Introduction

When I started doing scans of my video game collection I joined the VGSC (Video Game Scanning Collective) project. One of the first thing I asked the senior members is if they had any kind of checklist of what was already scanned and what still needed to be scanned. Unfortunately nobody could come up with anything like that.

At the time I naively thought that such a thing was easily doable and started working on my own scanning checklist in the form a spreadsheet. This is when I understood how colossal of a task that was. Not only did I have to account for every games but also for every languages, editions, reprints and revisions. This is only for game covers and boxes, if I wanted to include instruction manuals, cartridge labels, inserts and more (which I did) then I also had to account for every variations of these as well.

Now that I knew what kind of data I wanted to gather I quickly ran into a new problem. How can I differentiate between different variations of a certain cover, manual, CD, cartridge etc? Some are really easy to differentiate, for example a Playstation 1, black label vs. a greatest hit or a Nintendo original printing vs a Player's choice are really easy to tell apart visually. With that said, some covers have very minimal visual differences despite not being the same.

Thankfully, there tends to be markings that uniquely identify these different assets, these markings or “part numbering systems” are unfortunately different across licensors, developers, publishers, distributor or manufacturers. They, however, tend to follow common patterns or some kind of logic.

In this guide I hope to transmit my knowledge about these different part numbering systems, where to look for them on products, how to interpret them, what can be done with them and how you can help in the cataloging effort.

The ultimate goal of video game cataloging would be to build a public and centralized repository of every piece of video game related media ever created tangible or not. CD arts, cartridge labels, inserts, advertisement, merchandise, posters, story displays, hardware, cover, boxes, everything! This will probably never happen but we can strive toward that goal.

• Video game historians
• Video game archivists
• Video game collectors
• Video game enthusiasts

and many more

This guide will first cover topics that are universal to any cataloging effort regardless of what is being cataloged. This will cover topics such as how to read and interpret UPC barcodes.

Then there will be a similar page that covers universal topics about hardware cataloging since this is a very specialized topic.

Next, there will be one page per major licensor like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega, Sony, Bandai, Atari etc. Within each of these categories there will be a page for each system they released (for example: Nintendo 64, Playstation 2, Xbox 360 etc.)

Each system will also have a separate page concerning hardware cataloging for that specific system.

Finally I plan to create a unique page for every publisher part numbering system. These systems are often applied by publishers. If one such system is instead specific to a developer or distributor then a page will be created accordingly.

Barcodes have become an ubiquitous way to tag every unique products sold by an organization. Video games products are no exception, therefore I can't overstate their usefulness in cataloging products. It also comes as no surprise that stores and warehouses use the profusely in their inventory system. With a barcode in hand you can:

• Identify the distributor of the product.
• Identify the distributor's country of origin.
• Uniquely identify each product for that publisher/distributor
• Given a list of known barcodes and products for an organization, identify gaps in their barcode space that can lead to the discovery of previously unknown or unreleased products from that organization.

Some limitations of barcodes:

• They are not always present. Not every companies adopted barcodes at the same time, in my experience with video game products, vintage and retro video games that came out before the 1990's have good chances to be lacking a barcode. Additionally, products that are part of a bundle or were not sold for retail, like contest prizes, development tools, display cases etc also often lack a barcode.

• While barcodes are a good way to identify different products in a cataloging project, they almost never uniquely identify packaging (cover and boxes), art revision or sometimes even different language boxes/covers and/or editions. If we're striving to catalog every variations/correction to a product packaging then we can't rely solely on barcodes.

In the next section, I will introduce the most important format of barcodes you should know when cataloging video games. I won't go over every single format in existence my focus will mainly be on what you'll encounter when looking at video game products.

You will find this format of barcode mostly on products that are sold outside of North America and Japan.

• It consists of 13 numbers.
• The first 7 numbers identifies the company (also called the prefix).
  • Within these 7 numbers, the first 3 identifies the country of the GS1 organization responsible for assigning that prefix. Often that will match the country where the product is being sold but it is not a requirement.
• The next 5 numbers uniquely identifies a product sold or distributed by that company (also called the suffix).
• The last digit is called a check digit and is an error detection measure used to make sure the rest of the barcode has been read correctly. (Usually by a barcode reader but it can also be calculated manually)

We can analyze the above EAN barcode the following way:

• 497: This falls withing the 490 to 499 country code range which corresponds to the prefixes administrated by GS1 Japan. This barcode comes from Sonic the Hedgehog (8-bit) for Master System sold in Europe, notice how even though the final product was sold in Europe the barcode indicates Japan. This is a good example showing that where a product is sold and where its barcode is issued doesn't necessarily matches. The cover for this product, however, indicates that it was Made in Japan so there's still a logical explanation to this.

• 4365: This is the numbers that were assigned to Sega of Japan, sure enough this is a Sonic the Hedgehog game so that make sense. With that said when we talk about the manufacturer/company prefix we usually include the entire 7 numbers so Sega of Japan's barcode prefix would be 4974365.

• 63476: This is the product code for Sonic the Hedgehog (8-bit) for master system (European Version). The company to which the prefix belongs (in this case Sega of Japan) is responsible for managing this range of 5 digits meaning they can register products from 4974365 00000X to 4974364 99999X for a total of 100 000 unique products. If they want to register more than 100 000 products they would have to go back to GS1 to get a additional prefix recorded, then they'd have a new range for an additional 100 000 products.

• 6: This is the check digit, I won't go into the detail of how it is calculated but just know that its value depends on the 12 previous digits.

One last thing to mention is that you might runs into EAN barcodes that ends with a “>” (greater than) symbol (see the image above). This is called a guard mark and it is not part of the barcode per se, it is just used to help barcode readers read it properly. I have also heard that some barcodes can start with “<” (lesser than) this also works in the same way and is not considered part of the barcode so you can safely omit them when cataloging.

You'll mostly see these in North America. They were the first version of the barcode to be used en masse and it originated in the United States. They work the exact same way as the EAN but the company prefix is 6 digits long instead of 7. You can easily convert a UPC to EAN by prepending a 0 to the UPC (this has no impact on the check digit). You'll notice that visually the check digit is shown separated from the product code contrary to the EAN where the check digit is grouped with the product code. What I've shown here is a UPC-A format, there are other UPC formats but I haven't seen them used with video game products.

• 04: With UPC-A you can consider that there's always an implicit 0 at the start so this is really a country code of 004. Since the first number is always a 0 that implies that the country code always indicate the United States given that GS1 country codes between 000 to 099 are either assigned to the USA, are reserved or have some other special meanings.

• 5496: This company prefix is assigned to Nintendo. We usually refer to it including the country code (without the implicit 0) so 045496.

• 59043: This is the product code that Nintendo assigned to the Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild, Canadian version on Nintendo Switch (remember barcode country code is not necessarily equal to place of sale). .

• 7: This is the check digit, it serves the same purpose as described above in the EAN section.

The Japanese Article number barcodes are those used in Japan and are governed by GS1 Japan. For all intent and purposes they are identical to European EANs and that they start with 450 to 459 or 490 to 499. With that said it is worth mentioning that you will probably come across barcodes with no spacing between numbers at all, especially while looking at older items. These barcodes also sometimes starts with a “T”, before barcodes were introduced in Japan some point of sale (PoS) systems used optical character recognition (OCS) that is, they read actual human readable letters and numbers instead of bars, that “T” simply tells the OCS reader that the code that follows is to be read as a JAN code, therefore, this OCR “T” prefix can safely be ignored when cataloging.

The international standard book number is a international system to uniquely track and identify books published all over the world. You might be thinking “what does that have to do with games?”, well it seems like some publishers actually gave ISBNs to their games along with a UPC/EAN/JAN, I don't know why this is the case but it actually happens. It is also useful to have a good understanding of the system in order to catalog books that are gaming related like strategy guides for example. Here's an example of a game that was given an ISBN code:

There are two formats of ISBNs. ISBN-10 are 10 digits long and were assigned before 2007 the game above uses this format. ISBN-13 are 13 digits long and are assigned to publication from 2007 onward. They also double down as an EAN code (notice how they are equal in length).

ISBN-10 are divided into 4 sections often (but not always) delimited by hyphens (-).

1- A registration group: This is a variable length code representing either a country or a language group under which the registrant (publisher) is registered. You will often see 0 or 1 which are the English language registration group, it is not tied to a country rather it is for any English language publication. 2 is the French language registration group, 3 is German and 5 is Russian.

You will also see registration groups that are tied to a country or region, for example: 4 is Japan, 7 is Mainland China, 89 is South Korea, 626, 957 and 986 are Taiwan and 962 and 988 are Hong Kong.

2- A registrant (aka publisher): This is also of variable length and is assigned to a registrant by whatever organization is in charge of the registration group. The less digits is assigned to the registrant the bigger publisher the registrant is because that leaves more digits for publication number. If a registrant runs out of digits for publications it can request an additional registrant number, therefore the same publisher can have multiple different registrant numbers. It is similar to the company prefix in UPC/EAN/JAN

3- A publication number: This is yet again a variable length number. The more digits form this number the bigger the publisher, the less digits the smaller. This uniquely identify a publication (book or game) published by the registrant. It is similar to the product code in UPC/EAN/JAN.

4- A check digit: A single digit used to detect errors in the code. This is similar to the check digit in UPC/EAN/JAN. Note that for ISBN-10 this number is base 11, that is, there are 11 symbols/characters that can be used to represent a single digit, 0 to 9 are used as usual but 10 is represented by the letter “X” don't be alarmed if you see an ISBN-10 ending with an “X”.

Now let's use this knowledge to decode the ISBN in the picture above. ISBN 1-56673-054-6:

• 1 is the English Language registration Group, indeed the game cover is in English.
• 56673: Searching for 1-56673 on isbn-international.org we get 978-1-56673 = Sony Electronic Publishing Company, sure enough the game is published by Sony Imagesoft (more details about the 978 prefix in the ISBN-13 section)

• 054: This is the 55th item published under the 56673 Sony registrant code. Notice that this is 3 digits long so Sony can publish up to 1000 books/games (from 000 to 999) under that 56673 code.
• 6: This is the check digit, how it is calculated is out of scope of this guide.