 | NES In Europe |
Another issue that Nintendo had to deal with was game censorship. Us U.S. gamers had our games censored big time before U.S. release. The European gamers had even bigger censorship pollicies, most likely because of Germany. Words such as "ninja" were thought to be too violent in parts of the continent. Even worse, some games had tweaked graphics and such. Contra was renamed Probotector and the people were changed to robots! Geez. Following, I have numerous pictures of European NES games, some unique to Europe and some released all around. It is also good to note that the European Mega Man games seem to have much cooler label art, excluding the 2nd one.
Unfortunately, the gray box never took off in Europe as well as it did in the US-or Japan for that matter. Think of the NES sales in Europe as an airplane. The airplane starts for lift off and then it has engine troubles forcing it back down to land. That is what happened to the NES in Europe. NES started but it wasn't really popular enough to have good sales, thus it didn't have as big of a game library either, though it did have a few unique NES titles such as Elite.
Codemasters, an unlicensed game company, was actually based in the UK so it had produced a lot of NES carts. Dizzy, Codemasters' mascot, was very very popular in the UK. Active Enterprises tried the European market too, but they failed miserably just as they had done in the states.
Game Title Company Other Notes
Beauty & the Beast Hudson Soft Europe Only Release
Crackout Palcom Europe Only Release
Duck Tales Capcom Same as US release
Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy Codemasters Plug-through version
Gamekey Horeleg Play NSTC on PAL
Mega Man 2 Capcom Very bad label art
Mega Man 2 (Variation 1) Capcom Awesome art work
Mega Man 3 Capcom Awesome art work
Probotector Konami Contra w/ Robots
Shadowgate Kemco/Seika Swedish Version
Shadow Warriors Tecmo Same as Ninja Gaiden
Shadow Warriors 2 Tecmo Same as Ninja Gaiden 2
Smurfs Infrogames Europe Only Release
Super Sports Challenge Codemasters Same as Quattro Sports
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Palcom "Ninja" wasn't allowed
