RickyTheCollector

I don't know, it might be a recycled release brought straight from Nintendo from the looks of it. A rushed one too it seems.

Thank you for all of this. I have a strong feeling though that Alesayi/Dotts could have distributed GameBoy and SNES into the countries though. I also sense that they started bringing in the NES in around 1993. I can also be sure that Itochu at some point started bringing Nintendo products as well, when they started doing so I'm not sure though. See: https://web.archive.org/web/19980205072054/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/companies/middleeast.html And after that, apparently Nintendo's Japanese office started importation into the region: https://web.archive.org/web/20010330121610/http://www.nintendo.com:80/corp/companies/middleeast.html followed by Nintendo Of Europe: https://web.archive.org/web/20011211041558/http://www.nintendo.com:80/corp/companies/middleeast.html Nowadays the distributor for this region is Active Boeki, who have a mixed distribution system of importing both European and U.S. products, and in some rare cases Asian products, in the following countries, UAE, to which the Active Gulf branch is situated, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Also regarding the Gameboy ad, you just never know the story behind it, chances are that it is official, for which I think it is.

Thank you for all of this. I have a strong feeling though that Alesayi/Dotts could have distributed GameBoy and SNES into the countries though. I also sense that they started bringing in the NES in around 1993. I can also be sure that Itochu at some point started bringing Nintendo products as well, when they started doing so I'm not sure though. See: https://web.archive.org/web/19980205072054/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/companies/middleeast.html And after that, apparently Nintendo's Japanese office started importation into the region: https://web.archive.org/web/20010330121610/http://www.nintendo.com:80/corp/companies/middleeast.html followed by Nintendo Of Europe: https://web.archive.org/web/20011211041558/http://www.nintendo.com:80/corp/companies/middleeast.html Nowadays the distributor for this region is Active Boeki, who have a mixed distribution system of importing both European and U.S. products, and in some rare cases Asian products, in the following countries, UAE, to which the Active Gulf branch is situated, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Also regarding the Gameboy ad, you just never know the story behind it, chances are that it is official, for which I think it is.

And as a side note, you should really consider sending this over to the folks at consolevariations.com

And notice how it says, "For sale and use only in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia only" and how the box is a localized variant of the German and GPS variants of the Console. So pretty much a recycled release from two viewpoints. Pretty cool what you have there though mate!

But what about the Gameboy and the SNES? Can you also hit me up on the ad I posted earlier, I reckon must have come from the one of the distributors in the countries mentioned. Also you seem to have some precious information regarding Israel, which is technically a part of the Middle East? Do you also have an archive of the seller you talked to and his reply for reference?

Dude that is spot on. This pretty much covers most of my curiosities regarding the NES in that region.

So now we can conclude that this was one out of the dozen other regions that have had their NES beaten by a low quality bootleg Chinese rip-off. Oh well, I guess price was key at the time and I'm still not ruling out the possibility that the NES was one of the Nintendo consoles officially released in there.

Here's a box art that belongs to a SNES GPS game, in this case Wario's Woods (SNSP-65-GPS). I'm not going to turn this discussion to one referring wholly to the GPS code, but again it is highly likely that it was imported to this region. As we can see here this is taken from the German cover (which in turn borrows many elements from the North American one) complete with a column on the bottom referring to the origin of the product (Grossostheim (old address for European headquarters it is now based in Frankfurt), Germany, Nintendo Of Europe, and CE label). Note that everything in the package is in English, including documentation. So just for reference, I'm going to put up a list of all the countries were GPS consoles and games are known to my knowledge to have happened to be distributed in some way or form. It is most likely missing a few, as it is partly based on recent findings. In Europe: *Portugal *Italy (Some cases) *Croatia *Greece *Netherlands (Very minimal instances. A number of them though were said to have been imported, officially or not I do not know. There were copies of the NES game Mario and Yoshi that had this labelling with black and white dutch/french manual and was known to have been sold in this country by the official distributor (Bandai). Own code = HOL or FAH, shared with France. ) *Spain (Again very rare instances where they would just slap in a cheap manual of the countries native language, own code ESP, which most games used). *Sweden and Scandinavia (Same story as previous two territories, own code SCN) Outside of Europe *Australia (Perhaps for one games only, Killer Instinct for the SNES. It is known that the firm Novagroup were in contact with Nintendo Europe to import some of their games into here, which is quite odd considering: A. that the Australian base for Nintendo has been in operation from 1993 and that B. some European games were already being imported by them. Oddly from the looks of it it does not seem to even bear the rating system for the country at the time. That and GPS Game Boy systems are the only two European related items known to have been imported by Nova Group however I think that it is very likely that there are more distributed by them.) *South Africa (A variant of this code was released for the NES which bears SAF coding. All games, including for other consoles, were GPS though.) *Egypt (although I'm not so sure about this one) *Israel *Middle East/Gulf regions (Presumably) Do hit me up if I'm obviously missing a few.

It is highly likely that they must have also used GPS cartridges for the SNES (and maybe even Game Boy). Thing is, no one knows what this code might suggest, however, what I do know is that this code was used for PAL regions that have a very minimal market for games, some outside of Europe, like in the Middle East. In other words, regions that Nintendo did not care very much about. A very specific number of games used this code, mainly games from Nintendo (AFAIK some Konami ones too, eg. Prince of Persia). They are very rare. Here's an example of a GPS cart: It can be certain that Soccer Shootout was one of the very few games that got that treatment now. Now, I can nearly be fully sure that SNES was released in that region. Still many questions in my mind though!

Let me start off in saying that I am a collector who is also interested in knowing about gaming in the lesser known areas of the world. I am now looking at the Middle East. However, info is surprisingly scarce, and I need help knowing about Nintendo in that region from say, early 1980's till the late 90's. I did find some valuable info, although very little. Question is what HAVE I found? So upon trying to do some research about the matter that we are talking about, I came across THIS! It's meh, it isn't much, but at least it's something Well now we now that Game Boy was at least released there. Question is, who released it? So here's what I think. My guess is that it was maybe distributed from the UAE by Itochu (what I do know is that they certainly did carry out this job from 1997 till 1998, short break from that year until Nintendo Japan decided to carry out distribution themselves to the Middle East from 2000, I have some sources if you want!) so that's some good info to keep going? Need more info though. So just to recap, I want to know: 1. The distributor(s) involved? 2. A brief history/the beginnings of Nintendo in this area (was the NES actually released in the UAE/Gulf regions?). 3. The fate of their entry into market (failures by clones, etc.) 4. Some more ads hopefully? (I'm a sucker for promotion of old consoles) Thank you and See ya!