Most of the older Nintendo games have a region ID at the end of the serial number.  America is USA, Canada is CAN, Britian is UKV and so on.

I've tried to google this and, though I can find a list of Nintendo regions, I can't find a list of all regions with their corresponding region codes.

I'd like to find an extensive, complete list.  Has anyone put this together?  If this info can easily be pulled out of the game data, I'm not seeing it.  Sure, you can search by region, but I'm not 100% sure how complete the NintendoAge is.  It has mostly every game covered, but I'm not sure about every variant or even region since even I have found holes in data, and I'm moderately new around here.

Thanks guys.

Edit - nevemind, I just saw you have already used the NA database and want something that may be more accurate.

Not sure what you're asking, do you want a list of all available Nintendo region codes, or do you want a complete list of all Nintendo released games, and all regions which they are available on, one by one? The latter is impossible, but the former is fairly simple.

I'll start you off with a few NES PAL regions, and somebody can fill in the ones I've forgotten.

SAF: South Africa (Never actually seen a SAF cart, but consoles do exist. Probably carts as well)
ISR: Israel
NOE: Nintendo of Europe
EEC: Common early release of PAL-B games
UKV: Great Britain
ITA: Italy
AUS: Oceania
EAI: Great Britain, Oceania, Italy
SCN: Scandinavia
SWE: Sweden (Scandinavian released games with Swedish in-game language)
ESP: Spain
HOL: Holland
GRE: Greece (I think. Maybe this was manual code only?)
FRG: Germany
FRA: France
FAH: France and Holland (I believe. Not entirly sure what the FAH acronym is for). Only used on back of carts.
GPS: Different opinions on meaning. Search forum for threads on it. Essentially common region-code for late-release PAL-B carts.
HKG: Hong Kong
DAS: Common PAL-B code, only used on back of carts.

And probably a few others I can't think of right now.

Above mentioned are the "main" areas for the PAL regions. A lot of smaller countries didn't have their own region code, so they came under same distribution as other countries, and shared region codes with the main distributor (Austria, Belgium, Portugal, et cetera).

There were also transition phases in the region codes, and how they were used.

Take Scandinavia for example, where they following combinations are available:
Cart front / back
1: "European Version" / Blank
2: "European Version" / EEC
3: EEC / EEC
4: EEC / SCN
5: SCN / SCN

Edit: And, of course, to make things even more complex, the distributors also borrowed cartridge labels off each other once in a while, which is why you can find FRA-marked frontiside labels with EAI marked cartridge backsides. FRA being a PAL-B region, and EAI being a PAL-A region, this sometimes adds confusion to whether the hardware inside is PAL-A or PAL-B. Some examples of this are the PAL-A versions of Zelda and, I believe, Metroid. 
Other more simple versions are, I believe the Scandinavian release of Aladdin had NOE carts bundles together with SCN box and SCN manual.

Edit2: Oh, This is my 100th NintendoAge post.  

you're mixing the back/front codes.
you're also missing GBR, which was used in Australia.
EAI is a backplate code.
GRE is only on manuals that were printed by the distributor there; aka not made by Nintendo per-se.
FAH is indeed France and Holland; the distributor (Bandai, after ASD) originally distributed in France, but then later also distributed in Holland.
on boxes, there was ESP/ESP, FRG/FRG, NOE/FRG, SWE/SWE
there was also the Asian region: ASI
also Korea: KOR

Is this game cart only? Or are you including manuals and boxes? I've never seen an ISR cart, but have seen a box and manual.

Of Games, have you ever seen a South African cart? You didn't dispute it being on tordur's list.

I own a South African cart, they are real. Quite a neat cart, despite some of the shittiest people I ever met hailing from that region.

There were a few companies that had presence in SA. Electro brain is one, who in 1993 were selling stuff in the country. another is the distributor for Greece (if I remember correctly) had a presence in SA too; maybe another but I can't remember.

lmao at fcgamer's comment tho

really weird to see some of this , as GBR literally stands for GREAT BRITAIN......
UKV and GBR carts are easily found on the UK ebay, i have never seen a GBR cart on the Australian ebay....
furthermore, at least -----> Mario Bros original arcade classic series exists both with GBR and AUS code on the front,
meaning if GBR was an Australian thing, then why would they have at least that game with 2 different front codes?
that makes no sense....

also, in the PAL B list, we have 1 game that is quite funny....and gets often overlooked here,
Athletic World was released in the Netherlands with USA label on front, but HOL code backside...
so it's gets offered as a USA cart quite a lot, as people don't realize the HOL code on the back.....

Feel free to find any GBR cart on UK ebay that haven't come from Australia.
It was used for first party games in Australia, up until 1994 when Nintendo took over in the country (from Mattel.)
-UKV (and -FRA) was used in the UK after the normal "AUS ITA GBR" on the box business.

edit: when i say GBR, i mean NES-xx-GBR. "GBR" by itself on cartridges was sold in both Australia and the UK.

NES-xx-GBR boxes/carts/manuals are Australian Nintendo published games only, distributed by Mattel.
"GBR" boxes/manuals/carts were sold both in Australia and the UK, and are literally the exact same product with no difference between the two at all (i.e. there's no way of knowing the origin)

Using SMB 1 for an example:
"GBR" released in Australia: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/OP0...
"-GBR" released in Australia: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/jZc...
"-AUS" released in Australia: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xJE...

In my book I explain why GBR was used in Australia, and why -ITA and -GBR was also used in Australia, before the -AUS code.

Also there absolutely was not an AUS coded Mario Bros original arcade classic series. at all.

Hey guys, thanks for all of the details, though I don't have time read through them all. What I was basically looking for were the region codes on the serial numbers. For instance, NES-CV-xxx, where xxx would be the region code.

I've not looked at many other games that NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBC or GBA so I don't know if there are other stamps are on carts, or other identifiers for later games.

My main reason for asking is so that I can easily identify the region of a game by its region code in the serial, especially when the region is a bit more obscure. Also, it'd be nice to know because I've considered collecting a "complete set" of certain games for a region. Tetris, for instance, on the game boy. I'd like to know where it all has been released what each region ID stands for. There are a couple of other games I may do this for as well, so it'd help to have a master list regions for a starting point.

Do you mean cartridge,manual, or box? They're not all the same  

Am I? Apart from the EAI, which one am I mixing?

I'd assume GBR is a British Mattel code, which would've been sold in Australia, but surely not meant for the Australian market? 

Okay - Can see your other comment further down in regards to this. Didn't know that. Interesting. The whole usage of the NES-SM-GBR as oppose to GBR only doesn't seem to have been used the same way as in the PAL-B regions. Interesting stuff. And SCN/SWE

But the part after the "/", I wouldn't class as region, since it only determines in-game language. 
  Ah. Of course, yes  
  Cool  

The whole Family Fun Fitness series seems like a mess in Europe. The Scandinavian Stadium Events manual even has "Leicht Athletic" written on the front page, just as the German manual. This is the only SCN manual, which has German language on the front. The strangest thing is, that you could say fair enough, they only copied directly from the German manual, but they actually changed the background color from Blue to Yellow, so some editing was done. 

Anyway - Might be we should all try to make a list of which regions were available on front of carts, back of carts, box flaps and manuals, and their corresponding copies, and add it to the page. This place could definitely need som more PAL information, to be honest.

 

Yes, EAI. And DAS as you said.

You'll find that Mattel UK didn't distribute non-first release stuff (they stopped being distributor around 6 months after beginning), so Australia used the -GBR code instead (the 'color code' of -GBR is the exact same as -AUS)
SCN/SWE was only one game, right? F-15?

I've attempted to make a list of what games came out in different regions, however there are 100000 variants for manuals/boxes/etc. so it's not really worth it. Also (in the UK at the very least) a mix of different revisions for boxes/manuals happened: so one game could have a -2 box, with a -3 manual, whereas the same game could also have a -2 box with a -2 manual. The highest I think I've seen it a SMB 3 -UKV-5 manual

I guess the cartridge.  I would have assumed that Nintendo would have been organized enough to keep regional codes consistent, regardless of whether the item was a game/box/manual.

I'm now seeing that my assumptions were a bit naive and that this is more complext than I assumed so... feel free to discuss and come to a consensus on details, but I'll modify my question to strictly NES and Game Boy games-- what are the region codes for NES and Game Boy cartridge serial numbers.  Not codes on the back.  I'm talking about the "NES-GG-xxx" and "DMG-GG-xxx" serials.
 

Yep, only F-15.

I believe this is linked to the fact, that F-15 is multilingual, in the sense that the menu is in Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian, as opposed to the other three SWE/SWE games, which were only in Swedish.
  Impressive stuff that - Never had anything over a -2 myself.

Another quirky observation is that I used to do collecting of games imported to Denmark, which got added a local Danish manual. These games didn't go through the local Scandinavian distributor (Bergsala was for Scandinavia), but some of them did go through Bergsalas Danish distributor (Electronic Fun). Out of the 40 or so different titles I've found so far, one of them actually came with a PAL-A box (NEJ-JJ-UKV), with a PAL-B cart (NES-JJ-FRA), and a Danish manual.

So again an oddity. Shows that maybe it wasn't just the brits borrowing FRA labels, but maybe also the French borrowing UKV boxes.

PAL collecting (or PAL studying) is often very complex and interesting, compared to NTSC.  

 

How sure are you that it's an actual French cart?
Also the reason for the front being -FRA for some uk games is due to the distributor actually being from France (Ron Judy, and bandai)

very interesting topic  

just two additions from my side. A lot of people think the FRG games are the german releases. However, most of the games release with a "pure" FRG code are actually the austrian and swiss versions, while Germany received NOE coded versions. This does however not apply to the early EEC/FRG releases and to the late NOE/FRG releases (the latter being the games with german screentext I believe).

the DAS code on the back of some cartridges stands for Deutschland / Austria / Schweiz I believe.

I've also searched for this info and haven't found any official list, so it might come down to just combing the internet for info on a game-by-game, code-by-code basis. That sounds tedious, and it's right up my alley. I've been trying to answer the question "what PAL-region-exclusive Game Boy games have a UKV version?" And I've had to put together my own list of PAL exclusives, and I've been collecting photographs as "proof" that a UKV version exists for each. (under the assumption that nobody stands to gain anything by falsifying this kind of information.) But I've started thinking "hmm, someone might be interested to know that there's a ESP version of this game" etc.

So, hey rlh, if you want to collaborate on a project of putting this list together by hand, with photos per game per region, I'd be interested. It's not a good way of doing it, but it might be the only way. We'd start at retrocollect.com, they seem to have good region data on most games.

Also, nobody has mentioned the EUU region code, which I found on this cart. There's a EUR version of that game as well. I've never seen EUU anywhere else. http://imgur.com/OMtwzwe...

I doesn't seem like anyone made a list for more than PAL (and that list has it's own problems). So, I made one myself. The major rule is the country code must be found in the at the beginning of the third section of code. e.g. SCN in NES-8F-SCN/SWE, but SWE wouldn't count if SWE/SWE didn't also exist. This also excludes codes like EAI that are only found alone on the back of the cart. I've only marked things I've seen picure evidence of. 
 

Code	C	I	B	First On	Stands for
ASI	X	X	X	NES	Asia
AUS	X	X	X	NES	Australia
CAN	X	X	X	NES	Canada
EEC	X		X	NES	European Economic Community
ESP	X	X	X	NES	España
FAH		X	X	NES	France and Holland
FRA	X	X	X	NES	France
FRG	X	X	X	NES	Federal Republic of Germany
GBR	X	X	X	NES	Great Britain
GPS	X	X	X	NES	Game Pack Software?
GRE		X		NES	Greece
HKG	X	X	X	NES	Hong Kong
HOL	X	X	X	NES	Holland
ISR		X	X	NES	Israel
ITA	X	X	X	NES	Italy
KOR	X	X	X	NES	Korea
NOE	X	X	X	NES	Nintendo of Europe
SCN	X	X	X	NES	Scandinavia
SWE	X	X	X	NES	Sweden
UKV	X	X	X	NES	United Kingdom
USA	X	X	X	NES	United States of America
CHN	X	X	X	GB	China
EUR	X	X	X	GB	Europe
EUU	X	*	*	GB	Europe?
ROC	X	X	X	GB	Republic of China
LTN	X	X	X	SNES	Latin America
ASM	X	X	X	N64/GBC	Asia (and Malaysia)?
MSA	X	X	X	N64	Mexico and South America
DAN	X	X	X	DS	Danmark
NOR	X	X	X	DS	Norway
RUS	?	?	X	DS	Russia
USZ			X	Wii?	? (North America)

* I've only seen an EEU cart for Gameboy, but I've seen CIB for N64
? For RUS I've only been able to find a picture of the back of a box, but I think it's likely the cart and manual have this code.
Also, some of the names I'm not sure about what they stand for (GPS, EUU, ASM, USZ).

Thank you!  I was actually thinking about this post I made just yesterday.  It's as if you were reading my mind.  I'm going to catalog this info.  I also mentioned (maybe in this thread) that I think I want to try to get every variant of Tetris because for one it's prolific and second, it's "cheap".  This will help me a lot in trying to search and seek out specific region codes.

That tetris thread was one of the places I started looking, so it's cool to see if it feeds back. I did this research for a similar reason as I'm considering expanding my Zelda thread past the US. Also, I'm sure I've missed a couple post N64 codes, but luckily for us those tend to be country exclusive children's games.

You have any details about the KOR code, or when it started.  I know Nintendo has been in SK since the early-90s, I think, but they had to find manufacturers and license the hardware manufacturing, which is why their brand there was "Com Boy" for a time.  Did they start using the KOR code, when they started officially exporting to South Korea, or were those IDs used for the Com Boy stuff too?

I don't really know much but here are some threads I found.

http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess... http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess... http://nintendoage.com/forum/mess... http://www.autofish.net/hosted/fa...

It seems like Comboy and Famitek are pretty knowledgeable, so either look at their posts or pm them if you have questions.