Where did this excitebike come from?

[silentshadow56 | 0]

I came across what I assume is a scan of the excitebike box art, but I'm really having a hard time figuring out the mystery behind the UPC on this one.

 

For those that don't know long story short (I can elaborate if necessary to help unravel the mystery) on a UPC the first digit to the left of the barcode is relative to the product being sold in this case "7" is just a general use so nothing anomalous there. However the next five digits are unique to the company and are referred to as the "company prefix" and furthermore the first three digits of the company prefix denote the region of manufacture. For example the UPC for this Excitebike would break down as such

 

7 - Denotes a general use UPC code to follow

25272 - The company prefix w/ 252 denoting the region of manufacture

 

This is puzzling to me for two reasons:

1. Nintendo's company prefix is typically 045496 (Again, in this case "0" just denotes a general use UPC)
2. 200 - 299 for the region of manufacture is reserved for "Restricted Distribution"

I could take a guess at what restricted distribution means, but all the same what was "restricted" about this particular version of the game? Furthermore why would Nintendo pay to have an additional UPC for what all intents and purposes is the release of the same game? Excitebike is the only example I've stumbled across thus far but I'm sure there are others and I wanted to see if anyone here had any insight or even knew exactly what the reason was? REALLY looking forward to see what anyone might have to say!

 

*I've named the anomalous Excitebike "pic_a" and the regular one "pic_b" and you will be able to see that there is some difference in the pictures shown to demonstrate gameplay 

  

[DoctorEncore | 3,691]

The top picture you posted is the official boxart that was released in NA.

The bottom picture appears to be some type of reproduction. The screenshot in the upper right appears to have been nabbed from the GBA release, although I'm not sure about the others. I'm sure the UPC was stolen from somewhere else or just randomly numbered.

Edited August 18, 2021 by DoctorEncore

[Murray | 2,449]

Is the name Ben written anywhere on the cart? 

[AdamW | 713]

1 hour ago, DoctorEncore said:

The top picture you posted is the official boxart that was released in NA.

The bottom picture appears to be some type of reproduction. The screenshot in the upper right appears to have been nabbed from the GBA release, although I'm not sure about the others. I'm sure the UPC was stolen from somewhere else or just randomly numbered.

yup. there are various other classic indications it's a repro; for instance, all the text fonts are slightly wrong (they used the closest freely-available font they could find to the ones Nintendo used at the time), which leads to the text positioning being all slightly wrong. They did a better job than most repros at avoiding typographical errors, but I see at least two:

1. the real back has "fierce motocross comp-etition" across a line break, the repro has "fierce motocross comp-petition"
2. the blurb next to the seal says "with your Nintendo Entertainment System" on the real back, but "with you Nintendo Entertainment System" on the repro

The "programmable series" graphic is slightly wrong (cable waves the wrong way, controller is tilted more and zoomed out more). And as you both noted, the screenshots are different.

Those are all classic indications of a repro - typos, slightly wrong fonts, slightly wrong graphical elements.