set on the index of banned games outright. ( where they would not have been allowed to be sold visibly, and you were not allowed to do any marketing ) - In the case of Probotector, I think it is a change for the better! Those robots are way cooler than some Rambo looking dudes, IMO.
yes please have a look at "Command & Conquer" - in the us release all are humans. In the german (and european?) release all a robots with black "blood". There were alot of cut down version due to be afraid to be only allowed for adults (18+). Back in the day those games weren't allowed to be on the shelf (the person had to ask the store clerc) or needed a seperated room for 18+ - which most stores didn't have. Also it wasn't allowed to advetise those games.Thus resulting into lower sales. Some games are even banned like games with Nazi symbols (original Wolfenstein 3D), excessive brutality or sexuality. I think this changed with the introduction of the USK (german PEGI/ESRB-style system)
@@DoomWarriorX I am aware of that. C&C2 even cut out the somewhat comedic appearance of Hitler in the intro from the game. the USK changed a lot to the better.
Probotector looks incredibly fun not really a fan of contra but I might give it a shot
@@RenoRelapse2287 If you don't like Contra, you probably won't like Probotector. While the robots are cool, the gameplay is exactly the same.
@@DoomWarriorX xD and the cheap "can crushing" effect if you run over a soldier was hillarious
Man, you gave me a nostalgic trip with that Koningsdag. When I used to live in the Netherlands, I actually was dragged by relatives to take part in selling their junk, but the best part was going around and buying other people's junk.
Dutchman here. Love to see your take on European, and in particular Dutch, game collecting. Very recognizable.
I just used Marktplaats to sell some old, but valuable games. A complete copy of Pokemon Emerald went for 200 euros and a sealed copy of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for 180. I quite undercut those prices, but whatever.
People definitely know about game value here.
I don't think it's people knowing game value, rather it's people looking at what others are asking and pricing similar and not just for gaming stuff. Even most thriftshops I visit do this.
I even seen this happen in action with some mid 90's PC cards, as I had a search thing for email on it. ~2 years ago Voodoo cards went for around 20~30 euro each with often 2 or 3 cards on marktplaats and was way below eBay price. At some point someone offered their Voodoo 3 for 80 euro (around eBay price at the time), which stayed on the site for around 2 months but at some point he was the only one offering a Voodoo card on the site. After that point every Voodoo card went for around the 70~80 euro mark and still does. (which at this point is again below eBay price)
Pokemon games definitely go for good prices if you still have the packaging in the Netherlands
We got Pokémon ruby for like 20€ from a German flea market 🤣
I've always thought that European versions having simpler language was for translation purposes. "Nice" is WAY easier to translate than "Booyah"!
This was awesome to see talked about! I love learning about the difference in UK/European versions, it was crazy to learn that Star Fox was called Lylatt Wars here at one point...
It's not that it's easier too translate, translators typically know the languages well enough to understand puns and the like, but rather that players who play in English are quite likely to be non-native speakers whose languages don't get official translations and they might not understand uncommon words.
It's also that in most(not all tho) cases, the european localization is more direct from japanese. At least it used to be like that, the US/EU-split in english settings still technically exists, but much less games make use of it these days.
In Germany I was surprised by the giant "giveaway culture" people have. It still amazes me how many good appliances and furniture you can get here for free, but sometimes that applies to videogames as well. Last year I got my hands on TloZ: Collector's Edition, MGS: Twin Snakes, Mario Strikers, Red Steel, Street Fighter IV 3D, Rayman 3D and Metroid Prime Hunters - for - free... Other times I've spotted other gems on small antique shops for really low prices (Star Fox 64 aka. Lylatwars for 7€ for example). This is something I would never see on the other side of the Atlantic, it's mindblowing
Woooow those are amazing finds!!! And yeah I went video game hunting in America a few times and you can really notice the huge differences in prices and general atmosphere about selling something of value
FINALLY! a good English speaking (fellow dutchy) European who makes good quality gaming videos. I love this dude you have my sub ❤
As a Moroccan, I mainly collect from Europe using eBay, we don't have Shops for retro games here, only flea markets with very used games (European versions).
Where in morocco do you life?
fun fact: PAL runs at a higher resolution (20% more horizontal lines), compared to NTSC which was the intended way for devs so its like PAL is the original version while NTSC are the "modified" ones.
@@JoenHarlverkeep telling yourself that but the retro releases run 12% slower than intended so your argument goes completely out the window.
@@HammerStudioGames no the argument still stands, some games were intended to be on PAL and there were even documentations about some games had issues to release an NTSC version since they uintentional made the game harder as it should be, therefor the EU had some games that ppl find pretty easy to beat while US had way smaller window to react and made it "frustrating" to play. so some games even changed the pacing. Also your argument was the same i said, it ran slower. so said: still higher res over fps. Games that were developed from the ground up for NTSC had obv no problem, common sense. - but it seems i have to include that everytime and write a assay about useless facts
@@JoenHarlver pal also had superior color display.
Great video. I just wanted to mention a few things though.
The first thing I would like to add is that in European game collecting language variants make a pretty massive difference in prices and therefore, aside from general language variants like English, local markets decide the prices. If you look at pricecharting for a game like pokemon xd gale of darkness for example you will see a price of 210 usd for a pal cib copy. However if you look at the actual listings this is based on you will find that English copies tend to sell in the 250-270 range, while German copies go for 150-170, same for French ones etc. The Netherlands has a very active game collecting market and thus you will find that generally for popular titles the prices of HOL variants will be on the higher end. This price difference in language variants is not only affected by the demand of certain variants, but also by rarity. This whole system obviously creates a game collecting market where some variants will be printed less than others. In some cases you can see FAH variants of games be very expensive. This is especially the case for Konami published titles for the gamecube for example. You also have some rare ITA variants for gamecube, UK variants for ps2, region exclusives like many bad ps2 games that only came out in Italy etc etc. It's pretty fun to get to know the variants when diving into a specific console. Nintendo games also have the region code on the cartridge/disc so make sure to check if the game and box/manual have the same region code, though there are also many cases where the disc or cartridge ir just EUR or just UKV while the packaging is different.
Another thing I would like to mention is that In the Netherlands, we have 'rommelmarkten,' and there are 4 kinds (broadly speaking). You have the ones that happen every few months in the same location with mainly semi-professional vendors, which are generally picked through and priced accordingly or high, but tend to have more expensive stuff. You have the 'buurtmarkten,' which you mainly see in cities. These are usually annual and have people from around the area come and sell their stuff. It's a bit more organized as compared to garage sales, but they are generally pretty close. You have the massive King's Day markets that you mention, which speak for themselves. And then lastly, you have the 'buurtmarkten' in communities outside of the city, usually hosted by a local organization to raise funds, a church, for example. These tend to be annual, but there are many communities in the Netherlands. For these sales, stuff is gathered by the organization by asking people to bring whatever they no longer want or wish to donate to them, and they somewhat organize it all and have general pricing. These are absolutely the ones to go to and have the most potential for good finds since nothing is really looked up usually. I have basically given up purely looking for game stuff myself, but other avenues like audio or other electronics are fantastic for sales like this, and if you get there early you can find a ton of game stuff as well, it's just a lot more competitive IMO. I haven't gone in years, but these are definitely super unique to the Netherlands and are super fun. There is usually a line and mad rush to get inside at opening time, especially at the known good ones. I used to go to like 4/5 on Saturday and sunday every single week about 5 years or so back, and thinking back on it I actually did find quite a bit of gaming stuff, as mentioned you just gotta get there early.
The Spyro music being mono in Europe was definitely because of all the language files, though the series just had weird stuff going on with its music in general, with the first game having some completely different tracks between NA and EU versions, and the third game having four different versions (original and 1.1 in both regions) that had messed up music in all but one - tracks missing or playing in the wrong levels and one release even playing peaceful hubworld music during the final boss.
@gomam0n702 Ah, C3 Racing, developed in France for PAL made for 50 Hz, with tracks all over the world. Ported to USA where the cars are pickups, and the tracks are now said to be different parts of USA, because USA, despite using the exact same graphics. Then also running the game at 60 Hz with no compensation so the game runs too fast. they also changed "km" to "m" (miles) without applying any modifier, so C3 Racing will say a distance is "1.0 km" and the US port will say "1.0 m" (miles).
@gomam0n702 Yeah I'm kinda ignoring that one for now. It's not as silly as the North American release.
14:03 The reason was for this, is that because Europe has so many languages and people especially kids may not understand everything from the text like playing with words.
I'm from Sweden and game collecting here has become difficult in the last few years, with basically all physical game stores closing down and prices in second hand marketplaces going up significantly. I actually used to order a lot from The Netherlands (Marktplaats specifically) in the last 6-8 years because it was much cheaper, but it seems prices have caught up there too.
I am curious though, how does the access to Marktplaats work for you as a Swede? I thought it was an 'internal' second hand website, primarily or basically solely focused on the Netherlands, made and start-up by Dutch people. How does the importing and delivery to another country work, does that on its own cost much more too?
@@robinmank3158 Yes, I should clarify that I have a friend in the Netherlands who used to handle it for me. Buying and sending it to me, or personally delivering it when visiting Sweden.
As a fellow swede, I agree. Game collecting here can be a lot more tedious here than it is the US. Places like Tradera doesn't always have the games I want, and the shipping on Ebay costs a lot more, and if i'm buying outside of europe I have to pay import fees. For example if i'm buying something from the US, the shipping and import is on average 500-600kr (~50-60$) for a game that costs 100kr.
I’ve been to Game Mania when I was in the netherlands and while we have Gamestop in germany, they’re the exact same.
Insane used game prices, a focus on merch and the overall feel of the store are identical
As a UK citizen, I find collecting PAL games to be the only nationalistic/jingoistic aspect of my personality. I love collecting PAL games and proud of it for no other reason than they're PAL.
I like collecting the exclusive European games that only came out here since its something that not a lot of collectors based in the US would have. It makes me feel that my game collection is somewhat special and unique despite a lot of uk collectors probably having the same version. There's some games that I could just import from Japan as it would be cheaper than buying a PAL copy, mainly being the PS2 Persona Games but I still save up and buy the PAL version.
I tend to also emulate the PAL versions of older games and a lot of people would say is just because I'm patriotic about the UK that I'd rather have 50hz or 60hz but to ke it feels natural playing the game how it was intended to play here.
You don’t have pride for your nation?
i've heard of cases where an American game being ported to a PAL was retooled to fix the 50hz problem. for example, the creators of the first Crash Bandicoot were very involved in the PAL version, and Crash runs faster in those releases because of it
Probably already mentioned, but Project Zero was the original Japanese title, it was the US release that was changed to Fatal Frame.
I also live in the Netherlands and this is very relatable
So many things I took for granted about gaming over here I did not realise were different in the US. The ps2 spine art especially surprised me, they look so weird to me with art on the spine.
I think the funniest thing about EU vs US game collecting is living in AUS and never knowing which version of a game we'll get.
Over here in Ireland collecting retro games is surprisingly accessible (in my experience!) Stores like Cex sell a lot of obscure titles for dirt cheap (but if its in any way in demand the prices are inflated to absurd levels). But there's plenty of "car boot sales," as I know em by that I've picked up entire consoles for good rates! I got a gamecube for €80 euro once :) Not to mention just how many obscure things you can find second hand here. I've got an obscure Mario 3 vinyl from a car boot sale, and got a professor layton movie for €2! If you're on the hunt for retros, you're usually not too far from em here :)
Cex is pretty good in the UK, but you're right about stuff in demand being overpriced. If you're not fussed about buying cartridges loose you can still pick up bargains though. Glad I bought a lot of my retrogames about 15 years ago before the market heated up.
My experience in Ireland is that you see very very few retro games, but I wouldn't have looked into things like car boot sales as much. I feel like CeX is very limited though, you might only see a few PS1 and N64 games in a shop, and practically nothing from before that. It compares unfavourably to something like Gamescash (game shop franchise in France) where I've seen several shelves of Master System and NES games, a respectable number of Saturn games (more than the number of N64 games I've ever seen in a CeX) and even a bunch of Super Famicom imports. The really frustrating thing is that there's been a very noticeable increase in GameCube games in CeX shops nationwide recently: I have a strong feeling CeX has had GameCube game stock that they've been keeping in storage for some unfathomable reason, same might be true of stuff from other consoles.
@@conorneligan7694 with Cex your experience varies by the store. Naturally the stores in the more dense spots like malls and cities have more varied stock! They've always got a solid Ps2 stock, though! Recently I picked up Mario Sunshine from one of the city mall stores, too! You're right about the more obscure consoles, their stock for those is certainly much smaller, but if you do some digging and lookin through stores (and online, since you can get it shipped from another store to your local one, or your door) you can find good stuff :) But i'd suggest looking through car boot sales here, theres rarely treasures, but when you find em its worth it!
Definitely NOT accessible. CEX have only been doing PS1 for a few months, and there are a very very limited number of retro gaming shops here. Marketplace and donedeal overflates the prices on the rarity of items. Rage are selling Suikoden 2 at a laughable €375 and its in average condition. Ireland retro collecting is frustrating
Not sure about in Ireland but the carboot sales in the UK atleast in the area I'm in has had such an increase in dealers selling games now who will sell loads second hand for near what people charge online
Here is a German game collector 🙋♂️ Thanks for the great video 🙏
I'm so glad this came up on my recommended. Been collecting in the US for 15+ years and its so fascinating seeing how much the hobby is similar and different overseas. New sub from me :)
Also, my favorite "same game, different name" is Yoshi's Universal Gravitation. I guess they thought that was too wordy so they called it Yoshi Topsy Turvy for us dumb Americans to get lol.
A comment like this is exactly why I wanted to make this video! Thank you so much for watching my dude :D
lol I love looking up what my favorite old games are called in other countries
I feel you. I had a similar experience and love the video as well.
In the 90s, EU/UK would get the shit end of the stick when it came to games. First up, it would take 6 - 12 months to hit our shores after they came out in the US and Japan. Games would also run slower to their NTSC counterparts. Finally, we'd pay the higher prices for our games compared to the US and Japanese folks as well. All in all, it really did feel like we was loved the least when it came to gaming.
Great video!! The part about weirder games coming to Europe is interesting, Europe was more big on PC games in general than consoles which made it easier for small companies and solo nerds to create games on their own if they owned personal computers so it's generally where a lot of old more "artsy" games came from at first, I wonder if that's why those games that weren't published in the U.S. came to Europe? Either way, really interesting video!! Very well made too! Good job!
I was really contemplating on whether or not I wanted to include a talk about PC Games and specifically the MSX since that was such a big computer for the game market over here but decided to keep it to console games since the video was specifically about how these changes effect game collecting in each region. There was a version of the script that kinda started changing into a video about the history of the EU Game market but that began feeling like its own rabbit hole so I wanted to limit that a bit.
@@Mallerdcould be an interesting topic for a future video
This was extremely interesting and very imformative. My own personal game collection consists of 80% PAL versions of games since that's what I was brought up with (I'm from Scotland) but as time passed, I learned about the slower speed thing and I started collecting US/JP versions of my favourites to get the best playing experience as possible. Not only that but I'm a sucker for the different box art so I collect the different versions for that too. I also love that some games have noticable gameplay differences between regions too.
Neat. There are a couple of other notable things about the European market/collecting I’d like to bring up.
The popularity of consoles sometimes could differ between Europe and other markets. The NES for example was an absolute juggernaut in America/Japan but in Europe, not so much. How well the NES did in Europe depended on the country but especially in places like the UK, the NES played second fiddle to the Master System, which was a failure in America/Japan. The Master System lasted way longer in Europe due to just how successful it was (Sonic 1 was the last game released for the Master System in America yet, Europe got many more games years after Sonic came out, hence the insane price difference for the game in the different regions). Meanwhile, the NES had to fight an uphill battle which it simply did not have to do in the other major regions, hence why Europe missed out on quite a few NES games. There are of course more examples of this (the TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine was basically non existent in Europe for example) but the NES/Master System is probably the most notable distinction.
Regarding the whole 50Hz making games slower, this was very much a case by case basis depending on the game. Yes, European consoles had to run at a lower frequency/framerate but it was possible for developers to adjust their games to 50Hz so they would play at their intended speed. The problem was that this was entirely down to the developers and in a good chunk of cases, developers did not optimise their games for 50Hz, resulting in games literally running slower. There was no consistency with developers optimising their games, it was simply a roll of the dice.
Also, while the 6th gen consoles did start including 60Hz options in Europe as mentioned, it was not consistent at all. Some games had 60Hz, some didn’t and even at that point, you could still have unoptimised 50Hz games (without the option for 60). It wasn’t until the 7th gen when it was the norm to include 60Hz for games in Europe.
One last thing I think which is worth mentioning was the 80/90s computer market. Back in the 80s and early 90s, the 8/16 bit computer were a big part of the European gaming market. Commodore and Atari computers were significantly more successful gaming platforms in Europe and Europe had its fair share of its own computers for gaming, like the ZX spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The computer market was a major part of Europe’s early gaming market with how cheap games were and how easy/cheap they were to distribute. Europe got tons and tons of exclusive games on these kinds of computers, there was a ton of stuff for them. Europe of course moved on to Windows for gaming in the late 90s onwards but that early European PC gaming market is quite notable in terms of Europe’s history with gaming. It’s not for everyone of course but it’s still a notable thing worth mentioning.
@proudofyourroots9575for Xbox it wasn't really on the developers, Microsoft just didn't care a bit about the European market and just decided that any console they sold as pal wouldn't get the output resolution menu
Yeah some PS2 games were still unoptimized for 50Hz. Spyro Eternal Night for example is really choppy performance wise or the GTA games in general but there was no music slowdowns like in the Mega Drive anymore. Then you had others like Silent Hill 2 where it almost feels like 60Hz despite still being 50Hz. We call it PAL optimized games. Then some games like Haunting Ground or Black offered 60Hz and even progressive scan, the so called PAL60 games.
The PAL original Xbox also supports 60Hz and 480p but you can only unlock it with soft/hard mod. Even some PAL exclusive games can do progressive scan like Hello Kitty, it was really dumb of Microsoft to lock this feature by default in PAL regions. As for the Gamecube, I don't own one so I'm not sure of the capabilities of a PAL Gamecube.
Regardless, I'm glad this nonsense went away in the 360/PS3 era and now the NTSC/PAL versions are equivalent with only some language support differences.
@proudofyourroots9575 I literally own both consoles and you're saying things I didn't even say so get sober before you speak to me.
The only part of your 3 comment rant that makes any sense is that yes, some - a minority of OG Xbox PAL games support 60hz without 480p and modding which I should have clarified. Everything else is gibberish or correcting things I didn't even say.
@proudofyourroots9575 I honestly don't know the amount of games that had pal60 support, but from what I know using a modded og xbox had they just kept the resolution menu for pal territory it would've allowed any pal xbox to play 60hz out of the box with just the pal copy of a game, so it was an unnecessary omission
@proudofyourroots9575 Where did I say the majority of PS2 games supported 60hz? And why did you bring up the Xbox sales to say Europe loved Xbox when that wasn't even the topic?
Again... I will try to make your 2 braincells work. My mistake was not clarifying that a minority of PAL OG Xbox games supported 60hz out of the box. However a good chunk of them supported progressive scan and therefore 60hz which was impossible to enable without modding.
Did you understand this? Do you want me to make a drawing next time? Anyway I'll stop replying because you'll probably make more crap up until you sober up.
(8:00) It is weird that games didn't come with Spanish and French translations in North America since there are Spanish and French monolinguals. If they're going to translate the game to Spanish and French anyway for Europe (at least for games they know they'll release in Europe), then that would reach a wider audience without any extra work (it was already going to be translated).
So im gonna butt in here with what its like down here in australia (from my own experience) because we are weird, my main gripe here is with the ds library because it changed from the pal boxes to the north american ones leaving your library with this weird half massive boxes (that don't require the massive boxes because nearly all of australia speaks english) and the north american ones and we also get a weird mix between north american and europen names and box arts and spines like for the wii we got the actual game logos on it like in north america but we also usually get the europen names for games and systems now i could have gotten a lot of that wrong because i am just starting collecting but this is how i have noticed it.
1:57 Oh you have NO IDEA how prevalent this is here in Europe. Sonic 1, 2 and 3 were a completely different type of game here because of this.
For one, the speed was slower. We didn't quite associate it with a "fast" game, it was simply a cool platformer, that's it. The _MUSIC_ also played slower. Whenever I hear the Sonic 1 music (diru-diru-diru-diru...) in a video, it sounds like it's being sped up like in a TH-cam Poop. 17% slower, it just sounds like a pleasant jingle, not like the "GOTTA GO FAST KID" song it was meant to be.
Edit: Look at me. I was so excited about this that I paused the video and made this whole comment before seeing how you addressed this.
Nice touch with the PAL star light zone music.
We also have a weird history in the UK with Electronics Boutique - they purchased GAME, a British retailer, then rebranded as... GAME.
Most people think GAME ruined eb but it was the other way around, and then they ruined gamestation.
Do you remember when blockbusters had gamestation inside it? Nobody else seems to remember, but i swear towards the end of gamestations life they teamed up with blockbuster in some way or another.
I picked up most of the retro stuff I own from Gamestation back around 2008, sadly missed!
1:10 nice touch with that background music. It made me lol.🤣🤣
A lot of the differences you talk about are cases of the European version being closer to the Japanese version.
Project Zero is way closer to the original name of the series, not some random thing they came up with for Europe.
ive been collecting games in the Netherlands for about 3 years now and never have i related more with a youtube video, Im not kidding. Thank you for making this it was very fun ! :)
Thats a huge compliment!!! Thank you so so much!!!
Another neat part of the European market is also the bootlegs we got. A lot of them were just as good as the original and we got a lot of unique games made here that you might not find in the NA market. In Portugal it was pretty easy to just go to a local Chinese general shop and grab some bootleg yugioh cards and PS2 games when I was growing up. Especially now with the ease of jailbreaking these old consoles, it can be a cheaper alternative if you just want to try out a game but aren't too fussed about buying the official copy.
Interesting. What you said has made me think of another notable point about the European gaming market. Europe has many different countries and different countries will have different markets. The UK for example was big on computers in the 80s/early 90s for games and as for consoles, Nintendo was dragging behind to either SEGA or SONY right up until the Wii. Even the NES struggled to keep up with the Master System while the NES completely dominated the American/Japanese markets. In Portugal however, bootlegs were a lot more common (whereas they were not in the UK). That’s the neat thing about the European gaming market. You have many vastly different countries and those countries naturally have differing gaming markets. The NES might have struggled in one European country but it could have done a lot better in another European country. You even sometimes have games which only came out in specific parts of Europe. You might have UK exclusives, French exclusives, German exclusives and so on.
Yeah, we also used to have a bunch of Gameboy and Gameboy Advance bootlegs on the Chinese shops. It was even possible to find bootlegs at street fairs until about 15 years ago.
@@bigbangbot-SuperSqankto your point about Nintendo, the NES wasn’t even labelled as a “Nintendo” Entertainment System when first released in the UK. They sold the marketing rights to Mattel toys and the original UK systems were labelled as the “Mattel Entertainment System.” Someone on my street had one growing up, I had no idea how rare it was (neither did he), because they didn’t sell many. Nintendo took the rights back and started marketing with another partner (or by themselves, I don’t remember), but weren’t successful. The UK was SEGA country as far as consoles were concerned until the Playstation was released.
The PSX was massively influenced by Liverpool-based Psygnosis after Sony bought them and the British bedroom coding scene from the 80s more generally.
SEGA’s early success in the UK has a lot to do with Virgin, as their subsidiary Virgin Megagames had the rights to market SEGA in the UK (and a lot of europe too). They’re why the Master System was so successful in Europe and SEGA bought them out in the end as they’d done a great job establishing SEGA in europe and especially the UK.
PORTUGAL CARALHOOOOOOOOOOO
Interesting, I remember seeing a bunch NES and GBA bootlegs on those stores but never PS2 or other disc system games.
Awesome video! Cool to see an in-depth video on this subject by a fellow Dutch collector. 🔥
I think when it comes to gaming in Europe you have to go back to the start. It was predominantly a home computer market, your spectrums, c64's Amstrad cpu's and the like, then into the 16bit era with Atari St and Amiga's. By the time I had even heard of the NES let alone seen one it had been and gone as a thing and I was on an Amiga. The SNES made a minor impact, and the mega drive/Genesis a little more (I had at least seen both those systems 'in the flesh'), but even then they were rare to see at a mates house compared to any of the home computers of the era. Consoles were just not a thing really until the PlayStation came along when many were looking to upgrade from their 16bit computers but the emerging pc market was to expensive an alternative. The combination of consoles having much improved graphics over the 16bit home computers and the lack of viable alternatives is what drove a large part of the console market in Europe into being. And it was similar for European software companies like RARE or the emergent Rockstar (still DMA Design then) who also began moving more and more from the home computer market in Europe into developing for the new consoles.
Am from Belgium and had An Atari Pong , Phillips videopac , Nes , C64 , megadrive, SNES , N64 ,gamecube ,Gameboy and a Neogeo pocket color.I come from a normal workerfamily ...so gaming was a thing in Europe
What you describe is Britain. For example here in the Netherlands it's more Atari, Megadrive, SNES, C64, Videopac, MSX, N64, Gamecube, Gameboy and Amiga. Spectrum wasn't popular here, Amstrad is basically unheard of (and was licensed by a German company here), SNES was significantly more popular than the megadrive, Atari 2600 became the budget system till the early 90's, Playstation toke the Atari spot late in the 5th generation. CDi's are also relatively common, though mostly due to the their adoption by businesspeople as their original inteded design, being functionally powerpoint machines (Which is also why when you find them here you tend to find the earlier luxury models with the IR remote rather than the newer consolized version with the game controller).
The BoTW box art was changed to look like ‘Wonderer above the sea of fog’, a famous German painting which really matches the game well. Maybe the Euro team there are classical art fans or the rest of the world isn’t expected to recognise the Mona Lisa of Germany.
The 50hz problem is one reason I don't have a console before the PSX.
I can respect it, but honestly I do think the 50hz problem is at least a little overblown, everyone loves to bring up the sonic 1 example, but that is only because it is one of the worst cases, very few games were as bad as sonic 1.
A lot of the major titles on the Nes and Snes for were actually somewhat optimized to run on Pal systems, all Mario and Zelda games for example run pretty well. Every game that Rare developed for the Snes and N64 as well should run perfectly. All the PS1 Crash and Spyro games as well run perfectly on Pal systems.
There are a ton of examples of games actually running pretty well on Pal consoles. But it is very much on a case by case basis tho, and some developers (looking at you Capcom and Square) almost never optimized the gameplay of their games, even as far as on the PS2...
But the one thing that almost every developer did after the at least th Snes was released was to at optimize the music and sound of their games, which is the big reason why the sonic 1 example is as jarring as it is. When the music at least plays correctly, I honestly find it somewhat hard to even tell if a game has optimized gameplay or not.
What I find so interesting with collecting here in Europe, is that on the spine of Nintendo games at the bottom, you can see a colored triangle. This actually shows from which country/region the game is!
Here in Belgium, we don't really have a color associated to us, so you will find TONS of different colored ones! We can sometimes have some from Netherlands, but also from the UK, France, Germany, etc. This is ESPECIALLY apparent when it comes to used games here in game stores or retro stores.
I really like to look at my collection and see all the different colors, trying to find out which country/region it's associated to!
- Light Blue is the Netherlands
- Green is the UK
- Red is for France
- A very dark Purple/Blue/Indigo is from Germany
- Purple is usually the color you'll find on games that come from Limited Editions/Collector's Editions, so they're for all of europe.
- Pastel Purple seem to be for Spain and Italy? (Maybe Portugal aswell?)
- Marine Blue seems to be the same as Purple, this being for all of Europe, but not for limited editions? Still not 100% sure about this one xD
These are all the colors i know of so far! You can check this yourself on any box in Europe, check the color of the triangle and then look at the product code on the box, usually right above the barcode!
For example, my copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Limited Edition is: DOL-GZLP-HOL
The DOL is to indicate which system it is for, which i find really cool that this is called DOL, which is the codename for the Gamecube, that being Dolphin. Thats why you also have RVL for the Wii for example, this standing for Revolution.
The next couple of numbers indicates a unique code that identifies the game. Fun fact: Seeing as Breath of the Wild is the first release on switch, this is why it's unique code is "AAAAA" seemingly the beginning of the alphanumeric code! "TRA-HAC-AAAAA-HOL" in full for example
and the HOL showing which country it is from, this case it being Holland/Netherlands.
You won't find the colored triangles on cardboard gameboxes like for GB(C) and GBA for example, instead, you'll find these on the instruction manuel! :D I think this is super fascinating and always something I pay extra attention to!
Actually the italian games have the blue triangle. Not the pastel purple one. Source: I'm Italian, and almost all my games are italian copies
@@giasca Nice! Thanks so much for letting me know! I can be more accurate with this information now! :D
This is great stuff. I'm a Brazilian game collector that moved to Sweden about six years ago and befriended a Swede that is really into game collecting too. We learned a lot from each other on how to get good deals on hard to find or expensive stuff, it's one of my most treasured friendships nowadays because of this cultural exchange aspect. I specifically try to go for the Brazilian edition of the games released over there and my friend tries to go for the Swedish edition, sharing the differences between releases of two extremely niche places that hardly ever talk to each other is such a pleasant experience. You can do a deep dive on the specifics of each european country by talking to locals over there, I feel there's a niche for it, Lady Decade and the Top Hat Gaming Man usually talk about this stuff too and I love their content. Str1ka is a portuguese guy that also covers a lot of the lusophone market which means Brazil too but his channel is quite obscure, probably because of how thick his accent is. The main thing is that you don't have a european accent, you could proooobably bring this sort of global content to american audiences if you tried ;)
Of course one connection between European and Brazilian gaming is the Master System being popular in both. I was genuinely shocked to learn that 8-bit Sonic 1 was the last game released in the US for the Master System - it's the first console game I ever played and only the start of my journey with that console.
(12:45) One reason for changing names can be similar to changing covers, to find a title that overall works better for the global European market. Sometimes titles are changed to be more basic English, and a great example is "Squeak Squad" which is changed to "Mouse Attack"; words that non-English speakers are more familiar with. "Huge Adventure" being "XS" and so on. But "Ripto's Rage!" being "Gateway to Glimmer", no idea.
However, sometimes titles are changed in Europe from North America to be similar to the original Japanese title. In Japan, a game known as Kuri Kuri Mix was renamed to The Adventures of Cookie and Cream in North American, and then titled Kuri Kuri Mix in Europe.
Well it's something that Sony of Europe liked the name Gateway to Glimmer better for some reason
Would y'all be interested in a similar video but focused on NZ within the PAL region? Cause we have a lot of differences to European collecting and US collecting
Definitely. As an Australian, I assume both of the countries have a lot in common when it comes to games.
Really great video 👍 As a NES collector in the UK, it's always great to see the history I remember here on TH-cam.
Mario RPG also didn’t release in Europe because it used a special graphics chip called the sa1 chip and at the time it was very expensive so not only would it would take to long to translate it, it would also cost to much.
It still baffles me that Nintendo didn't release a Mario game in Europe while they did release Lufia II (even the only RPG that got a Dutch translation) here. That chip must have been very expensive.
@@Ruudos what’s even weirder is Kirby Superstar (which used the same chip)released in Europe in January of 1997, 2 months before the n64 released there. Although Mario RPG is more focused on dialogue and the translation would probably take longer.
I am also Dutch and a game collector i didn't know there whas so much difference between the American and European games i just didn't see it so thanks for making this video
Great video dude! Im from the UK so is nice to see someone talking about the differences in Regional games. Dropped a sub and look forward to seeing more ^_^
Yooo that's super awesome to hear! Thank you so much :D
Hey ! Just stumbled upon your video and you earned yourself a new sub. I’m a video game collector from Portugal and it was so refreshing to watch this. Game collecting is indeed so much different here in the old continent.
As someone who collects exclusively PAL region games, I loved watching your video through the end and I can’t wait for more content. Thank you !!!
Biggest difference for most European localized retro games being the frame rate, 50 Hz (EU) vs. 60 Hz (NTSC), is probably why I would never collect European games. And also because they are region locked, so my console would probably never even be able to play them.
8:07 Canadian here. Our video game boxes virtually all come out with English and French on the boxes and game manuals.
Great topic. I have to mention that Australia is a PAL region and a lot of the games described as 'European only' were also released in Australia.
I find myself playing only NTSC versions of older games nowadays. The speed difference wasn't an issue back in the day but you do notice it if you try to go back. Something you didn't really touch on was a lot of games were optomised for PAL so that the speed of the gameplay and/or music was altered to resemble the 60Hz timing.
I kinda wanted to mention it but in actuality there are relatively few games optimized for 50hz. More so around the 2000's just before the 60hz option became available. EU Game companies like Rare did always optimize their games though
@@Mallerd It really was company to company but a lot were at least partially optomised. I also wished you had talked about the coloured triangles on the spines of Nintendo games, that would have been great for the topic.
@@goatbone there is like 5 versions of this script with one of them having that included by GVG already has a super indepth video on that topic and I didnt want to rethread that ground. (Fun fact I was actually in that video because I send in a picture of my Wii collection for it haha)
The Sega Saturn had some great PAL optimisation. VF 2 and Sega Rally run full screen and speed. The Dreamcast was the big one as the 60hz option on 99% of the games was great. PS2 was hit and miss. Later era mega drive games some of them were optimised.
@@Mallerdmore games than you would think were actually Pal optimized or at least somewhat optimized. A ton of first party Nintendo games on the Nes and Snes, including the Zelda and Mario games had at least some optimisations. Since Rare is a European studio all of their games run perfectly on Pal systems. All the PS1 Crash and Spyro games.
Also once the Snes came out almost every single game at least fixes the audio to play at the correct speed, which imo was the biggest and most noticeable problem with the 100% unoptimized games.
Super impressed with the depth of your research and quality of this video. Great job!
Was always super jealous of the PAL version of Luigi’s Mansion for the GameCube as it had a different Hidden Mansion mode that we never got in the US or in Japan. Great video, and love seeing TWRP fans!
Hey, I came across this video on my homepage and I really liked it, I also checked out some of your animations and they look sick (another artist here, hello!)
I'm from Turkey and game collecting, especially for Nintendo consoles, is almost impossible here, as Nintendo stopped selling in Turkey in early 2010s, so most stuff you can find is really damn expensive. Thankfully, I'm moving to the Netherlands next year (to study) so it's nice to hear that I'll get more options to shop for my nerdy Pokemon games and merch xD
Loved this video! As an American, I’ve never really thought about what game collecting was like in Europe. I knew your DS cases were different, but I didn’t know Dreamcast cases were as well! I also remember hearing that those little colored triangles on your game spines have something to do with what countries or languages are supported? Something like that. Either way, thank you! I hope to see more videos from you about games :)
About Project Zero, the Japanese games are called Zero FWIW.
Also on Splatoon 1: The slang in that game often dated itseld very quickly. I remember foe one Splatfest the line "Team Snowbae is so fleck that I literally cant even". The booyah/cmon situation meant players didn't know what those inputs were intended for.
Another annoying aspect of collecting in EU is finding the game you want but it turns out to not be the english version.
Plenty of JRPG and adventure games in the PS1/PS2 era would get a separate release for just the english, german, italian etc. version
I didn't realise that was still the case even on some PS2 games, so I ended up owning extra french copies of Final Fantasy X and X-2 :) (I don't speak french)
It does actually make sense with disc space being limited for large RPGs to Release in Different languages. (esp. If voice acting is involved, which wasn't that often iirc)
@@keit99 I wonder though, how much space does text take up.
Sure it makes sense for something like a gameboy Pokemon game, where space on the cartridge is already super limited. But PS2 games? For example, the Sly Cooper trilogy. These games are fully translated and voice acted in 11 different languages, all on the same disc.
@@edvinas643 Yeah with FFX I don't really get it. It only had the english dub anyway.
When it comes to JRPG and their multiple, lengthy cutscenes, There simply might not be enough space to fit 5 or more languages unless they have to cut corners.
Always see the packaging language and the possible game product IDs, if the back cover is in English, so will be the manual and the game has English as an option, if it's not the only language. Frenchies, Italians, Spanishers and Germans like their own language variants depending on the game.
Us Scandinavians usually have the packaging in Fin/Swe/Nor/Dan (or sometimes just one of those) and the game in English, unless multi-language, which is usually Eng/Fra/Ger/Ita/Spa but sometimes there's different languages as well.
I'm from Portugal, and I can understand your point of view. Collecting video games in Europe is a truly enjoyable experience and not as bad as some people make it out to be.
Thank you for representing our European perspective.
Great video! Love to see more! I'm also from Europe and I always wished our market would be documented too or more frequently on the internet.
I also wanted to mention a certain aspect I don't know whether the NA market struggles with. So as you mentioned, the boxes are bigger so they could display the text in different languages. But in some cases, some games only carry 1 specific language instead of multiple languages. Or it does contain multiple languages (including English) but the boxart & text is in another language but English, which is still ok! But I feel like this makes the PAL/European English boxes very wanted and, in some cases, more expensive than the games in a native language of a random European language.
One of the interesting things about living in the PAL Asia belt is that whenever Bandai Namco drop an anime game of some kind they always give us a bunch of really cool rewards whenever we go pick up a. Preorder whether it’s digital or physical.
I remember when I went to pick up a copy of DragonBallZ Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and the dude behind the counter gave me this code sheet for five extra characters including Emperor Pilaf and Demon King Piccolo. And I was like “TF is this?” And he was like “BN Asia gave us a bunch of these with the delivery. Apparently they’re only exclusive to this area and Malaysia and I was like dang, that’s pretty cool.
Then they added everyone to BT3. But when I picked up BT3 I got a bunch of exclusive costume colors you can’t get on other versions.
I’m not sure why it’s a thing that exists but there you go.
Toffe video en logischerwijs heel herkenbaar. Ik ben ondertussen ruim 28 jaar bezig met verzamelen en de meeste van de dingen die je aanhaalt ben ik gaandeweg wel tegen gekomen. Wat ik daarentegen niet wist is dat Amerika een andere box art voor Breath Of The Wild heeft. Ik denk dat ik die zelfs mooier vind dan de europese. Je ziet wel vaker dat de europese en japanse box art ongeveer of precies hetzelfde is, maar de amerikaanse volledig afwijkt. Ik heb een aardige verzameling japanse games, veelal puur voor de box art en als je daar van houdt, dan zit daar een hoop moois tussen, met name voor de Super Famicom, de japanse Super Nintendo. De PS2 spines zijn altijd wel wat saaiig met alleen maar zwarte tekst op een witte achtergrond. Zo had het gaaf geweest als de .hack spellen in Europa net als in Amerika een plaatje vormden als je ze alle vier had.
Tegenwoordig ga ik eerder naar Nedgame dan Game Mania. Het aanbod is wat uitgebreider met betrekking tot retro games en ik heb het idee dat ze daar net wat meer verstand van zaken hebben, al kan dat natuurlijk verschillen per werknemer of filiaal. Ook ga ik graag naar de kleinere retro game winkels, zoals Joydo en Press-Start. Ik kom daar soms dingen tegen die ik nergens anders vind. Bij Joydo haal ik wel vaker japanse spellen en Press-Start heeft meestal wel een doos met amerikaanse comics staan die ik altijd even doorspit.
In 2017 ging ik voor het eerst naar een retro gaming beurs. Daar heb ik een wijze les geleerd. Opletten wat je aan wil schaffen. In tegenstelling tot de gewone winkels kom je van alles uit verschillende regio's tegen. Dat wist ik toen nog niet en helaas kwam ik daar pas achter toen ik thuis kwam. Twee van de spellen die ik daar had gekocht bleken amerikaanse versies te zijn. Whoops! De ene was voor de Nintendo DS die regiovrij is, dus die was gelukkig gewoon te spelen, maar de andere (en veel duurdere) was voor de Gamecube. Gelukkig zijn daar in dit geval nog opties voor, zoals emulatie of een Freeloader, maar op het moment dat ik erachter kwam, baalde ik toch lichtelijk. Aan de andere kant heb ik op zo'n beurs een amerikaanse PlayStation 2 gekocht, waardoor ik PS1 en PS2 games die Europa niet hebben gehaald toch zou kunnen kopen en spelen. Live and learn.
Watching your video I was like: damn, this dude sounds like he could live next to me. And then you said you're from the Netherlands and I'm like, makes sense lol. Great video! The King's Day part hit.
Although we also have Gamestop here in Germany, I would argue that it is similarly awful to your Gamemania in the Netherlands. Gamestop has a really bad reputation among gamers here because the prices were always much higher, the used games too and because purchases brought incredibly little money. For example: a game that had only been on the market for 4 weeks was bought there for 10€ and was resold by Gamestop itself for 50€. Nowadays Gamestop is only a marginal phenomenon where you can buy cheaply processed merchandise.
It's funny because I've been in Gamestops in Italy, Germany and Denmark and they are very different then the ones I've been to in the US. You're right in that EU Gamestops feel like Gamemania
and half of the german stores closed in the last months and all stores in austria and switzerland@@Mallerd
One of the best games that only released in Europe and Japan that never got released in North America was Deep Fear on the Saturn. I believe it was the last Saturn game released in PAL regions and the used price is ungodly because of that, but it's a very unique survival horror game with a sci-fi nautical setting. I was surprised it didn't get mentioned here but it's worth checking out on an emulator or watching a playthrough online, it's a wild swan song for the European Saturn.
Not so Fun Fact: The N64s only way of region locking games is a small piece of plastic in the cartridge slot. This piece can be easily replaced to play any regions games. Unless you have a European N64, That one has an actual region locking chip makeing this impossible. This fact isn't super well known and led to me unknowingly buying a unplayable Japanese game. Always make sure you specify Pal N64 when Google searching. 😭
A decent reason I can think of for why the European version of Splatoon has less personality in it's dialogue, is because it was a more direct translation of the Japanese release, that's why "Booyah" was changed to "Nice", since it's a more direct translation of 「ナイス」
Great video, man!
Collecting games in Europe is a mess as many games got several releases based on languages. You often had 5 or 6 different releases of the same game with the following sub region : UK Scandanavia, Germany, France + Netherlands, Italy & Spain.
Fun fact, Nintendo box has a small coloured triangle for each version. German use purple, France red, Italy sky blue and so on.
When collecting games here, you may choose to stick to one.language version making it harder to find the copy of your game.
(11:45) European collectors tend to say they overall prefer European covers, but not all. North American collectors tend to say they overall prefer the North American covers, but not all. It's either due to nostalgia, or that they just know their audience when it comes to changing the covers.
Good video :3
I find this kind of stuff interesting. Especially about the GameCube since each region has their own game cases. In Europe they are rather simple, in the USA with some thicker disc nest or whatever these are called and in Japan they are very small with cardboard sleeves. The Japanese case design is also used in Korea but with the European-like UK colored triangle on them lol
Nice to see a video about game collecting that's close to home. Here in Belgium (Flanders) it's pretty much the same as in the Netherlands. Marktplaats is 2dehands (which is owned by Marktplaats), and we also have GameMania. I really like the ending by the way xD
Your segments with the camera (eg: 0:56) have an incredibly loud high pitched noise in the background, sadly making this video unwatchable for me :(
Tinnitus simulator
I bought a copy of Lufia on a dutch flea market this year, and discovering that it actually has dutch text kind of blew my mind. Guess I'll now have to learn dutch properly if I want to play Lufia. Also the upside down german flag on snes lucky luke will never not be funny. Great video!
You are like the Dutch Scott the Wozz. I like you.
Great video. I’m an American collector in England, and you are spot-on with a lot of your observations. I love the big differences like Starwing & Contra.
north america or south ?
Nah he means 'MURICA 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅🦅🦅
Two localisation changes that stood out to me were Advance Wars Days of Ruin being changed to Dark Conflict, with all of the characters having different names; Will became Ed, Brenner became O'Brien etc for some reason. The other was FFX having loads of extra postgame superbosses in europe - the dark aeons and penance. Although the american HD remaster added these back in.
I'm originally from the Netherlands, moved to Japan almost a decade ago.
Game collection in Japan is very unlike both Europe and America.
Sadly I don't have most of the European games anymore, because I had to sell them to fund my first months of stay while waiting for my visa to be approved, 3 months without a job or other means of funding.
I've been game collecting here in Japan for quite a while now, mostly Super Famicom (aka SNES) and Nintendo 64, but eventually branched out to the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance, Playstations 1, 2, 3, and 4, Nintendo DS and 3DS, Gamecube, and all the SEGA consoles.
I want to add Famicom (NES) too, but I have yet to find the original console anywhere.
I never owned anything from Sony or SEGA back in Europe, so can't really compare them though.
But the biggest differences in gaming overal is actually outside of console gaming.
Arcades are still thriving with new games being released to them to this day, Gundam being among the biggest game franchises here, which is one the entire rest of the world doesn't care about, visual novels are massive (and sadly DRM protected too), and more or less everyone is into gatcha "games" on smartphones.
PC gaming isn't as big apart from smaller dojin games or bigger Steam games, but it's steadily growing since the Japanese found out that Discord exists back in 2017.
My collection isn't as extensive as yours, due to how shit the economy has been.
But one game I really want to have in my collection is Conker Bad Fur Day, but I will probably need an import console from the US or Europe, since that game never released in Japan.
Very illuminating video! I’ve always wondered about the reason for the bigger boxes in Europe.
The EU RE4 cover fucks soooo hard. Wish we got something that cool in NA.
Yo, ook een verzamelaar in Nederland hier. Ik verzamel sinds ik 13 was ongeveer, dus dat zou nu 6 jaar zijn.
Leuk om te zien dat iemand een keer aandacht geeft aan hoe anders het kan zijn hier in Europa.
Ik gebruik vaak Marktplaats voor alles wat ik koop tweedehands, en koningsdag kan je altijd hele goede deals vinden. Ik hou van deze hobby, ook al ben ik soms wel jaloers op wat de Amerikanen krijgen
Hello, I'm a game collector from Hungary. I have been collecting video games for 20 years now. My biggest problem with collecting games in my country before I had internet access was that I ran into games with german covers quite often, and I don't speak german, so I don't like game packaging with only german language on it, in fact in my country the used market value is lower for games with german cover than that of an english one. Nowadays it's easy to sort out shops that are selling games with only german covers, so I avoid them. For local game stores we had a quite a big shop brand across the country called 576 kbyte, they even had their own video game magazine which was very popular in the 90s and early 2000s. I really liked them back in the days, but unfortunately they went out of business in 2010. Now days there a couple video game shop brands across Hungary, but I really don't favor any of them, one of them changed their shop's names like 3 times within 10 years.
Kell a sűrű cégnévváltás ha csalod az adót, és el kell bújni a nav elől :D