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.