I'm not a gamer, neither have I ever owned or any Nintendo product. But THIS is the kind of community dedication I adore and love! :) P.S.: Working at a company who curates a database for collector's items maaaaaaaay be a reason too. ;)
@@Mrjcowman Well, NTSC is pretty much just North America and Japan. (Also some of South America.) NTSC games mostly only come in English and Japanese (and sometimes Mexican Spanish or Canadian French.)
@@m2pt5 What about Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean? Are they currently NTSC or PAL??? (I *_do_* know here that they used to be PAL, but I'm not sure here if any of them switched to the NTSC region or remained in the PAL region to this very day - particularly for Mexico, as it has had a free-trade agreement of some kind with the U.S. and Canada since 1995.)
@@StevenVillman Chilean here. We had a mess with games. We used NTSC because consoles came from the US (and labeled as American (for us, America is the whole continent)) and the games were mainly NTSC. If the console is not region locked, you may find some PAL. But, why? NTSC versions were mainly in English, because they pretty much ignore that mostly of the rest of the continent speaks Spanish. So if you wanted to play, you're limited to a NTSC console and NTSC English games, or for region unlock PAL Spanish games. But Spanish versions were uncommon until multilanguage games.
I used to think the triangles were like a "this is an official Nintendo licenced product" thing, until I bought an Australian copy of Mario Sunshine which has a brown triangle. I wanted to know why that one was brown and the rest green. Then after researching it, I slapped my head because how did I not realise that the Mario Sunshine I got was Australian? It literally has the word "Australia" all over the box!
I've always been fascinated with these triangles, for some reason My triangles are all green, because I live in Ireland and there's no reason to make it a different colour because we also speak English. It's a pity we can't be unique, but it makes sense
I love how "Jon Cartwright" this video is. It's a weird way of describing it, but what I'm really saying is I'm happy the GVG crew finally has the creative freedom to make the crazy variety of videos they want to produce on the channel. I also really enjoy how Derrick has also been able to dive into more history/retrospectives and Steve has used the channel as a way to advertise new tech and reviews. These types of video just wouldn't be approved if they were still working with GameXplain or NintendoLife because of those channels' news-focused agendas.
@@robbertlw9610 NintendoLife is a fantastic channel and I love the videos that Alex, Zion, and Felix produce. Additionally, their website is a really great place to read fun articles. But most things they do are tied to the Nintendo brand and usually they have to keep pace with the news and game release schedule, which doesn't leave the most time for personal creative projects. The NL website & channel is actually my primary source for gaming news because they do such a fantastic job at covering stories. I don't think NL was holding Jon back but it did limit his ability to cover other spheres of gaming which he can do on the GVG channel. The GVG crew has always had strong ties to Nintendo but they are so much more than Nintendo gamers. GVG projects also don't feel catered to any company's release schedule or are not constrained by deadlines, which is a nice change of pace.
We do have triangles though, they're brown. They're either on the spine like with GamCube and some DS games or on the bottom left hand corner on the back like with Wii, Switch and the other DS games. Those the only ones I've got for reference.
Meanwhile here in Germany, the rating is so big that on the boxes of Super Mario 3D All-Stars and TLo Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, they had to move the game logo a bit to the right😂
I think it's a good idea but you know there are some maniacs out there who will sort their games by age ratings so the colours match. One day lent my collection of assassination's classroom to a friend and she sorted them by colour, so basically each volume was on a different shelf...
Also a Dutch person: most of my games have that sky blue triangle as well, but some of them have an orange one. These feature both Dutch and French, which is probably useful to sell in the Benelux in order to save money. I got a couple that also have a brown triangle; those feature Dutch, French AND German. And dark green triangles too, those have Dutch, French, German AND English. Some Pokémon games in the GBA era feature a light pink color, and those only feature Dutch and English. Speaking of the GBA era, they actually have DO feature the regional color on the box itself too, but not only is it not a triangle (it's a square), but they're also well-hidden: namely, on one of the small flaps when opening the box. I presume it's the same with Game Boy/Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64, SNES and even the NES. It probably wouldn't have been handy if they invented a whole color system to distinguish the packaging for each region, but don't do that at all with the box itself until the GameCube era. Of course they're hidden on the box flaps because those are things that a regular customer doesn't need to see; but because game manuals and plastic cases don't actually HAVE any flaps, they're made triangles and moved elsewhere: a page corner on the manual, or the spine on the game case.
Interesting! I'm from Switzerland and we also tend to have multilanguages boxes with german, french and italian. On the Switch, the triangle is usually purple or violet for Nintendo games. Third party games have sometimes other colors. But we also have some weird things on a few games. For example, Kirby and the forgotten land has the title in german on the front (Kirby und das vergessene Land) but the description on the back is in both german, french and italian. For Hyrule Warriors, it's even weirder. The title on the front is written 3 times, in those 3 languages. How is it in the Netherlands and Belgium for those games?
I've got a few PAL games in my collection, and never actually noticed the triangles until this video popped up in my recommended. Now I honestly want to start collecting the triangles.
Glad I'm not the only person who wondered this. A few months ago, I was struck by the realisation that having multiple languages on one ROM is a relatively new concept to Americans, but it's something I've always taken for granted.
New? I guess, but I've expected language settings in my games since they started going on disks. It's very common over here, too. Has been for years. I distinctly remember laughing about the French VO of the first Harry Potter game with my sister. Although, I played that on PC, so I guess that's much more to be expected.
I would just like to point out that most games in europe weren't multilingual until the GBC, in most cases if they had a localization that localization had its own rom. Even the original link's awakening had 3 separate releases (English, French, and German) in Europe with only the Oracle sequels actually shipping with 5 languages (the previous 3 plus Italian and Spanish) on the same cart. Many other early games simply didn't have any localization outside of the packaging and manuals at all, and played in English. Only big markets like Germany or France would get translated games with any regularity until about the 1995.
I'm from the US, and obviously we don't have the triangles, but this is something I never really knew about! It's really cool and makes sense. Personally I'd hate to have all those colored triangles on my game spines but at the same time it does give a collection a unique look too it.
Gamecube games in Australia is in a unique situation where it was in the middle of our rating laws getting a complete overhaul. So for early games like Mario Party 4 and 5, we used Brown triangles like in Europe. Then with Mario party 6 and 7 we ditched the triangles and just used the newly updated age rating labels. We kept doing it like this with the wii and wii u, however the switch mostly abandoned the side age rating labels. Probably due to the small case size, but wiredly enough ubisoft and sega games still do it. which makes them stick out like a sore thumb.
I'm from Austria and until 2020 we had a red triangle. The box was basically identical to the german one but instead of the usk-symbol we had the much smaller pegi-symbol. I always said this is the perfect german version of a nintendo game. But in 2020 Nintendo probably thought that Austria isn't big enough for its own region and so every game since then is the switzerland version. The problem now is that every game i buy has 3 languages on the back so most of the times more then half of the box is covered with warnings. So now there isn't a perfect german box anymore D: .
I'm Australian - I just looked through my game / manual collection and it looks like while everything past the DS shows an age rating on the box, our NES, gameboy and GBA manuals have a dark brown triangle on them
Thank you for this. I'm from Luxembourg and have a mix of German, French, Belgian, UK and international triangles, and the distribution had always seemed so random.
I'm Finnish and my triangles are all over the place. The Nordic greenish yellow is pretty common in my Switch games, but only have a few of them among Wii, DS and 3DS games and the Gamecube triangles are mostly darkish green. Another common color is dark maroon, which might be the Finland specific box since those usually prioritize the Finnish language in manuals and the back of the box. That color's no longer present in the Switch boxes though, so I wonder if there's no longer a separate version for us apart from the Nordic one. I also have a couple purple ones that seem to be the Swedish release.
The art being in a black void i actually personally like, it prevents the art from touching any text which allows you to perfectly cut it out if you ever wanted that. Plus its just nostalgic as heck
Ah, Jon, you always know how to tickle my curiosity. It's a background-mystery I was waiting for to be solved for years now. Thanks for supplying us with the missing puzzlepiece!
Since I'm from Norway, I SHOULD be getting all those nice yellow nacho's because those have Norwegian, Swedish and Danish on the box. BUT since Scandinavians tend to be pretty adept at English, they sometimes just give us the English box. So I have a mixture with UK Green Triangles on my boxes too. (As well as some special Purple editions, but that was expected) I haven't checked or tested this thoroughly yet, but it seems that games with higher age ratings tend to not get at Yellow triangle. I suspect it has to do with kids not being expected to be able to properly read English at those ages. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's coincidental that all my Pokemon games have a yellow triangle while Zelda and Fire Emblem are green.
I live in Norway too, and my copy of Bayonetta 1+2 has a yellow triangle, so I don't really think the age rating is the explanation. My copies of Xenoblade 2, 3 and Fire Emblem Three Houses also have a yellow triangle. My copy of XCDE doesn't have a yellow triangle as I got a copy which came with the collector's set, but I know that yellow triangle copies exist as I bought one not too long ago for a friend. My 3DS Fire Emblem games (Awakening and Echoes) and all of my 3DS Zelda games apart from Majora's Mask 3D have a green triangle. My copy of Yo-Kai Watch 1 has a yellow triangle, but Psychic Spectres and 3 have a green triangle. All of my 3DS Pokemon games, apart from Y have a yellow triangle. I have the new 3DS version of Xenoblade Chronicles and surprisingly enough, my copy has a yellow triangle.
@@duskvortex Interesting... Only working theory I have now is that it might be related to the localization budget or something like that, but I have absolutely no clue.
I have Dead or Alive Dimensions which was apparently banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, so the back has only Finnish and Swedish text (because Finland is bilingual) and it has a purple triangle.
You forgot Finnish, the yellowish green one is for Swedish/Danish/Norwegian/Finnish. I have an old Emerald game with the trainer guide being only in Swedish and Danish (even though it was purchased in Finland), making the triangle purple.
As someone from Germany, like you mentioned in the video, pretty much all my boxes have the purple or burgundy triangle. But there are three exceptions to this rule: - My copy of Nintendo Land (which was included with my black color Wii U) has a red triangle, but doesn't seem to have any limitation to the languages on the back - The Labo Toy-Con 04 cartridge (aka the Labo VR game) doesn't have any triangle; yet it is Europe-Specific with all the languages on it; specifically mentioning Nintendo of Europe on the back - My Copy of Nintendogs has a torquoise/blue color triangle for some reason. Seems to have only German, English, French and Dutch on the back
I’m from Tennessee, USA, and we have no triangles as you mentioned lol. I literally had no idea European games had those triangles, and I literally thought for half the video that this was gonna be a big joke. Having all those different colors on my shelf would drive me crazy 😅
What drives me crazy is that all my EU switch games have the text on the spine centered. My USA and Asia games look better as the text starts at the very top of the case, nice and consistent.
Ya glad I found out about this Some of them steelbooks and other neat things Nintendo only gives them are really cool and I want them but finding out about the squares I'm alot less inclined to import them here lol the triangles would ruin everything lol Im also from tennis sea USA Editor me here: I guess I misclicked a letter or 2 when writing "Tennessee" so it thought I said " tennis sea" and that is really funny
Fun fact about Australian ones. The coloured triangles were dropped after the classification board redesigned the age classification in 2005 giving each rating a specific colour which explains why they don't appear on australian boxes for DS, Wii, 3DS, WiiU or Switch but before that on NES, SNES, GB, GBA, N64 and gamecube they did have the coloured triangles. They were brown
I've been wondering about this for years!! All this time I thought it had to do with the age rating or genre or something. Thank you for getting to the bottom of this!
I'm from Portugal and yes, most cases have the yellow triangle with Portuguese and Spanish text on it! Except for rare exceptions like SMT 3 Nocturne, which has English, French and German on the back and is purple labeled! I'm living in the UK now so a lot of my labels are also green but up until now I never really thought about what the colors meant. So interesting!
In Australia actually, we have a brown triangle. On GameCube spines there is a brown triangle but in 2006 we started getting the age ratings. Now, the brown triangle is on the lower left side of the back of the case.
I am from the Netherlands so i mainly have blue triangles but i do have a lot of french and spanish games as everytime i go on vacation i buy some games there.
This had me scratching my chin for a while when I put my Nintendo titles on their current shelf, but I never bothered looking any further into it. Thank you for doing the leg work and answering that curiosity!
Im italian but I got xenoblade 3 while I was in Spain on vacation. I completely forgot the triangles so now X1D, X2 and XX have blue triangles except X3 which has a pink triangle
I'm from Spain and all of my first party Switch games have a yellow triangle, that applies to both Spain and Portugal, and the boxes are in both languages; one third party game has a pink one ,exclusive to Spain and with box in Spanish; and another third party title has a green one, since it was imported from the UK and thus it's only in English. Seeing from the other Spanish person in your video how older Wii games used to have the "Spain only" pink I think that maybe on their jump to the Switch Nintendo decided to homogenise distribution for both Portugal and Spain. Also I think all switch cartridges in Europe (not the cover, the cartridges) have an age rating printed in German.
These kinds of videos are exactly the reasons why I love Good Vibes Gaming. Plus, as a french guy, listening to Jon trying to read the translation of the DQ title was very, very funny.
Australia does have a colour! It's burgundy, but for some reason it's not in the same spot as everyone else. On the back, on the bottom left, there's a small (sometimes *very* small) burgundy triangle, and all these games were made in Japan but imported to Australia. However, I also have a few DS games (purchased here, with Australian ratings and everything) that were made in the EU. One of them even has a hastily applied Aus rating sticker over what must have been the PEGI rating - and these few have green stickers. It seems like some time in the mid-2000s Nintendo Australia moved from importing some games from Europe to importing everything from Japan.
I'm Dutch and over half of my Nintendo DS boxes are orange. Light blue and green is also a common colour; one or two of them are lavender. Nowadays I buy most my games online because they're cheaper there, so my Switch games have more variety. Thank you for solving a childhood mystery.
I'm from Brazil and usually import PAL games because they're cheaper but, stangely enough, it's always copies from the UK that get sent here so it's all green triangles for me
4:19 considering that that BBFC "U" logo is also very blue, it might just be a case of the spines getting sunbleached while the front covers remain safe snug on a tightly packed shelf
In Australia the Gamecube cases actually did have the triangles (it was a dark brown colour), but they seem to have done away with them from the Wii onwards.
Thank you for teaching me for what these dang triangles finally were 😄. I'm from The Netherlands and from what i can tell based on what i have, most of them have a light blue triangle. But still a little mix of other colors as well.
I always hated these triangles because I have a mix of french and british games as well as how the triangles keep flipping sides for no reason, they all stick out and don’t fit a pattern at all.
Thank you for clearing up that mystery Jon!! As a Brit i had always wondered what those curious triangles were about and my theory about a multi-colored Triforce in Europe was wrong all along!
In Australia we also have triangles, but it's usually on the back of the box rather than on the spine, and they're brown. Most of my games are like this, but my copy of Oninaki is European and has the triangle on the spine (I'll have to check for the triangle color later) and my copy of Fate/Extella Link is American making it the only game in my collection without one. I can only really speak for 3DS and Switch games though.
I bought a copy of Sega Megadrive Classics while I was visiting Greece earlier this year, and it has a yellow triangle! I actually hadn’t noticed until seeing this video that it had a triangle, since I’m from the US. Super cool!
I can’t believe I’ve been “collecting” (very casually) Nintendo games for 10 years and didn’t even know these triangles existed! I’m in Canada and pretty much exclusively buy my games locally so it makes sense I’ve never seen them but still I feel like I should’ve known
6:50 - Nintendo games in Greece are now distributed by a new company, cdmedia, as of a few years ago. They use the UKV (Green triangle) packaging in UK English (the boxes aren't translated) 😞. I was looking forward to picking up Splatoon 3 to add a new triangle to my collection, but alas...
I bought a copy of Kirby Super Star Ultra from Greece earlier this year, it had all of the Nortec packaging, stickers and documents but it had a green triangle!
I've always wondered what these triangles from game covers mean, and I didn't bother to Google it as in my head I might sound crazy if I did. Thanks for bringing this up
Great video! This triangle thing is very confusing and since Nintendo tend to change the rules every generation of consoles, it becomes even more confusing. I don't remember how it was earlier but on Switch, we have the triangles but we also have a country code on the back. Those codes are usually obvious and indicate clearly the country. I'm from Switzerland and the code for Nintendo games is GFI which stands for German French Italian. Third party games have others codes sometimes. I also have some games with the code FRA for France or GER for Germany. But I also have games with the code GEP. The box is in german but it has the european PEGI rating instead of the ugly german USK, so I guess it's meant for Austria. But why GEP? The age rating system can be also confusing. Despite not being in the EU, countries like Switzerland and Norway use the european PEGI system, but Germany use its own USK system with the big ugly logo. Sometimes, they even need to move the title in order to let the logo fit in.
Cing archivist here, thanks for displaying Last Window and Another Code:R, and thanks for this video. My Hotel Dusk copy from Spain has a brownish triangle.
"Belgium has a similar colour to the Netherlands and Switzerland has a similar colour to France that's weird" woah it's almost like parts of those countries share languages with the others or something. (in all seriousness, really cool video!)
@@adamunown The Netherlands and Belgium have the Dutch language in common, I think that's why they share the blue colour. Perhaps the French language copies in Belgium share the same red/pink colour with the ones from France, but I haven't found any. But in the end it doesn't really matter because most Belgians play their games in English anyhow.
@@TheTepelsteeltje I feel like an idiot, I didn't realise there were so many common languages in Belgium, I thought they mostly spoke French. Thanks for the knowledge.
@@adamunown Games with blue triangles are sold in the northern part of Belgium, games with pink triangles are sold in the southern part of Belgium. This essentially splits the second hand market in half, if you care about the language of the boxes. Really annoying!
This is the exact kind of topic I was curious about for the past decade but was so relatively forgettable that I never researched it. Thankful that someone else has. 3:20 Also worth highlighting that the burgundy triangle, alongside being on special editions and bundles, is also often featured on games designed to be sold with accessories. So any game that comes with a wheel, toys to life pad, dance mat, or exercise equipment should also have that triangle. I initially assumed it was just games with accessories, until I noticed the similarly coloured triangle on my 3DS version of Disney Planes Fire & Rescue (says it was assembled in the E.U. instead of in Germany like my other UK 3DS games). Yet all images I can find of the box had a green triangle, only leading to wonder of which universe this one came from.
Now I wonder what triangle the Age of Calamity box in switzerland has, since that one had very special packaging since it needed the title in French, German and Italian
It's purple. Switzerland is a little bit of an odd region, triangle-wise. Purple is for packaging in german, french and italian. Burgundy, is for german only packaging, but without the USK-rating. So this is probably for the german-speaking part of Switzerland and Austria. Blue is also very common, which is the german version with the USK-rating. Meaning this is the proper version from Germany. Pink is the french version, which is probably not only for the french-speaking part of Switzerland but for France and other (partly) french-speaking countries aswell. The only thing left should be italian only packaging, but unfortunately I don't think I own one of these.
This was the first video of yours I've seen and I instantly subscribed. Which I do very, very rarely. Also, I liked that you have a German DS Game sold by momox for some reason (probably because I also have bought many games there).
From Finland, I've got mostly green with some green-ish yellow, and a handful of purple games, plus one single blue 3DS game. I've also got two US DS games that were never released in Europe (both editions of 999), so they don't have the triangles.
2:43 I mean, Gen 1 was literally at the cartridge size limit in Japanese. They couldn't be multilingual even if they wanted to be. Game Freak are amazing developers.
I have Professor Layton and the curious village, has a dark purple triangle. But the box language is English and manual are in English. The warning and one word on the manual (Speilanleitung) are in German. I had never noticed this detail until this video. Cheers man.
Thank you for this. I have a couple of European imports and I always found this interesting. Australian games usually don't have this, but on the odd occasion we just get the same as what Europe gets so this is fascinating to me.
We do actually. On the back of Australian boxes we have a brown triangle for our region. For a while we did have many stores who sold the European versions too. I have many with different colours on in my collection! It's also how you can tell if a game was only released in a certain country too because the colour trangle will be from that one region only. (Like snowboard kids 2 - it has a brown triangle on the booklet on the majorty of second hand copies because they only released it in Australia in English.)
@@meikahidenori I LITERALLY NOTICED THIS LIKE YESTERDAY LMAO I FORGOT I POSTED THIS COMMENT, wild I never noticed until now. Yeah it's super interesting stuff
I'm pretty sure those Wii games with blue triangles were green originally but have just faded/yellowed over time. Epic Mickey 2 has the U rating which is supposed to be green but shows up as blue on the spine so I imagine the green triangle would fade to blue in the same way. That would also explain why they use bbfc ratings which only exist in the UK as far as I'm aware.
I think you meant to say ‘can speak English’, because when you said that around 93% of people in the Netherlands can’t speak English, I nearly choked on my drink because that can’t possibly be true. A quick Google search later and about 90-93% of Dutch people speak English as a second language. Which isn’t that weird considering I first got taught English in high school. It is also a mandatory class that you can’t drop (unlike German and French). Most courses will also teach it (aside from courses focused on a different language I would assume), you really can’t escape it. Shows (aside from cartoons for kids, because they haven’t learned English in school yet) aren’t translated from their original language, instead they’re subtitled. This also helps in keeping that percentage high. Edit: caught an autocorrect error
I clicked this video honestly expecting some sort of Mandela effect thing to suddenly make me aware all my Nintendo games had triangles on the spine that I'd never seen before. Glad to know I'm just American.
I'm a fellow filthy PAL gamer in NZ and the latest Nintendo console I have triangles on is the GameCube, so I think it stopped when Australia started putting the age ratings on the spine of film and game cases (they share the same ratings) in the mid 2000's, as the triangles would get in the way of the age rating
Being from the us, we don’t have any triangles, but I thought I might as well share something a little odd about our boxes. In America there is only English on the box, but in Canada they have French and English. That is not too out of the ordinary, the us is mostly monolingual, and Canada is bilingual, but sometimes here (often enough to not be just a one time thing) you will find a Canadian version brand new on store shelves. Like, they literally shipped the Canadian version of the game to the US, although I do live a little close to the boarder, so they could be doing this because it is the same game just with the box having French text, and sending the normal us version over the country. Not the best comparison, but it’s like seeing the French version of a game on sale in the UK, how did it get there?
I’m from the States of America and I sometimes buy games from Amazon and they send me imports. The two only European games I have green triangles. Something weird I’ve noticed is that all the games have unified title in the same font and same spacing in their spine; however Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is literally just its logo in white. Oh and on the US the text for the spine is on the left side and not the middle if y’all are wondering. :)
Thats seems also mostly be a region thing. From what I saw in my collection all games I bought in my own country (Germany) have a unified look with text in the middle (and the triangle below the publisher logo at the bottom) and everything from outside europe (bought through Limited Run Games, Play-Asia, Japan in general) has a left-sided Game Logo. I dont have any Switch Game with a Game-Logo, though... but this practices seemed to be pretty random with the Wii and Wii U, which always drives me crazy. Even some Nintendo developed games suddenly opted for logos instead of the unified text.
@@Rosa_Canina Oh yeah, I’ve definitely noticed that in the Wii & Wii U area. Splatoon had a very bland font, while Mario Kart 8 & Super Mario 3D World have a font that fits their game but isn’t their logo. As far as I know, there is only one other game that used a logo in the Switch library instead of some text and that is early production copies of Super Bomberman R. I think they fixed em’, however most copies made in (at least here in the states) from 2016-2018ish should still have their logo instead of text.
I wonder if the triangles might be used by Nintendo to not only identify where games are supposed to go but also to identify instances where games intended for one market are being sold (without permission) in another market.
I'm pretty sure that by just watching this video, i suddenly got swapped over from my parallel-universe where there never were triangles on Nintendo games - suddenly they're everywhere!
Switzerland is a special case, it's really weird. Sometimes, we have version with all 3 native langues (French, German, Italian) right on the title of the box (which is very ugly sometimes) and some other times we simply have the German, French or Italian version (depending of the region the game is sell on)
just randomly happened to find this video, watched it, got curious and decided to check my DS and Switch games. for context, I'm in the Netherlands and most of my games were bought either first-hand or secondhand at Dutch game stores. most of my games have either the [NL] blue or the [NL/FR] orange, but I noticed a few outliers: - my copy of Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship 2007 has the dark pink triangle and has text in English and Dutch. I got this game secondhand at a Dutch game store and have never seen the Dutch/English text combo on other games, only on this one. the SEGARetro page mentions this combination but doesn't have an image of the pink; I can confirm that it is the same as the dark pink listed for the entirety of western Europe at the top of the list. - my copy of Yoshi's Island DS has the crimson/burgundy triangle and has text in German, French and Dutch. interestingly, the DE/FR/NL text combination with crimson triangle is listed on the SEGARetro page as "to be confirmed". I can confirm it exists! - my copy of Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has the green triangle and text in English. I got this game in England, so that makes sense. - and I was about to mention my copy of Pokemon Platinum which has no triangle and call it a misprint, but I just realized it's an import from Canada (the text on the back is English and French, and the game has an ESRB rating rather than a PEGI rating). I'm sure I knew that when I bought it but just forgot until now.
I'm from the US (otherwise known as The Land Without Triangles) but I've somehow ended up with a UK version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with a green triangle. That doesn't bother me, but what DOES bug me is that the text is in center rather than left justified! Oh well. At least it's never hard to find Mario Kart.
The triangles are some times inconsistent. Speed kings FAH for the gamecube has a a light purple pinkish triangle while the normal FAH triangle is orange for example. Considering that the louvre tour UKV release was not meant to be shipped to the UK but rather to France it would make sense that they didn't use a blue triangle since that could potentially mess things up.
The NintenDaan discord has been hard at work documenting every triangle
t.co/19NcTVsTr1
Seeing you pull out Puyo Pop Fever made me smile. :-)
Where can I join this discord?
I'm not a gamer, neither have I ever owned or any Nintendo product. But THIS is the kind of community dedication I adore and love! :)
P.S.: Working at a company who curates a database for collector's items maaaaaaaay be a reason too. ;)
Hey there is a black tri angele on turkish wii games mine black tri angele games epic mikey 2 and çata 2
Nintendo truly had a Triangle Strategy since the very beginning.
Ahaaaaa... haha. >:(
I hope that game will also get a PC port like octopath.
But Nintendo would be smarter if they wouldn't let that happen.
@@gamin9wizard945 Triangle Strategy is getting a pc port in a few weeks. It's even got a preorder page on steam, same with Octopath II.
They just wanna give our boxes a various daylife with these different colours
I spat my tea reading this!
This was the best video about triangles
copyrighted triangles
Checked my US boxes and found out they come with invisible triangles 😳🤯
Hey same! I guess they decided NTSC needed no label
@@Mrjcowman Well, NTSC is pretty much just North America and Japan. (Also some of South America.) NTSC games mostly only come in English and Japanese (and sometimes Mexican Spanish or Canadian French.)
@@m2pt5 What about Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean? Are they currently NTSC or PAL??? (I *_do_* know here that they used to be PAL, but I'm not sure here if any of them switched to the NTSC region or remained in the PAL region to this very day - particularly for Mexico, as it has had a free-trade agreement of some kind with the U.S. and Canada since 1995.)
Transparent triangles for the transatlantic region.
@@StevenVillman Chilean here. We had a mess with games. We used NTSC because consoles came from the US (and labeled as American (for us, America is the whole continent)) and the games were mainly NTSC. If the console is not region locked, you may find some PAL. But, why?
NTSC versions were mainly in English, because they pretty much ignore that mostly of the rest of the continent speaks Spanish. So if you wanted to play, you're limited to a NTSC console and NTSC English games, or for region unlock PAL Spanish games.
But Spanish versions were uncommon until multilanguage games.
I used to think the triangles were like a "this is an official Nintendo licenced product" thing, until I bought an Australian copy of Mario Sunshine which has a brown triangle. I wanted to know why that one was brown and the rest green. Then after researching it, I slapped my head because how did I not realise that the Mario Sunshine I got was Australian? It literally has the word "Australia" all over the box!
I've always been fascinated with these triangles, for some reason
My triangles are all green, because I live in Ireland and there's no reason to make it a different colour because we also speak English. It's a pity we can't be unique, but it makes sense
Why, I oughta reckon that y'all like havin' green, even be it the same as the British ones.
It's actually green for Ireland, the UK just stole it
Most of mine are green but some are pink
Irish too! Yeah I wish we had our own colour lol
Ireland here too and I agree lol
I love how "Jon Cartwright" this video is. It's a weird way of describing it, but what I'm really saying is I'm happy the GVG crew finally has the creative freedom to make the crazy variety of videos they want to produce on the channel. I also really enjoy how Derrick has also been able to dive into more history/retrospectives and Steve has used the channel as a way to advertise new tech and reviews. These types of video just wouldn't be approved if they were still working with GameXplain or NintendoLife because of those channels' news-focused agendas.
Nintendo Life is similar, but they do alot more videos like Good Vibes Gaming too!
Jon has a great sense of humor
I disagree. Nintendo Life does stuff like this too! I really recommend watching them!
@@robbertlw9610 NintendoLife is a fantastic channel and I love the videos that Alex, Zion, and Felix produce. Additionally, their website is a really great place to read fun articles. But most things they do are tied to the Nintendo brand and usually they have to keep pace with the news and game release schedule, which doesn't leave the most time for personal creative projects. The NL website & channel is actually my primary source for gaming news because they do such a fantastic job at covering stories.
I don't think NL was holding Jon back but it did limit his ability to cover other spheres of gaming which he can do on the GVG channel. The GVG crew has always had strong ties to Nintendo but they are so much more than Nintendo gamers. GVG projects also don't feel catered to any company's release schedule or are not constrained by deadlines, which is a nice change of pace.
I knew before clicking this it was gonna be a jon video lol
Honestly I like how Australia and Japan both put their ratings on the spines. I wish more regions did that.
DVDs sold in the UK & Ireland have two age ratings on their spines: one from the BBFC and one from IFCO.
We do have triangles though, they're brown.
They're either on the spine like with GamCube and some DS games or on the bottom left hand corner on the back like with Wii, Switch and the other DS games.
Those the only ones I've got for reference.
Meanwhile here in Germany, the rating is so big that on the boxes of Super Mario 3D All-Stars and TLo Zelda: Skyward Sword HD, they had to move the game logo a bit to the right😂
esrb on the spine really and in Japan they do have ratings on the spines but for PlayStation
I think it's a good idea but you know there are some maniacs out there who will sort their games by age ratings so the colours match.
One day lent my collection of assassination's classroom to a friend and she sorted them by colour, so basically each volume was on a different shelf...
"I HATE SHAPES!" -Scott the Woz
Jon having fun with an obscure side of video games is the best kind of content. Keep at it, king.
I never knew these triangles existed. I haven't really looked at foreign box art outside the U.S. Definitely interesting.
Now I will look at all my games including the original Gameboy and take note of these mysterious triangles lol
Also a Dutch person: most of my games have that sky blue triangle as well, but some of them have an orange one. These feature both Dutch and French, which is probably useful to sell in the Benelux in order to save money. I got a couple that also have a brown triangle; those feature Dutch, French AND German. And dark green triangles too, those have Dutch, French, German AND English. Some Pokémon games in the GBA era feature a light pink color, and those only feature Dutch and English.
Speaking of the GBA era, they actually have DO feature the regional color on the box itself too, but not only is it not a triangle (it's a square), but they're also well-hidden: namely, on one of the small flaps when opening the box. I presume it's the same with Game Boy/Game Boy Color, Nintendo 64, SNES and even the NES. It probably wouldn't have been handy if they invented a whole color system to distinguish the packaging for each region, but don't do that at all with the box itself until the GameCube era. Of course they're hidden on the box flaps because those are things that a regular customer doesn't need to see; but because game manuals and plastic cases don't actually HAVE any flaps, they're made triangles and moved elsewhere: a page corner on the manual, or the spine on the game case.
Interesting! I'm from Switzerland and we also tend to have multilanguages boxes with german, french and italian. On the Switch, the triangle is usually purple or violet for Nintendo games. Third party games have sometimes other colors.
But we also have some weird things on a few games. For example, Kirby and the forgotten land has the title in german on the front (Kirby und das vergessene Land) but the description on the back is in both german, french and italian. For Hyrule Warriors, it's even weirder. The title on the front is written 3 times, in those 3 languages.
How is it in the Netherlands and Belgium for those games?
I've got a few PAL games in my collection, and never actually noticed the triangles until this video popped up in my recommended. Now I honestly want to start collecting the triangles.
Glad I'm not the only person who wondered this.
A few months ago, I was struck by the realisation that having multiple languages on one ROM is a relatively new concept to Americans, but it's something I've always taken for granted.
New? I guess, but I've expected language settings in my games since they started going on disks. It's very common over here, too. Has been for years.
I distinctly remember laughing about the French VO of the first Harry Potter game with my sister. Although, I played that on PC, so I guess that's much more to be expected.
I would just like to point out that most games in europe weren't multilingual until the GBC, in most cases if they had a localization that localization had its own rom. Even the original link's awakening had 3 separate releases (English, French, and German) in Europe with only the Oracle sequels actually shipping with 5 languages (the previous 3 plus Italian and Spanish) on the same cart.
Many other early games simply didn't have any localization outside of the packaging and manuals at all, and played in English. Only big markets like Germany or France would get translated games with any regularity until about the 1995.
I'm from the US, and obviously we don't have the triangles, but this is something I never really knew about! It's really cool and makes sense. Personally I'd hate to have all those colored triangles on my game spines but at the same time it does give a collection a unique look too it.
In my collection in Australia we've had games released with the green, brown & burgundy triangles.
Gamecube games in Australia is in a unique situation where it was in the middle of our rating laws getting a complete overhaul.
So for early games like Mario Party 4 and 5, we used Brown triangles like in Europe. Then with Mario party 6 and 7 we ditched the triangles and just used the newly updated age rating labels.
We kept doing it like this with the wii and wii u, however the switch mostly abandoned the side age rating labels. Probably due to the small case size, but wiredly enough ubisoft and sega games still do it. which makes them stick out like a sore thumb.
was every GC game never been printed in Australia
I'm from Austria and until 2020 we had a red triangle. The box was basically identical to the german one but instead of the usk-symbol we had the much smaller pegi-symbol. I always said this is the perfect german version of a nintendo game. But in 2020 Nintendo probably thought that Austria isn't big enough for its own region and so every game since then is the switzerland version. The problem now is that every game i buy has 3 languages on the back so most of the times more then half of the box is covered with warnings. So now there isn't a perfect german box anymore D: .
I'm Australian - I just looked through my game / manual collection and it looks like while everything past the DS shows an age rating on the box, our NES, gameboy and GBA manuals have a dark brown triangle on them
The triangle is also on the bottom left on the back of the box
@@Johntrampoline wow it is too, never noticed that
@@Johntrampoline Holy crap, i cannot unsee it now.
This is some Scott the Woz level content.
Not even close. Scott says “hey all,” Jon said “hey everyone.” That’s completely different
oh god scott has more wiiu games to collect
Hey All, John here
Cept Scott hates European boxes, the naughty little xenophobe.
Jon isn't psychotic over Madden or blue borders, just triangles and tea, probably.
Thank you for this. I'm from Luxembourg and have a mix of German, French, Belgian, UK and international triangles, and the distribution had always seemed so random.
I'm Finnish and my triangles are all over the place. The Nordic greenish yellow is pretty common in my Switch games, but only have a few of them among Wii, DS and 3DS games and the Gamecube triangles are mostly darkish green. Another common color is dark maroon, which might be the Finland specific box since those usually prioritize the Finnish language in manuals and the back of the box. That color's no longer present in the Switch boxes though, so I wonder if there's no longer a separate version for us apart from the Nordic one. I also have a couple purple ones that seem to be the Swedish release.
The art being in a black void i actually personally like, it prevents the art from touching any text which allows you to perfectly cut it out if you ever wanted that.
Plus its just nostalgic as heck
I have always wondered what those triangles are, thank you for explaining!
Ah, Jon, you always know how to tickle my curiosity. It's a background-mystery I was waiting for to be solved for years now. Thanks for supplying us with the missing puzzlepiece!
Since I'm from Norway, I SHOULD be getting all those nice yellow nacho's because those have Norwegian, Swedish and Danish on the box. BUT since Scandinavians tend to be pretty adept at English, they sometimes just give us the English box. So I have a mixture with UK Green Triangles on my boxes too. (As well as some special Purple editions, but that was expected) I haven't checked or tested this thoroughly yet, but it seems that games with higher age ratings tend to not get at Yellow triangle. I suspect it has to do with kids not being expected to be able to properly read English at those ages. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's coincidental that all my Pokemon games have a yellow triangle while Zelda and Fire Emblem are green.
I live in Norway too, and my copy of Bayonetta 1+2 has a yellow triangle, so I don't really think the age rating is the explanation. My copies of Xenoblade 2, 3 and Fire Emblem Three Houses also have a yellow triangle. My copy of XCDE doesn't have a yellow triangle as I got a copy which came with the collector's set, but I know that yellow triangle copies exist as I bought one not too long ago for a friend.
My 3DS Fire Emblem games (Awakening and Echoes) and all of my 3DS Zelda games apart from Majora's Mask 3D have a green triangle. My copy of Yo-Kai Watch 1 has a yellow triangle, but Psychic Spectres and 3 have a green triangle. All of my 3DS Pokemon games, apart from Y have a yellow triangle. I have the new 3DS version of Xenoblade Chronicles and surprisingly enough, my copy has a yellow triangle.
@@duskvortex Interesting... Only working theory I have now is that it might be related to the localization budget or something like that, but I have absolutely no clue.
I have Dead or Alive Dimensions which was apparently banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, so the back has only Finnish and Swedish text (because Finland is bilingual) and it has a purple triangle.
@@JomaXZ might be likely, though that theory may or may not be disproven. I got Triangle Strategy recently and my copy is a yellow triangle one
You forgot Finnish, the yellowish green one is for Swedish/Danish/Norwegian/Finnish. I have an old Emerald game with the trainer guide being only in Swedish and Danish (even though it was purchased in Finland), making the triangle purple.
As someone from Germany, like you mentioned in the video, pretty much all my boxes have the purple or burgundy triangle. But there are three exceptions to this rule:
- My copy of Nintendo Land (which was included with my black color Wii U) has a red triangle, but doesn't seem to have any limitation to the languages on the back
- The Labo Toy-Con 04 cartridge (aka the Labo VR game) doesn't have any triangle; yet it is Europe-Specific with all the languages on it; specifically mentioning Nintendo of Europe on the back
- My Copy of Nintendogs has a torquoise/blue color triangle for some reason. Seems to have only German, English, French and Dutch on the back
I’m from Tennessee, USA, and we have no triangles as you mentioned lol. I literally had no idea European games had those triangles, and I literally thought for half the video that this was gonna be a big joke. Having all those different colors on my shelf would drive me crazy 😅
What drives me crazy is that all my EU switch games have the text on the spine centered.
My USA and Asia games look better as the text starts at the very top of the case, nice and consistent.
Ya glad I found out about this
Some of them steelbooks and other neat things Nintendo only gives them are really cool and I want them but finding out about the squares I'm alot less inclined to import them here lol the triangles would ruin everything lol
Im also from tennis sea USA
Editor me here:
I guess I misclicked a letter or 2 when writing "Tennessee" so it thought I said " tennis sea" and that is really funny
Fun fact about Australian ones. The coloured triangles were dropped after the classification board redesigned the age classification in 2005 giving each rating a specific colour which explains why they don't appear on australian boxes for DS, Wii, 3DS, WiiU or Switch but before that on NES, SNES, GB, GBA, N64 and gamecube they did have the coloured triangles. They were brown
We still got the brown triangles, look at the back of the case bottom left corner
I've been wondering about this for years!! All this time I thought it had to do with the age rating or genre or something. Thank you for getting to the bottom of this!
I'm from Portugal and yes, most cases have the yellow triangle with Portuguese and Spanish text on it! Except for rare exceptions like SMT 3 Nocturne, which has English, French and German on the back and is purple labeled! I'm living in the UK now so a lot of my labels are also green but up until now I never really thought about what the colors meant. So interesting!
As an Australian, my Wii and Switch games have a Dark brown triangle on the back instead of on the side of the box, because of the age rating.
In Australia actually, we have a brown triangle. On GameCube spines there is a brown triangle but in 2006 we started getting the age ratings. Now, the brown triangle is on the lower left side of the back of the case.
I am from the Netherlands so i mainly have blue triangles but i do have a lot of french and spanish games as everytime i go on vacation i buy some games there.
I'm from Australia and we have dark-brown triangles located on the back of the box in the bottom-left corner
This had me scratching my chin for a while when I put my Nintendo titles on their current shelf, but I never bothered looking any further into it. Thank you for doing the leg work and answering that curiosity!
This is the GameXplain guy right? No-one else has a voice that deep.
I always thought the triangles showed what genre a game is as a kid, because I got mostly platformers I never noticed. 😂
Im italian but I got xenoblade 3 while I was in Spain on vacation. I completely forgot the triangles so now X1D, X2 and XX have blue triangles except X3 which has a pink triangle
I'm from Spain and all of my first party Switch games have a yellow triangle, that applies to both Spain and Portugal, and the boxes are in both languages; one third party game has a pink one ,exclusive to Spain and with box in Spanish; and another third party title has a green one, since it was imported from the UK and thus it's only in English.
Seeing from the other Spanish person in your video how older Wii games used to have the "Spain only" pink I think that maybe on their jump to the Switch Nintendo decided to homogenise distribution for both Portugal and Spain.
Also I think all switch cartridges in Europe (not the cover, the cartridges) have an age rating printed in German.
These kinds of videos are exactly the reasons why I love Good Vibes Gaming. Plus, as a french guy, listening to Jon trying to read the translation of the DQ title was very, very funny.
FINALLY SOMEONE TALKS ABOUT THESE!!! I first noticed them some weeks ago and I couldn’t figure out what they meant!
Australia does have a colour! It's burgundy, but for some reason it's not in the same spot as everyone else. On the back, on the bottom left, there's a small (sometimes *very* small) burgundy triangle, and all these games were made in Japan but imported to Australia. However, I also have a few DS games (purchased here, with Australian ratings and everything) that were made in the EU. One of them even has a hastily applied Aus rating sticker over what must have been the PEGI rating - and these few have green stickers. It seems like some time in the mid-2000s Nintendo Australia moved from importing some games from Europe to importing everything from Japan.
I'm Dutch and over half of my Nintendo DS boxes are orange. Light blue and green is also a common colour; one or two of them are lavender.
Nowadays I buy most my games online because they're cheaper there, so my Switch games have more variety. Thank you for solving a childhood mystery.
Oh my god!
Finally someone with an explanation for this mess!
I’m from Germany and this phenomenon haunted me since years!!!
Thank you 😂
So glad they finally made triangle strategy. The triangles finally have a game all about them
Fascinating.
Collecting only NTSC & NTSC-J, I had no idea about these colorful triangles of mystery!
Thank you.
I'm from Brazil and usually import PAL games because they're cheaper but, stangely enough, it's always copies from the UK that get sent here so it's all green triangles for me
There's a very rare dark green triangle for games meant to be released only in Finland. I live in the country and only have found a single one.
The reason N64 games have those black borders Is because that's how most of the games looked due to resolution differences
4:19 considering that that BBFC "U" logo is also very blue, it might just be a case of the spines getting sunbleached while the front covers remain safe snug on a tightly packed shelf
In Australia the Gamecube cases actually did have the triangles (it was a dark brown colour), but they seem to have done away with them from the Wii onwards.
This has got to be the best video about triangles I've seen all year!
High praise
Thank you for teaching me for what these dang triangles finally were 😄.
I'm from The Netherlands and from what i can tell based on what i have, most of them have a light blue triangle. But still a little mix of other colors as well.
Gotta love distribution standards that are so poorly explained that even the people they're meant for don't know what they're for
I always hated these triangles because I have a mix of french and british games as well as how the triangles keep flipping sides for no reason, they all stick out and don’t fit a pattern at all.
Thank you for clearing up that mystery Jon!! As a Brit i had always wondered what those curious triangles were about and my theory about a multi-colored Triforce in Europe was wrong all along!
Hmm. That would have made an interesting ARG...
Triangle Strategy
In Australia we also have triangles, but it's usually on the back of the box rather than on the spine, and they're brown. Most of my games are like this, but my copy of Oninaki is European and has the triangle on the spine (I'll have to check for the triangle color later) and my copy of Fate/Extella Link is American making it the only game in my collection without one. I can only really speak for 3DS and Switch games though.
I’m from America and now I wish my games had triangles. 😢
I feel like as a child I spent hours staring at these triangles wondering about the different colors and the system behind it lol
I bought a copy of Sega Megadrive Classics while I was visiting Greece earlier this year, and it has a yellow triangle! I actually hadn’t noticed until seeing this video that it had a triangle, since I’m from the US. Super cool!
I can’t believe I’ve been “collecting” (very casually) Nintendo games for 10 years and didn’t even know these triangles existed! I’m in Canada and pretty much exclusively buy my games locally so it makes sense I’ve never seen them but still I feel like I should’ve known
6:50 - Nintendo games in Greece are now distributed by a new company, cdmedia, as of a few years ago. They use the UKV (Green triangle) packaging in UK English (the boxes aren't translated) 😞. I was looking forward to picking up Splatoon 3 to add a new triangle to my collection, but alas...
I bought a copy of Kirby Super Star Ultra from Greece earlier this year, it had all of the Nortec packaging, stickers and documents but it had a green triangle!
I've always wondered what these triangles from game covers mean, and I didn't bother to Google it as in my head I might sound crazy if I did. Thanks for bringing this up
Dark Triangles and Light Triangles, yes!
I live in the US and I didn’t even know there were triangles outside of that. You learn something new everyday
I have never noticed this ever. While I live in America I have imported switch games from UK sometimes and never realized
This is a fantastic video Jon. I loved it.
Great video! This triangle thing is very confusing and since Nintendo tend to change the rules every generation of consoles, it becomes even more confusing.
I don't remember how it was earlier but on Switch, we have the triangles but we also have a country code on the back. Those codes are usually obvious and indicate clearly the country. I'm from Switzerland and the code for Nintendo games is GFI which stands for German French Italian. Third party games have others codes sometimes. I also have some games with the code FRA for France or GER for Germany. But I also have games with the code GEP. The box is in german but it has the european PEGI rating instead of the ugly german USK, so I guess it's meant for Austria. But why GEP?
The age rating system can be also confusing. Despite not being in the EU, countries like Switzerland and Norway use the european PEGI system, but Germany use its own USK system with the big ugly logo. Sometimes, they even need to move the title in order to let the logo fit in.
Cing archivist here, thanks for displaying Last Window and Another Code:R, and thanks for this video. My Hotel Dusk copy from Spain has a brownish triangle.
I remember years ago i had that question and now it is solved thanks Jon !
"Belgium has a similar colour to the Netherlands and Switzerland has a similar colour to France that's weird" woah it's almost like parts of those countries share languages with the others or something.
(in all seriousness, really cool video!)
But if anything wouldn't France and Belgium share a colour?
@@adamunown The Netherlands and Belgium have the Dutch language in common, I think that's why they share the blue colour. Perhaps the French language copies in Belgium share the same red/pink colour with the ones from France, but I haven't found any. But in the end it doesn't really matter because most Belgians play their games in English anyhow.
@@TheTepelsteeltje I feel like an idiot, I didn't realise there were so many common languages in Belgium, I thought they mostly spoke French. Thanks for the knowledge.
No worries dude, I am just happy to share knowledge about my country
@@adamunown Games with blue triangles are sold in the northern part of Belgium, games with pink triangles are sold in the southern part of Belgium. This essentially splits the second hand market in half, if you care about the language of the boxes. Really annoying!
This is the exact kind of topic I was curious about for the past decade but was so relatively forgettable that I never researched it. Thankful that someone else has.
3:20
Also worth highlighting that the burgundy triangle, alongside being on special editions and bundles, is also often featured on games designed to be sold with accessories.
So any game that comes with a wheel, toys to life pad, dance mat, or exercise equipment should also have that triangle.
I initially assumed it was just games with accessories, until I noticed the similarly coloured triangle on my 3DS version of Disney Planes Fire & Rescue (says it was assembled in the E.U. instead of in Germany like my other UK 3DS games). Yet all images I can find of the box had a green triangle, only leading to wonder of which universe this one came from.
Now I wonder what triangle the Age of Calamity box in switzerland has, since that one had very special packaging since it needed the title in French, German and Italian
It's purple. Switzerland is a little bit of an odd region, triangle-wise.
Purple is for packaging in german, french and italian.
Burgundy, is for german only packaging, but without the USK-rating. So this is probably for the german-speaking part of Switzerland and Austria.
Blue is also very common, which is the german version with the USK-rating. Meaning this is the proper version from Germany.
Pink is the french version, which is probably not only for the french-speaking part of Switzerland but for France and other (partly) french-speaking countries aswell.
The only thing left should be italian only packaging, but unfortunately I don't think I own one of these.
@@30SecondsToMars97 very interesting, ty!
This was the first video of yours I've seen and I instantly subscribed. Which I do very, very rarely.
Also, I liked that you have a German DS Game sold by momox for some reason (probably because I also have bought many games there).
I always wondered that!
From Finland, I've got mostly green with some green-ish yellow, and a handful of purple games, plus one single blue 3DS game.
I've also got two US DS games that were never released in Europe (both editions of 999), so they don't have the triangles.
I’ve always wondered this but just not enough to ever research it myself. Thanks Jon 👏
2:43 I mean, Gen 1 was literally at the cartridge size limit in Japanese. They couldn't be multilingual even if they wanted to be. Game Freak are amazing developers.
I have Professor Layton and the curious village, has a dark purple triangle. But the box language is English and manual are in English. The warning and one word on the manual (Speilanleitung) are in German.
I had never noticed this detail until this video.
Cheers man.
Thank you for this. I have a couple of European imports and I always found this interesting. Australian games usually don't have this, but on the odd occasion we just get the same as what Europe gets so this is fascinating to me.
We do actually. On the back of Australian boxes we have a brown triangle for our region. For a while we did have many stores who sold the European versions too. I have many with different colours on in my collection! It's also how you can tell if a game was only released in a certain country too because the colour trangle will be from that one region only. (Like snowboard kids 2 - it has a brown triangle on the booklet on the majorty of second hand copies because they only released it in Australia in English.)
@@meikahidenori I LITERALLY NOTICED THIS LIKE YESTERDAY LMAO I FORGOT I POSTED THIS COMMENT, wild I never noticed until now. Yeah it's super interesting stuff
Huh, Im from sweden and somehow have a spanish copy of robots for gamecube. The more you know
I'm pretty sure those Wii games with blue triangles were green originally but have just faded/yellowed over time. Epic Mickey 2 has the U rating which is supposed to be green but shows up as blue on the spine so I imagine the green triangle would fade to blue in the same way. That would also explain why they use bbfc ratings which only exist in the UK as far as I'm aware.
Some of my Australian games with brown triangles on the back have faded to a burgandy-ish colour
I think you meant to say ‘can speak English’, because when you said that around 93% of people in the Netherlands can’t speak English, I nearly choked on my drink because that can’t possibly be true.
A quick Google search later and about 90-93% of Dutch people speak English as a second language. Which isn’t that weird considering I first got taught English in high school. It is also a mandatory class that you can’t drop (unlike German and French). Most courses will also teach it (aside from courses focused on a different language I would assume), you really can’t escape it.
Shows (aside from cartoons for kids, because they haven’t learned English in school yet) aren’t translated from their original language, instead they’re subtitled. This also helps in keeping that percentage high.
Edit: caught an autocorrect error
I clicked this video honestly expecting some sort of Mandela effect thing to suddenly make me aware all my Nintendo games had triangles on the spine that I'd never seen before.
Glad to know I'm just American.
I'm a fellow filthy PAL gamer in NZ and the latest Nintendo console I have triangles on is the GameCube, so I think it stopped when Australia started putting the age ratings on the spine of film and game cases (they share the same ratings) in the mid 2000's, as the triangles would get in the way of the age rating
Being from the us, we don’t have any triangles, but I thought I might as well share something a little odd about our boxes. In America there is only English on the box, but in Canada they have French and English. That is not too out of the ordinary, the us is mostly monolingual, and Canada is bilingual, but sometimes here (often enough to not be just a one time thing) you will find a Canadian version brand new on store shelves. Like, they literally shipped the Canadian version of the game to the US, although I do live a little close to the boarder, so they could be doing this because it is the same game just with the box having French text, and sending the normal us version over the country. Not the best comparison, but it’s like seeing the French version of a game on sale in the UK, how did it get there?
Yeah I have a few games with French/English ESRB ratings and box descriptions. Only like two or three though. I live in the north eastern US
they also had them im australia games in brown colour, but it ruins my collection for games that only got a uk/europe release
3:05 your boxes seem a bit thicker too ! interesting
maybe is for the bigger manual hmmmm
I’m from the States of America and I sometimes buy games from Amazon and they send me imports. The two only European games I have green triangles.
Something weird I’ve noticed is that all the games have unified title in the same font and same spacing in their spine; however Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is literally just its logo in white.
Oh and on the US the text for the spine is on the left side and not the middle if y’all are wondering. :)
Thats seems also mostly be a region thing. From what I saw in my collection all games I bought in my own country (Germany) have a unified look with text in the middle (and the triangle below the publisher logo at the bottom) and everything from outside europe (bought through Limited Run Games, Play-Asia, Japan in general) has a left-sided Game Logo. I dont have any Switch Game with a Game-Logo, though... but this practices seemed to be pretty random with the Wii and Wii U, which always drives me crazy. Even some Nintendo developed games suddenly opted for logos instead of the unified text.
@@Rosa_Canina Oh yeah, I’ve definitely noticed that in the Wii & Wii U area. Splatoon had a very bland font, while Mario Kart 8 & Super Mario 3D World have a font that fits their game but isn’t their logo.
As far as I know, there is only one other game that used a logo in the Switch library instead of some text and that is early production copies of Super Bomberman R. I think they fixed em’, however most copies made in (at least here in the states) from 2016-2018ish should still have their logo instead of text.
I wonder if the triangles might be used by Nintendo to not only identify where games are supposed to go but also to identify instances where games intended for one market are being sold (without permission) in another market.
I'm pretty sure that by just watching this video, i suddenly got swapped over from my parallel-universe where there never were triangles on Nintendo games - suddenly they're everywhere!
Switzerland is a special case, it's really weird. Sometimes, we have version with all 3 native langues (French, German, Italian) right on the title of the box (which is very ugly sometimes) and some other times we simply have the German, French or Italian version (depending of the region the game is sell on)
just randomly happened to find this video, watched it, got curious and decided to check my DS and Switch games. for context, I'm in the Netherlands and most of my games were bought either first-hand or secondhand at Dutch game stores. most of my games have either the [NL] blue or the [NL/FR] orange, but I noticed a few outliers:
- my copy of Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship 2007 has the dark pink triangle and has text in English and Dutch. I got this game secondhand at a Dutch game store and have never seen the Dutch/English text combo on other games, only on this one. the SEGARetro page mentions this combination but doesn't have an image of the pink; I can confirm that it is the same as the dark pink listed for the entirety of western Europe at the top of the list.
- my copy of Yoshi's Island DS has the crimson/burgundy triangle and has text in German, French and Dutch. interestingly, the DE/FR/NL text combination with crimson triangle is listed on the SEGARetro page as "to be confirmed". I can confirm it exists!
- my copy of Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has the green triangle and text in English. I got this game in England, so that makes sense.
- and I was about to mention my copy of Pokemon Platinum which has no triangle and call it a misprint, but I just realized it's an import from Canada (the text on the back is English and French, and the game has an ESRB rating rather than a PEGI rating). I'm sure I knew that when I bought it but just forgot until now.
One of my favorite UA-cam hobbies is knowing I'm going to see and hear Jon Cartwright without him being in the card art for the video
I'm from the US (otherwise known as The Land Without Triangles) but I've somehow ended up with a UK version of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with a green triangle. That doesn't bother me, but what DOES bug me is that the text is in center rather than left justified! Oh well. At least it's never hard to find Mario Kart.
The triangles are some times inconsistent. Speed kings FAH for the gamecube has a a light purple pinkish triangle while the normal FAH triangle is orange for example. Considering that the louvre tour UKV release was not meant to be shipped to the UK but rather to France it would make sense that they didn't use a blue triangle since that could potentially mess things up.
Loved the video. I always wondered what they were for lol