Nintendo never really broke into the Korea market because until the late 90s it was literally illegal to sell Japanese electronics in Korea. The NES was the "Hyundai Comboy" because if the manufacturer and distributer was Korean it was legal. PC gaming is much more popular in Korea because the big console manufacturers in the 80s and 90s were Japanese and the ban didn't apply to cultural exports from countries other than Japan.
yeah and i think the sega genesis was called the Samsung Aladdinboy here. Official korean translations of Nintendo games basically weren't a thing before the DS/Wii era, aside from a few offshoot translations like pokemon gold.
@@naianetwork2609well there are reasons throughout history japan has pillaged Korea committing crazy crimes especially during the Japanese occupation and ww2 and most Koreans hated the Japanese it also doesn’t help the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge that the crimes happened and only recently they acknowledged some of the crimes happened
A few years ago, I bought a second hand DS Lite, and to my surprise it was the Korean model. The menu is exactly like a regular DS Lite, except Italian is replaced by Korean in the language menu. Also there's some korean writing at the bottom because of regulations and stuff. But since the DS is region free, I can play any games on it
Fun fact like the JPN DS Lite, Korean DS Lite has a 512KB flash chip for the firmware instead of the normal 256K flash chip used on US/Europe consoles. ;)
To understand all these mess, you'll need to understand how Korean console market was grown up... It all started with bootleg Famicom consoles, then Hyundai Electronics officially licensed NES and SNES for Korean market, but it wasn't a popular option for kids and their parents then - not only because bootleg famicoms were cheaper, but Hyundai's NES weren't compatible with Famicom cartridge that was sold way cheaper than official Hyundai cartridges by grey-importers. That's why when Daewon took over Nintendo official distribution right, they decided to sell consoles with JPN region code to make it compatible with grey-imported games, and selling only limited library of first-party games in English so they can cut cost for localization. for any unreleased games, gamers could buy Japanese version. but soon everything changed when Nintendo decided to directly sell consoles in Korea, and releasing DS and Wii, fully localized. Localization included new KOR region code for Wii, so Gamecube compatibility was removed since there's no Gamecube with KOR region code in earth.
Also whenever the DS and Wii were released in 2004 and 2006, Nintendo had officially established a localization office in Korea after the ban on Japanese cultural exports had been fully lifted.
Being a Korean, I grew up with a Korean Nintendo Wii, the first edition Wii with the Gamecube disc drive and controller ports. Being a ten-year old kid, and since the Gamecube wasn't officially released by Nintendo KR, I always wondered what the heck those were for. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed when I found out they were essentially useless, as well as the whole history of Nintendo and Korea pre-DS/Wii era...
@@VinnytotheK Nintendo dont care about Poland (and (i think) diffrent post-communis countrys) and to this day, is very ofen to poles know only about nintendo games (not diretly) becose lack of anti piracy laws in early 90' now still nintento dont exist in polish gamers minds ... just dont ... before switch, be ultra rare to find some with nintendo console
The early South Korean gaming market is quite an interesting thing. Back in the early days of video games, there was a strict ban on Japanese imports in Korea (since Japan did some very not nice things to Korea in the early 20th century). In order to get around this, Japanese companies had to find unique ways to get their products in Korea and the main official way to do so was to allow a Korean company to manufacture those Japanese products. This naturally meant that the amount of official consoles and console games released in Korea was quite limited for a period of time. All of Nintendo's consoles prior to the GameCube were brought over to Korea by Hyundai. By the time the GameCube came out, laws on Japanese imports had softened but they were still not fully removed, it wouldn't be until 2004 when the law was fully lifted. The GameCube was brought into Korea by Daewon and from what I heard from Korean sources, they had rather strict licensing compared to SONY and Microsoft, hence the small number of games compared to the XBOX and PS2 in the region. Most games were fully in English but they were 2 games which were actually translated into Korean (Finding Nemo and Space Raiders). There were also a small handful of games that were fully in Japanese. By the time the Wii came out, the ban on Japanese imports was fully lifted in South Korea so Nintendo was able to release the Wii in Korea themselves. With the Korea specific region coding on the Wii and the fact that Nintendo did not release their own GameCube games in Korea, that could be why they removed the GameCube compatibility from the Wii in Korea.
Daewoo didn't import it because the company had gone out of business due to the Asian financial crisis at the time. The company that imported the Korean GameCube and early NDS/NDSL releases is called Daewon C.I., mostly known as a major comics publisher in Korea, been selling Japanese manga to the Korean market since the 90s. It was Hyundai Electronics that used to import Nintendo consoles in Korea, but they went out of business for the same reason as Daewoo did. The only part of the electronics arm of the conglomate that made it through was the semiconductor division, which is now called SK Hynix.
@@bigbangbot-SuperSqank Daiwon is the classical style of Korean romanisation of 대원. (actually way too classical; almost early 20c style) They changed their English name from Daiwon to Daewon in the 2000s, according to the Revised Romanisation, while the Korean and Hanja names remained the same. It's indeed quite confusing for foreigners. So tldr: Daiwon = Daewon != Daewoo.
most people in korea are familiar enough with english that they would be able to recognize a game based off its english title. i have to imagine back then the issue was not having the time/resources to redesign the box with a stylized hangul title.
Actually a lot of Koreans speak English, just about 1-10 Koreans can speak *fluent English! *Fluent as in they have enough of an understanding of English to converse with other English speakers.
@@mma070181 that's an actual stat, 1/10. Not sure how old it is but out of any eastern Asian country, they speak English more than anyone else, other than maybe Japan or the Philippines.
The Brazilian GameCube had a Brazilian Portuguese system menu. The very few games that were released were all in English but with box and manuals in Portuguese. The console was 100% compatible with US GameCube games.
My comment is inaccurate. I've just checked my copy of Wave Race Blue Storm. It's just a US game in a regular US package with an added Portuguese manual.
The 100% compatibility I believe is because Brazil and America both run at 60hz electrically. Though I believe the Brazilian standard has everything run ~220V instead of the US reserving that voltage for household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines/dryers, using 120V for everything else. So it was easy to just import games from America.
The funnier thing with the Wii is the GameCube mode was built in on a hardware level. The Wii types that removed the GC ports, will still boot a GameCube ISO if you mod those. And undoing the Region Lock is easy enough when modding, the far funnier thing is even after modding a Wii it will often not read other regional disks without booting them in some HomeBrew app, in my case even after modding my Wii it will not boot my PAL Billy Hatcher on the Wii menu, to boot my disk at all I had to boot it via Nintendont, but CleanRip was able to rip the ISO so I just use that and it works fine. Never modded a Korean Wii, but I bet a lot of the core hardware exists, as no Wii ever changed the board. Other fun note if you mod a Wii you can enable it to read and play DVD's.
I have a full set, also Korea has more than 4 n64 games. After the main 4 launch titles, they stopped the "for Korea only" label and uses a yellow "Asian Version" label. Two of these games were in Korean, those being Finding Nemo and Space Raiders.
Nintendo made similar things in other countries too. In brazil, the gamecube was released by the company Gradient in 2001 until 2003, I guess, via Importation. The console menu was totally translated into Portuguese. The game's box were translated too, If my memories were correct. But all the games were in English. The gamecube was the last console to receive a real Nintendo's support in brazil.
@@KeybladeMaster64 There has been an eShop in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru since the release of the OLED Switch, but still thats not as huge as support as in other markets like Asia.
I remrmber while I was in korea I visited a used gamestore. All the korean consoles and games were like double the price of all the japanese stuff. Like all the korean wii and ds were over $100 and most of the korean games were over like $40-$50 while the same games in japanese were $10-$20
Probably the true reason there's so few games, the people interested already were grey importing games and consoles from Japan, the same thing happened in Hong Kong
You know what's really weird? Tak and the Power of Juju was released in South Korea but not Japan, despite it being the only Nickelodeon game released in Korea, and as you mentioned everything is in English. Also, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was released in Korea as well, but not any of the other PS2/GameCube Crash games (i.e. Crash Nitro Kart, Crash Twinsanity, and Crash Tag Team Racing), so it's a very weird situation regarding what games get released in Korea and which ones don't.
(original) Crash's first any only attempt into the Korean market was Wrath of Cortex, which sold poorly. It was later re-released with a full Korean dub, but the sales were still not fruitful. N-Sane trilogy might have been release in Korea, at the very minimum digitally. I recall seeing it on the PSN store.
Nickelodeon released a fair few games in Korea back on the 6th gen consoles, mainly towards the end of the generation. As well as Tak & The Power of Juju, I believe they also released the second game in Korea (albeit only the PS2). Games like Nicktoons Movin, SpongeBob Lights, Camera, Pants, Barnyard and Spongebob, Creature from the Krusty Krab also got a Korean release. As a sidenote, I actually own a Korean GameCube copy of Tak & the Power of Juju. It's a neat thing in my collection.
After Hyundai Electronics, which had imported various Nintendo consoles to Korea, went bankrupt, it was a company called Daewon that stepped in to fill the gap. Daewon (also known as Daiwon previously), a well-known comics publisher in Korea, brought in Nintendo consoles from the Game Boy Advance to the early NDSL era. Daewon was doing well in the comics market at the time, releasing popular Japanese manga like Dragon Ball. On top of that, they had a long history as a Japanese anime production subcontractor, so it seemed like a good idea to import another successful Japanese media... until they messed it up completely. They didn't localise the game and/or consoles much at all. In fact, they were called "스티커 정발 (lit. Sticker-official-release)" by Korean gamers because they just put Korean labels on Japanese or US games and sold them as official Korean versions. Most Korean console gamers at that time relied on grey-market sellers importing Nintendo games and consoles from Japan. Nintendo consoles never sold well until Nintendo of Korea Co., Ltd. set up and their NDSL was a huge hit.
Wow, I had no idea South Korea got their own Gamecube. It's (not really) surprising that Nintendo didn't even attempt to translate Mario Sunshine to Korean. They just slapped Korean text on the box and disc and called it a day lmao
I was in seoul, korea for a few years during this time, the game cube was hardly known there, I don't remember seeing these games for sale anywhere, but the playstation 2 was pretty much the standard game console, but console gaming was not a big thing, the country is definitely pc gaming land
Korean Pokemon cards have done the same thing to various degrees throughout the years. Now that the cards are more unified, it's not as noticeable but older cards will use any combination of regional design differences and combine them.
The Korean console market has always been very slow compared to other markets. The Wii U in its entirety wasn't even released there. It wasn't until the Switch that console gaming started to pick up in popularity and nowadays most if not all Nintendo games get full Korean translated releases. The Wii had a pretty good Korean library too, though. Obligatory did you know Super Mario Galaxy's Korean title is "Super Mario Wii: Galaxy Adventure"?
You know what? same happened on 3DS, They even didn't launched Nintendo Network here, So no Miiverse., and they didn't update the web browsers on 3DS firmware too!
The Korean text sides remind me of a PSP era game case, as well as the box size in general. Also really cool to see these differences. Also, I have a thought on maybe why these consoles and their releases seem kinda… lack luster/ ill fitting… I think the reason for these quirks are due to S. Korea’s previous strict import laws, and not the best of relationships between these two countries, I’m pretty sure before, Nintendo basically sub contracted licensing/ sales of their hardware to Korean manufacturers like Samsung before deciding to move to first party licensing in the GameCube era. (also of note was that when Samsung had distribution rights, software was scarcely released, and often were straight up in a different language, and/or were just ports of MSX games due to their similar architecture) And If I’ve heard correctly, Korea had a bigger PC gaming market than it did home consoles. So Nintendo basically was marketing to a region without a huge video game console market, in a territory that they’ve had tension with in the past. Whereas in territories like the North America, South America, Europe and such, Nintendo has already had an established reputation in these territories that also already were familiar to home consoles and handhelds. I might be wrong, but that’s basically what I’ve heard over the years. Edit: I see now someone beat me to it, and what we are saying do seem to line up so I’ll leave my wall text as is lol.
Nintendo Korea was officially started with the launch of DS Lite. So, the GameCube in South Korea was actually a licensed game console by another company called Daewon. Since back then, Korean usually played video games with Japanese or English by poorly licensed games, we actually not much care about the fact they released in Japanese Bios and foreign language game titles. Because the company who licensed GameCube is different from the Wii (Nintendo Korea), Wii doesn't support Kor version of GameCube disk.
This is awesome! oddly enough, I didnt know a lot of information about all this- yet I in fact own one of the korean games you listed! I purchased timesplitters 2 from a seller awhile back, because thats my favorite game of all time I wanted to collect all regions and versions of the series. It was quite expensive, but the sales for these are very minimal and its hard to determine the value of these games! Either way, I fell in love with the look of the disk and the case! the lettering is red for TS2, since it seems to be an 18+ game. And the case is the same as the PAL cover art, yet the game is apparently identical to the US version? Insane but I love it and am so happy to learn more about these unique titles!
About the English title names, well, they pretty much keep those in every language, the titles are not usually translated unless it's like a subtitle or description, or in this case that it only has the text on the side
This is hilarious. I live in Korea and shop for retro games all the time. I’ve only ever seen mostly Japanese and the odd North American disc for GameCube. Never seen these Korean GameCube games at all.
Reminds me of a similar botch with the Sega Saturn in Korea which was known as the Samsung Saturn there as Samsung handled distribution for Sega consoles between the Master System to the Saturn. Essentially, the Korean Samsung Saturn was Japanese region coded yet for some reason, the boot screen for the console was the US/European one instead of using the Japanese one or even using its own boot screen like the Victor and Hitachi models
my understanding is that it's fairly easy (at least nowadays) to import japanese games from other asian countries on an individual basis. even back in the day I remember in amreica you could even import japanese games from certain magazines and catalogs, and they would sell you an adapter so you could play them. so I wonder if a similar thing was done in korea
Also America got spoiled getting games translated into English, it wasn't super uncommon for other regions to just get the Japanese or English version and basically told "figure it out!" Famous Ocarina of Time did get a few European translations like German and French, but the Spanish translation had a very tight deadline and couldn't be included in the game ROM itself, so they just printed a large instruction manual with each line in English and its Spanish equivalent...
I have the Korean Super Mario Sunshine, it's the only version I've played. I imported it as a curiosity from play-asia back in the day. I love the Japanese small boxes, they suit better with the image of Gamecube in my mind.
Fun Fact: even the Nintendo Switch was released in Korea without a Korean menu. They didn't announce when they would support Korean until just before they actually did.
I might know the reason why, due to the dwindling sales (or it could of being released the same time as Japan)of the GCN (and being ever so slightly more popular in Japan) Nintendo of Japan probably told Korea to sell as it is and on the outside it’s all Korean. I have a Japanese GCN and at the file select screen all of it is English cause there are parts of Japan that speak English as well. So what I’m seeing is that as what you presented, is that it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. There is very limited information I could find so far due to the whole console market acting very similar to China (even though Nintendo got more involved with them with their iQue range), a good example is there Saturn’s, MDs, and SMS, where there was no Sega over there and sold it off like it was a knock off console, so due to Korea at the time not have a real Nintendo of Korea (despite selling official Nintendo consoles) they sold it as is. Again I don’t know if they sold it at the same time as in Japan or when the console was doing poorly, but as it stands that is all I can muster with my history of video games. I would love to know more about this bizarre chapter, but sadly I can’t due to the console being Nintendo’s worst selling console and the early days of Korea and China being pricks. Apologies for being long, but it was the best of me explaining it. 🐋
You know I can’t believe they couldn’t be bothered to let Korean Wiis just be able to read Japanese Gamecube games or something like that since Korean Gamecube games use the Japanese region code
As a Spanish I find weird that the Nintendo Official logo on those games is the same we use in our PAL market since NES: rounded instead of the oval shape used in the US and Canada.
I'm not surprised you can get these for very little or a premium, as they're one of those things that is niche - it's desierable to those in the know but not really to anyone else. Couple that with the fact that there is a supply (you can often pick them up in Japan - I have) only lends to this. They are weird games. On the PS2 games even if you have a boot disc you can still get a lockout message (only playable in Korea).
I’m kinda curious, are how the Korean localization / translations for these games? Does any South Korean gamer know? I always find it fascinating seeing different games getting localized in different languages
Before the year 2000, South Korea had a whole lot of restrictions on Japanese products, one of them was video games which lead to a whole lot of Japanese video game systems and games either being few and or released at a later date compared to the rest of the world.
I don't think you would be, given the time and place. To begin with these are games you can play without knowing what the text says, and as an adult you have at the very least enough basic English to navigate simple menus, this is true for Korea. Secondly not localizing games is a fact in most countries. For example here in Sweden games don't get localized, it's all in English. So for kids who barely or haven't yet started learning English, they wouldn't understand text in games. Growing up we had games like Pokémon become massive, despite the fact that we couldn't really understand the text when we were 5-7, it didn't matter. Exposure to the English language this way is one of the biggest reasons we all wanted to learn it from such an early age, English levels in Nordic countries is generally higher than most other European countries just due to exposure. Places like Spain or France mandate localized games and even dubbed movies. There's a benefit to not localizing games, at least with English which is useful no matter where you're from.
@@rigglesgod, i can talk all day about how much i dislike the fact that games _have_ to be dubbed in european spanish, when they have to be localized in spain. apparently game companies still don't get the memo that latin americans (and even spanish people, I've heard) don't like their games in that specific spanish because of cultural differences and some things will not make sense. there are some games that are really good in european spanish but most of them sound... cheap to say the least.
I have the red Wii, blue Wii, OG Wii with GameCube support and a silver resident evil 4 GameCube i still have in mint condition, i don't use them very often these days tho but i do tend to look after them 😊
I guess Nintendo saw that Koreans just aren't interested in consoles and just said "Screw it just give em what we got over here dude they won't buy it anyways man"
So... on the board there is a set of resistors you can set to switch between United States and Japan for regions. I always assumed they had another region for Korea but I guess not.
Keep in mind that when the GameCube was a brand new console, Nintendo didn’t officially have a localization office for the South Korean market until 2004. Which was also the year that S. Korea had fully lifted the ban on Japanese cultural exports at that time.
Fun fact: the one notable difference between the US and Korean versions of Super Mario Sunshine is that the Korean version comes with debug symbols, which is quite useful for reverse engineering the game. The US version was the only one to not include those, but the debug symbols from the Korean version mostly apply to it.
The old reason the game's keep going up in price is that collectors and youtube game channels keep going to where the cheap game's are buying them and reselling to make money so keep doing this and will until the end times where normal people just pirate them or get fake copy's to play.
There were a few different cover art styles. I remember a black cover, gold, and yellow. The gold one was what I had, I always thought the yellow looked terrible though lol
Very interesting! I have the Korean Super Mario Sunshine as well. I also noticed the green triangle on the sleeve that usually English PAL games have on their cover. BTW, do you perhaps know any Wii game with Korean in-game text that is not Unicode/UTF-16?
"Literally had only four games released. Can you imagine-" Damn, I didn't know my parents were secretly korean 😔😔😔 (I only had 4 N64 games growing up! I imagine a lot of families did. Not everyone was a collector with money to spend on every new game release!)
Nintendo and other Japanese companies couldn’t do much business in South Korea after WWII. Given that Japan had taken over SK, the Koreans had nothing but contempt for Tokyo. So they limited the sale of Japanese products for awhile and outright banned them after the war
I bought the Korean Mario party 5 was disappointed it wasn’t in Korean but in English main reason they didn’t release a lot games there due Koreans not buying Nintendo products due to them being Anti Japan back than
Amazing video! Can you mod the Korean Wii? if you can you should try to unregion lock it to see if it still reads gamecube games or if that functionality has been completely removed
The only place I've seen it mentioned is a blog called scanlines16. The author of the blog says in the comments that a Korean collector said Korean Pikmin 2 GCN exists, but then clarifies that he hasn't seen it himself. Have you ever seen one for sale?
yoo!! thanks for covering this topic, i actually still have my orange korean gc with sunshine it was rly difficult to play this game in korea as a kid lol
@@bingokemski4473 for someone who doesn't want to mod, this could be an alternative method to play US games on a Japanese gamecube (it just might be more expensive and harder to find)
Does this mean the Korean Gamecube is effectively region free, being able to run both Japanese and North American Gamecube titles? Or was the Gamecube always region free?
I don't understand the point of releasing a game in a country with a different language but not translating at all especially wind waker with its heavy dialogue and all. I don't know how you would get through the game besides from trial and error
I remember playing Gamecube and Wii as a Korean kid. The imported games not being translated was the norm at the time, so I was grateful that at least they changed the language to English from Japanese, as many Koreans including myself could at least understand English a bit while couldn't read a single letter in Japanese. But still English was a huge language barrier for many people, and for that reason, very small number of people actually bought Gamecube over PS2 where most of the major releases were actually translated. My Wii couldn't read Gamecube games so I had to softmod the console to play Gamecube games. I guess because Gamecube was released before the establishment of Nintendo Korea, and Wii came after that, and plus Gamecube was sold so little in Korea, they just didn't think that Wii needed Gamecube support at all. I sold them all in the secondhand market long ago, but this video was a fun nostalgia trip. Those paper boxes get stained so easily.
A big reason why Korean games tend to be just the English games is because American military personnel stationed there are a huge part of the market. Computer games are, and have been, more popular with Korean citizens
chicken sandwich
Should I show more obscure stuff like this on the channel?
Randomly found this. Will sub for obscure content !
heck yeah you should
:)))))))
Heck yeah
Yes please do! Obscure games are a great subject
Nintendo never really broke into the Korea market because until the late 90s it was literally illegal to sell Japanese electronics in Korea. The NES was the "Hyundai Comboy" because if the manufacturer and distributer was Korean it was legal. PC gaming is much more popular in Korea because the big console manufacturers in the 80s and 90s were Japanese and the ban didn't apply to cultural exports from countries other than Japan.
yeah and i think the sega genesis was called the Samsung Aladdinboy here.
Official korean translations of Nintendo games basically weren't a thing before the DS/Wii era, aside from a few offshoot translations like pokemon gold.
For some reasons, some Korean people think Japan is a predator for them.
@@naianetwork2609well there are reasons throughout history japan has pillaged Korea committing crazy crimes especially during the Japanese occupation and ww2 and most Koreans hated the Japanese it also doesn’t help the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge that the crimes happened and only recently they acknowledged some of the crimes happened
@@naianetwork2609they have a good reason too. The Japanese were absolute menaces to the Korean population in the first half of the 20th century.
This is good information
A few years ago, I bought a second hand DS Lite, and to my surprise it was the Korean model. The menu is exactly like a regular DS Lite, except Italian is replaced by Korean in the language menu. Also there's some korean writing at the bottom because of regulations and stuff. But since the DS is region free, I can play any games on it
I had korean one also in metallic rose. What's your color?
Damn I hope you aren't Italian
You're just like Mario, you're Italian.
Fun fact like the JPN DS Lite, Korean DS Lite has a 512KB flash chip for the firmware instead of the normal 256K flash chip used on US/Europe consoles. ;)
To understand all these mess, you'll need to understand how Korean console market was grown up...
It all started with bootleg Famicom consoles, then Hyundai Electronics officially licensed NES and SNES for Korean market, but it wasn't a popular option for kids and their parents then - not only because bootleg famicoms were cheaper, but Hyundai's NES weren't compatible with Famicom cartridge that was sold way cheaper than official Hyundai cartridges by grey-importers.
That's why when Daewon took over Nintendo official distribution right, they decided to sell consoles with JPN region code to make it compatible with grey-imported games, and selling only limited library of first-party games in English so they can cut cost for localization. for any unreleased games, gamers could buy Japanese version.
but soon everything changed when Nintendo decided to directly sell consoles in Korea, and releasing DS and Wii, fully localized.
Localization included new KOR region code for Wii, so Gamecube compatibility was removed since there's no Gamecube with KOR region code in earth.
Also whenever the DS and Wii were released in 2004 and 2006, Nintendo had officially established a localization office in Korea after the ban on Japanese cultural exports had been fully lifted.
Being a Korean, I grew up with a Korean Nintendo Wii, the first edition Wii with the Gamecube disc drive and controller ports. Being a ten-year old kid, and since the Gamecube wasn't officially released by Nintendo KR, I always wondered what the heck those were for. Needless to say I was extremely disappointed when I found out they were essentially useless, as well as the whole history of Nintendo and Korea pre-DS/Wii era...
Cannot imagine growing up without Nintendo classics. 😢
@@VinnytotheK Nintendo dont care about Poland (and (i think) diffrent post-communis countrys) and to this day, is very ofen to poles know only about nintendo games (not diretly) becose lack of anti piracy laws in early 90'
now still nintento dont exist in polish gamers minds ... just dont ... before switch, be ultra rare to find some with nintendo console
you're supposed to say "as a korean"
The early South Korean gaming market is quite an interesting thing. Back in the early days of video games, there was a strict ban on Japanese imports in Korea (since Japan did some very not nice things to Korea in the early 20th century). In order to get around this, Japanese companies had to find unique ways to get their products in Korea and the main official way to do so was to allow a Korean company to manufacture those Japanese products. This naturally meant that the amount of official consoles and console games released in Korea was quite limited for a period of time. All of Nintendo's consoles prior to the GameCube were brought over to Korea by Hyundai.
By the time the GameCube came out, laws on Japanese imports had softened but they were still not fully removed, it wouldn't be until 2004 when the law was fully lifted. The GameCube was brought into Korea by Daewon and from what I heard from Korean sources, they had rather strict licensing compared to SONY and Microsoft, hence the small number of games compared to the XBOX and PS2 in the region. Most games were fully in English but they were 2 games which were actually translated into Korean (Finding Nemo and Space Raiders). There were also a small handful of games that were fully in Japanese.
By the time the Wii came out, the ban on Japanese imports was fully lifted in South Korea so Nintendo was able to release the Wii in Korea themselves. With the Korea specific region coding on the Wii and the fact that Nintendo did not release their own GameCube games in Korea, that could be why they removed the GameCube compatibility from the Wii in Korea.
yeah the japanese stole our last ice cream cone during ww2. it was super uncool of them to do so...
Daewoo didn't import it because the company had gone out of business due to the Asian financial crisis at the time.
The company that imported the Korean GameCube and early NDS/NDSL releases is called Daewon C.I., mostly known as a major comics publisher in Korea, been selling Japanese manga to the Korean market since the 90s.
It was Hyundai Electronics that used to import Nintendo consoles in Korea, but they went out of business for the same reason as Daewoo did. The only part of the electronics arm of the conglomate that made it through was the semiconductor division, which is now called SK Hynix.
Ah, ok. I heard names like Daewon, Daiwon and Daewoo thrown about a lot regarding the GameCube in Korea so I wasn’t sure which one was correct.
@@bigbangbot-SuperSqank Daiwon is the classical style of Korean romanisation of 대원. (actually way too classical; almost early 20c style) They changed their English name from Daiwon to Daewon in the 2000s, according to the Revised Romanisation, while the Korean and Hanja names remained the same. It's indeed quite confusing for foreigners.
So tldr: Daiwon = Daewon != Daewoo.
I doubt it has anything to do with Japan, it's more like Korean companies wanting protectionism
most people in korea are familiar enough with english that they would be able to recognize a game based off its english title. i have to imagine back then the issue was not having the time/resources to redesign the box with a stylized hangul title.
Actually a lot of Koreans speak English, just about 1-10 Koreans can speak *fluent English!
*Fluent as in they have enough of an understanding of English to converse with other English speakers.
oh wow I didn't know that
Yeah.... no... I wouldn't call it fluent just manageable
@@mma070181 that's an actual stat, 1/10. Not sure how old it is but out of any eastern Asian country, they speak English more than anyone else, other than maybe Japan or the Philippines.
@@pcb123lol Maybe it's "being able to speak", just not so fluently.
Koreans learn English in school only few choose to continue
The Brazilian GameCube had a Brazilian Portuguese system menu. The very few games that were released were all in English but with box and manuals in Portuguese. The console was 100% compatible with US GameCube games.
My comment is inaccurate. I've just checked my copy of Wave Race Blue Storm. It's just a US game in a regular US package with an added Portuguese manual.
The 100% compatibility I believe is because Brazil and America both run at 60hz electrically. Though I believe the Brazilian standard has everything run ~220V instead of the US reserving that voltage for household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines/dryers, using 120V for everything else. So it was easy to just import games from America.
@jefflavenz7285 yes, everything is 60hz here. As for voltage, it depends on the city. Some are 110v, others are 220v.
Brazilian GC also had a built in patch specifically applied to NBA 2002 because for some reason it crashes otherwise
Hummer Team and Tec Toy: hey little bro i love you :)
Korea: whats Korean?
The funnier thing with the Wii is the GameCube mode was built in on a hardware level. The Wii types that removed the GC ports, will still boot a GameCube ISO if you mod those. And undoing the Region Lock is easy enough when modding, the far funnier thing is even after modding a Wii it will often not read other regional disks without booting them in some HomeBrew app, in my case even after modding my Wii it will not boot my PAL Billy Hatcher on the Wii menu, to boot my disk at all I had to boot it via Nintendont, but CleanRip was able to rip the ISO so I just use that and it works fine. Never modded a Korean Wii, but I bet a lot of the core hardware exists, as no Wii ever changed the board. Other fun note if you mod a Wii you can enable it to read and play DVD's.
I have a full set, also Korea has more than 4 n64 games. After the main 4 launch titles, they stopped the "for Korea only" label and uses a yellow "Asian Version" label.
Two of these games were in Korean, those being Finding Nemo and Space Raiders.
Can we pause to talk about how pretty that Korean Super Paper Mario disc is?
Nintendo made similar things in other countries too. In brazil, the gamecube was released by the company Gradient in 2001 until 2003, I guess, via Importation. The console menu was totally translated into Portuguese. The game's box were translated too, If my memories were correct. But all the games were in English. The gamecube was the last console to receive a real Nintendo's support in brazil.
Nintendo doesn’t show any support in Latin American now days… except Mexico since it’s North America.
@@KeybladeMaster64 There has been an eShop in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru since the release of the OLED Switch, but still thats not as huge as support as in other markets like Asia.
@@KeybladeMaster64 Nintendo has completely pulled out of Brazil, foreign companies are too taxed to operate there.
@@tobexomega yeah I heard but Nintendo doesn’t update them.
@@KeybladeMaster64if it wasn't for that fact, every latin american country would get heavily neglected.
"The game market is such a scam right now."
TRUE
How THE FUCK do you pay 3x retail price on 20ish year old discs??
Emulation is such a blessing in this hard times
I remrmber while I was in korea I visited a used gamestore. All the korean consoles and games were like double the price of all the japanese stuff. Like all the korean wii and ds were over $100 and most of the korean games were over like $40-$50 while the same games in japanese were $10-$20
Probably the true reason there's so few games, the people interested already were grey importing games and consoles from Japan, the same thing happened in Hong Kong
You know what's really weird? Tak and the Power of Juju was released in South Korea but not Japan, despite it being the only Nickelodeon game released in Korea, and as you mentioned everything is in English. Also, Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex was released in Korea as well, but not any of the other PS2/GameCube Crash games (i.e. Crash Nitro Kart, Crash Twinsanity, and Crash Tag Team Racing), so it's a very weird situation regarding what games get released in Korea and which ones don't.
(original) Crash's first any only attempt into the Korean market was Wrath of Cortex, which sold poorly. It was later re-released with a full Korean dub, but the sales were still not fruitful.
N-Sane trilogy might have been release in Korea, at the very minimum digitally. I recall seeing it on the PSN store.
Nickelodeon released a fair few games in Korea back on the 6th gen consoles, mainly towards the end of the generation. As well as Tak & The Power of Juju, I believe they also released the second game in Korea (albeit only the PS2). Games like Nicktoons Movin, SpongeBob Lights, Camera, Pants, Barnyard and Spongebob, Creature from the Krusty Krab also got a Korean release.
As a sidenote, I actually own a Korean GameCube copy of Tak & the Power of Juju. It's a neat thing in my collection.
After Hyundai Electronics, which had imported various Nintendo consoles to Korea, went bankrupt, it was a company called Daewon that stepped in to fill the gap.
Daewon (also known as Daiwon previously), a well-known comics publisher in Korea, brought in Nintendo consoles from the Game Boy Advance to the early NDSL era. Daewon was doing well in the comics market at the time, releasing popular Japanese manga like Dragon Ball. On top of that, they had a long history as a Japanese anime production subcontractor, so it seemed like a good idea to import another successful Japanese media... until they messed it up completely.
They didn't localise the game and/or consoles much at all. In fact, they were called "스티커 정발 (lit. Sticker-official-release)" by Korean gamers because they just put Korean labels on Japanese or US games and sold them as official Korean versions. Most Korean console gamers at that time relied on grey-market sellers importing Nintendo games and consoles from Japan.
Nintendo consoles never sold well until Nintendo of Korea Co., Ltd. set up and their NDSL was a huge hit.
Wow, I had no idea South Korea got their own Gamecube. It's (not really) surprising that Nintendo didn't even attempt to translate Mario Sunshine to Korean. They just slapped Korean text on the box and disc and called it a day lmao
yup, they did the same with other consoles too
I was in seoul, korea for a few years during this time, the game cube was hardly known there, I don't remember seeing these games for sale anywhere, but the playstation 2 was pretty much the standard game console, but console gaming was not a big thing, the country is definitely pc gaming land
Korean Pokemon cards have done the same thing to various degrees throughout the years. Now that the cards are more unified, it's not as noticeable but older cards will use any combination of regional design differences and combine them.
The Korean console market has always been very slow compared to other markets. The Wii U in its entirety wasn't even released there. It wasn't until the Switch that console gaming started to pick up in popularity and nowadays most if not all Nintendo games get full Korean translated releases. The Wii had a pretty good Korean library too, though.
Obligatory did you know Super Mario Galaxy's Korean title is "Super Mario Wii: Galaxy Adventure"?
You know what? same happened on 3DS, They even didn't launched Nintendo Network here, So no Miiverse., and they didn't update the web browsers on 3DS firmware too!
i guess korea is the only country that never got a wii that reads GC discs
Not really, you can mod the Wii and give Nintendo the middle finger
this is peak content ty, glad youtube recommends some cool stuff still. but keep grinding man this is awesome and congrats on 1k subs
Thank you, people like you are a reason to keep going
The Korean text sides remind me of a PSP era game case, as well as the box size in general. Also really cool to see these differences.
Also, I have a thought on maybe why these consoles and their releases seem kinda… lack luster/ ill fitting…
I think the reason for these quirks are due to S. Korea’s previous strict import laws, and not the best of relationships between these two countries, I’m pretty sure before, Nintendo basically sub contracted licensing/ sales of their hardware to Korean manufacturers like Samsung before deciding to move to first party licensing in the GameCube era. (also of note was that when Samsung had distribution rights, software was scarcely released, and often were straight up in a different language, and/or were just ports of MSX games due to their similar architecture) And If I’ve heard correctly, Korea had a bigger PC gaming market than it did home consoles.
So Nintendo basically was marketing to a region without a huge video game console market, in a territory that they’ve had tension with in the past.
Whereas in territories like the North America, South America, Europe and such, Nintendo has already had an established reputation in these territories that also already were familiar to home consoles and handhelds.
I might be wrong, but that’s basically what I’ve heard over the years.
Edit: I see now someone beat me to it, and what we are saying do seem to line up so I’ll leave my wall text as is lol.
Nintendo Korea was officially started with the launch of DS Lite.
So, the GameCube in South Korea was actually a licensed game console by another company called Daewon.
Since back then, Korean usually played video games with Japanese or English by poorly licensed games, we actually not much care about the fact they released in Japanese Bios and foreign language game titles.
Because the company who licensed GameCube is different from the Wii (Nintendo Korea), Wii doesn't support Kor version of GameCube disk.
This is awesome! oddly enough, I didnt know a lot of information about all this- yet I in fact own one of the korean games you listed! I purchased timesplitters 2 from a seller awhile back, because thats my favorite game of all time I wanted to collect all regions and versions of the series. It was quite expensive, but the sales for these are very minimal and its hard to determine the value of these games! Either way, I fell in love with the look of the disk and the case! the lettering is red for TS2, since it seems to be an 18+ game. And the case is the same as the PAL cover art, yet the game is apparently identical to the US version? Insane but I love it and am so happy to learn more about these unique titles!
About the English title names, well, they pretty much keep those in every language, the titles are not usually translated unless it's like a subtitle or description, or in this case that it only has the text on the side
This is hilarious. I live in Korea and shop for retro games all the time. I’ve only ever seen mostly Japanese and the odd North American disc for GameCube. Never seen these Korean GameCube games at all.
Reminds me of a similar botch with the Sega Saturn in Korea which was known as the Samsung Saturn there as Samsung handled distribution for Sega consoles between the Master System to the Saturn. Essentially, the Korean Samsung Saturn was Japanese region coded yet for some reason, the boot screen for the console was the US/European one instead of using the Japanese one or even using its own boot screen like the Victor and Hitachi models
my understanding is that it's fairly easy (at least nowadays) to import japanese games from other asian countries on an individual basis. even back in the day I remember in amreica you could even import japanese games from certain magazines and catalogs, and they would sell you an adapter so you could play them. so I wonder if a similar thing was done in korea
Also America got spoiled getting games translated into English, it wasn't super uncommon for other regions to just get the Japanese or English version and basically told "figure it out!"
Famous Ocarina of Time did get a few European translations like German and French, but the Spanish translation had a very tight deadline and couldn't be included in the game ROM itself, so they just printed a large instruction manual with each line in English and its Spanish equivalent...
I have the Korean Super Mario Sunshine, it's the only version I've played. I imported it as a curiosity from play-asia back in the day. I love the Japanese small boxes, they suit better with the image of Gamecube in my mind.
Fun Fact: even the Nintendo Switch was released in Korea without a Korean menu.
They didn't announce when they would support Korean until just before they actually did.
I might know the reason why, due to the dwindling sales (or it could of being released the same time as Japan)of the GCN (and being ever so slightly more popular in Japan) Nintendo of Japan probably told Korea to sell as it is and on the outside it’s all Korean. I have a Japanese GCN and at the file select screen all of it is English cause there are parts of Japan that speak English as well. So what I’m seeing is that as what you presented, is that it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. There is very limited information I could find so far due to the whole console market acting very similar to China (even though Nintendo got more involved with them with their iQue range), a good example is there Saturn’s, MDs, and SMS, where there was no Sega over there and sold it off like it was a knock off console, so due to Korea at the time not have a real Nintendo of Korea (despite selling official Nintendo consoles) they sold it as is. Again I don’t know if they sold it at the same time as in Japan or when the console was doing poorly, but as it stands that is all I can muster with my history of video games. I would love to know more about this bizarre chapter, but sadly I can’t due to the console being Nintendo’s worst selling console and the early days of Korea and China being pricks. Apologies for being long, but it was the best of me explaining it. 🐋
Sony did something similar with the PS2 in where they effectively sent slightly modified J-region systems to Korea and other asian markets
You know I can’t believe they couldn’t be bothered to let Korean Wiis just be able to read Japanese Gamecube games or something like that since Korean Gamecube games use the Japanese region code
but do they work on a JP wii
As a Spanish I find weird that the Nintendo Official logo on those games is the same we use in our PAL market since NES: rounded instead of the oval shape used in the US and Canada.
I'm not surprised you can get these for very little or a premium, as they're one of those things that is niche - it's desierable to those in the know but not really to anyone else. Couple that with the fact that there is a supply (you can often pick them up in Japan - I have) only lends to this.
They are weird games. On the PS2 games even if you have a boot disc you can still get a lockout message (only playable in Korea).
I’m kinda curious, are how the Korean localization / translations for these games? Does any South Korean gamer know?
I always find it fascinating seeing different games getting localized in different languages
Before the year 2000, South Korea had a whole lot of restrictions on Japanese products, one of them was video games which lead to a whole lot of Japanese video game systems and games either being few and or released at a later date compared to the rest of the world.
I would be so angry if I bought a GameCube and a game for it then couldn’t understand any of it
I don't think you would be, given the time and place. To begin with these are games you can play without knowing what the text says, and as an adult you have at the very least enough basic English to navigate simple menus, this is true for Korea. Secondly not localizing games is a fact in most countries.
For example here in Sweden games don't get localized, it's all in English. So for kids who barely or haven't yet started learning English, they wouldn't understand text in games.
Growing up we had games like Pokémon become massive, despite the fact that we couldn't really understand the text when we were 5-7, it didn't matter.
Exposure to the English language this way is one of the biggest reasons we all wanted to learn it from such an early age, English levels in Nordic countries is generally higher than most other European countries just due to exposure. Places like Spain or France mandate localized games and even dubbed movies. There's a benefit to not localizing games, at least with English which is useful no matter where you're from.
@@rigglesgod, i can talk all day about how much i dislike the fact that games _have_ to be dubbed in european spanish, when they have to be localized in spain. apparently game companies still don't get the memo that latin americans (and even spanish people, I've heard) don't like their games in that specific spanish because of cultural differences and some things will not make sense. there are some games that are really good in european spanish but most of them sound... cheap to say the least.
Gaming was just like that in brazil
I have the red Wii, blue Wii, OG Wii with GameCube support and a silver resident evil 4 GameCube i still have in mint condition, i don't use them very often these days tho but i do tend to look after them 😊
Interesting that they use the international box art for the Korean GameCube games. Most PAL covers and disk art are similar to NTSC-U.
I saw the thumbnail and oh ya, they had the same cases as the japense gamecube games. Infact that windwaker even looks like the same art.
Only 4 games is crazy. At least they were all bangers though.
They probably shared the region code if they knew the library wasn't going to be very large expecting customers to import games.
I like that you have the slip covers for them
Super cool and in depth!
I guess Nintendo saw that Koreans just aren't interested in consoles and just said "Screw it just give em what we got over here dude they won't buy it anyways man"
So... on the board there is a set of resistors you can set to switch between United States and Japan for regions. I always assumed they had another region for Korea but I guess not.
Keep in mind that when the GameCube was a brand new console, Nintendo didn’t officially have a localization office for the South Korean market until 2004. Which was also the year that S. Korea had fully lifted the ban on Japanese cultural exports at that time.
It's teal (between blue and green) so don't worry too much about getting the color wrong there
Fun fact: the one notable difference between the US and Korean versions of Super Mario Sunshine is that the Korean version comes with debug symbols, which is quite useful for reverse engineering the game. The US version was the only one to not include those, but the debug symbols from the Korean version mostly apply to it.
I always loved the Japanese packageing looked so much better then the American versions
Are there any Gamecube discs that the Korean Wii can play ?
I'm expecting not, so I wonder if they even advertised backwards compatibility.
No
Extremely educational and entertaining video!! Very well researched too, great job and thank you!
This is why I prefer japanese GameCube games as well as PAL regions ones.
The way you hold the discs tho 😬🤚
The old reason the game's keep going up in price is that collectors and youtube game channels keep going to where the cheap game's are buying them and reselling to make money so keep doing this and will until the end times where normal people just pirate them or get fake copy's to play.
i might be crazy enough to spend money on these korean versions tbh
I hate the box art for wind waker we got in the states
There were a few different cover art styles. I remember a black cover, gold, and yellow. The gold one was what I had, I always thought the yellow looked terrible though lol
It's awesome.
Hate is a strong word lol
@@BornTroublesome the box art for Zelda II is better and that's saying a lot
EU version is far better 😊 I have over 150 GC games
Very interesting! I have the Korean Super Mario Sunshine as well. I also noticed the green triangle on the sleeve that usually English PAL games have on their cover.
BTW, do you perhaps know any Wii game with Korean in-game text that is not Unicode/UTF-16?
I don't really know what that means or how to know but I have a lot of korean games
"Literally had only four games released. Can you imagine-"
Damn, I didn't know my parents were secretly korean 😔😔😔
(I only had 4 N64 games growing up! I imagine a lot of families did. Not everyone was a collector with money to spend on every new game release!)
Those are some piano players hands right there
Yes definitely do more videos like this one
11:18 I really thought you were gonna take out the disc, put in a USA copy, and watch the game resume without any problems.
That would be heat
“If you’re expecting this to be a simple translation of the games, you’d be wrong…”
Oh so they did more than that?
“ *Less* “
Nintendo and other Japanese companies couldn’t do much business in South Korea after WWII. Given that Japan had taken over SK, the Koreans had nothing but contempt for Tokyo. So they limited the sale of Japanese products for awhile and outright banned them after the war
Great video thank you
"blue or green, color blindness"
actually this is pretty good, it's knda cyan so kinda both
So this is a way to have a Japanese gamecube read an English game. I have an American -> Japanese hardmodded gamecube.
I bought the Korean Mario party 5 was disappointed it wasn’t in Korean but in English main reason they didn’t release a lot games there due Koreans not buying Nintendo products due to them being Anti Japan back than
They still kinda are
Amazing video! Can you mod the Korean Wii? if you can you should try to unregion lock it to see if it still reads gamecube games or if that functionality has been completely removed
The silly disc drive in the korean wii physically won't accept gamecube discs so I would have to also swap out the disc drive to see if it reads.
Wait till you see my North Korean virtual boy
Seems even more bizarre given many of the anti-Japanese-language regulations and such that have existed in Korea. Very odd.
lets see the collection👀
Ok
0:47 Only four games? Even China received more N64 games than that on the iQue Player!
When was someone going to tell me a new slitherysheep video dropped?
0:53 yeah its called the ps5
I've heard that Pikmin 2 might have been available in Korea on the GCN, but I haven't found any proof of it. Do you know anything about that?
I think it's the same thing as Mario Party 7 where they just imported the japanese version
The only place I've seen it mentioned is a blog called scanlines16. The author of the blog says in the comments that a Korean collector said Korean Pikmin 2 GCN exists, but then clarifies that he hasn't seen it himself. Have you ever seen one for sale?
yoo!! thanks for covering this topic, i actually still have my orange korean gc with sunshine
it was rly difficult to play this game in korea as a kid lol
They look a bit like the japanese game boxes used to be.
So this is basically this is they way to play English versions of games on Japanese consoles without modding
yes
Technically all anyone needs is a soldering iron to switch an NTSC-J GameCube to an NTSC-U Gamecube Region.
@@bingokemski4473 for someone who doesn't want to mod, this could be an alternative method to play US games on a Japanese gamecube (it just might be more expensive and harder to find)
The retro game market may be overpriced, but it's not a scam.
Underrated video. This makes me so mad.
What happen if you start the korean disc on the korean gamecube and then swap the american disc of the same game, still normaly running?😮
I don't think it will continue the game because cringe region lock
sudden urge to want to buy a Korean Wii game
Very strange that the US version of the Japan region was released in Korea.
I'm pretty sure the Wii U never released in South Korea
Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, GameCube-Game Boy Advence Link Cable for Mario Golf: Advance Tour (AGB-BMGU-AUS)
YES & NO
Does this mean the Korean Gamecube is effectively region free, being able to run both Japanese and North American Gamecube titles? Or was the Gamecube always region free?
No it doesn't play actual USA games.
I don't understand the point of releasing a game in a country with a different language but not translating at all especially wind waker with its heavy dialogue and all. I don't know how you would get through the game besides from trial and error
I remember playing Gamecube and Wii as a Korean kid. The imported games not being translated was the norm at the time, so I was grateful that at least they changed the language to English from Japanese, as many Koreans including myself could at least understand English a bit while couldn't read a single letter in Japanese.
But still English was a huge language barrier for many people, and for that reason, very small number of people actually bought Gamecube over PS2 where most of the major releases were actually translated.
My Wii couldn't read Gamecube games so I had to softmod the console to play Gamecube games. I guess because Gamecube was released before the establishment of Nintendo Korea, and Wii came after that, and plus Gamecube was sold so little in Korea, they just didn't think that Wii needed Gamecube support at all.
I sold them all in the secondhand market long ago, but this video was a fun nostalgia trip. Those paper boxes get stained so easily.
"And if you recall, Korean people don't speak Japanese." Lol 😅
Not in the early 20th century, for reasons…
I will summarize this entire video in one sentence.
Nintendo said "fuck it".
hmmm, how did Nintendo break into Korea anyway?
Nintendo basically used to have other companies import their stuff. Other people in my comments have probably given the whole story
12:38 Based
Also, this might be the craziest region locking-related Nintendo fact I've ever heard.
Great video!
you should make more videos like this!
A big reason why Korean games tend to be just the English games is because American military personnel stationed there are a huge part of the market. Computer games are, and have been, more popular with Korean citizens
Pretty ironic as their internet infrastructure is ass
They got prime 1 but not prime 2