Game Collecting in Europe is very different

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

I've noticed that even a lot of European YouTubers 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

As, others have said, great video. It's nice to see the European region of video games focused upon. The big gaming channels on YouTube 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.

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.

(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.

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.

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 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.