Nintendo color codes for European games

Nintendo since its introduction on the old continent, by different distributors of the time, has segmented the European market in several regions for localization issues. You are not supposed to know that the production of these cartridges remained centralized in the factories and the assembly lines of Nintendo in Japan, notably for questions of financial order towards the third-party publishers, thus submitting them to a contribution of right licensing and use of their systems, all patents for the exploitation and manufacture of the NES / SNES and N64 cartridges belonging exclusively to the Kyoto firm. It is in this context of monopoly of use and exploitation that Nintendo took care of all the stages of making a game.

Back to our sheep, as all European production was centralized but had the peculiarity of having several versions specific to the different nations of the continent, Nintendo had the idea in addition to adding the codes of each region, to differentiate them by colors in order to facilitate the association of the boxes with their contents (manuals and cartridges) and to limit confusion errors with the personnel at the end of the chain. Thus we see the appearance of small pellets of colors like this one:

This identification applies to all supports of the firm. They are also found on the NES game boxes, Game Boy (Color and Advance), N64, Gamecube, Wii, DS and 3DS.

Letters :

• SNSP-XX-ESP: Release version in Spain in pink
• SNSP-XX-ESP / SESP: Release in Spain and texts in Spanish in yellow
• SNSP-XX-EUR: Release version for Europe in purple
• SNSP-XX-FAH: Release version in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland in orange
• SNSP-XX-FRA: Release version specially for France in red
• SNSP-XX-ITA: Release version in Italy in light blue
• SNSP-XX-NOE: Release version in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in dark blue
• SNSP-XX-UKV: Release in the UK in green

Small peculiarity:
Canadian bilingual Fr / Us games have a white pellet!