
If you're a Scandinavian resident then there's an excellent chance that the name Bergsala will mean a great deal to you. This company has been instrumental in distributing and marketing Nintendo's products in countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and, more recently, became an investor in SteamWorld creator Image & Form and its associated publishing arm, Thunderful. Bergsala is, at the time of writing, the only Nintendo distributor not owned by Nintendo – and the most incredible thing is that the whole relationship was started with a lie.
This excellent feature on IGN covers the story in great detail, and we recommend you give it a read. For the short (and less interesting) version, listen up. Back in 1981, Swedish electronics store owner Owe Bergsten spotted one of Nintendo's Game & Watch handhelds during a trip to Singapore. He wanted to not only sell the LCD game in his shop, but to distribute the product all over Europe. To get to this point, he fibbed to Nintendo in Japan that he owned a business with the contacts and network capable of achieving such a lofty goal, when in reality, his fledgeling outfit was anything but.
While he might have been economical with the truth, Bergsten's instinct was spot-on and after selling out of his initial order of 30,000 Game & Watch units, he was soon shifting 180,000 a month. By 1983, 1.7 million Game & Watches had been sold in Sweden alone – a country with a population of around 8.3 million people at the time.

When Game & Watch demand dropped off, Bergsten turned his attention to the Famicom, which had just launched in Japan. He was so sure that it would be a success in Europe and he convinced Nintendo to allow him to release a specially-modified variant of the Japanese console, but it never happened because, by that point, Nintendo had decided it was going to release the Famicom in the west as the NES (a move which, you could argue, was instigated in some small part by Bergsten's faith in the console). Bergsala also created the Nintendo Videospelklubb, a precursor to the Club Nintendo newsletter Nintendo of America released – another of Bergsten's many claims to fame.
Today, Bergsala controls Nintendo's business in Scandinavia, and for many players who grew up in that part of the world, is just as important a name as Nintendo, Sony, Sega or Microsoft. It's interesting to think about how Nintendo's presence in Europe could have turned out so much differently had Owe Bergsten not told the little white lie that netted him an empire.
[source uk.ign.com]
Comments 23
Clever guy. Smart business man.
@Damo "To get to this point, he fibbed to Nintendo in Japan that he owned a with the contacts and network capable of achieving such a lofty goal, when in reality, his fledgeling outfit was anything but."
Grammer error?
Just as important?! Man..! Ive been hoping for Nintendo to cut ties with Bergsala for a long time now.. They suck big time.
Please Nintendo, make your own regional office in Scandinavia like you got Nintendo Germany to take over in Austria recently
I've been dealing with them since the NES..
"If you're a Scandinavian resident"
>Nordic, actually. Finland's not in Scandinavia.
Interesting story though.
@kukabuksilaks Absolutely. I ordered the NES controllers for Switch through Nintendo of Europe. With shipping and import duty etc. I expect it to end up at around $110 (even with the Black Friday discount).
This is a major example of "Fake it till you make it," mentality right here.
Fascinating story for sure.
One of the few instances where the love for a product triumphed over practicality and truth.
Ugh, I don’t like Bergsala. Has a horrible customer support.
@Skalgrim
They're just horrible all over, not just their customer support..
As a Swedish retro collector, the Bergsala imported games, marked SCN, often are the most valuable ones.
The Mario statue outside of Kungsbacka, where Bergsala has its office, is forever burned inside my mind, as we often drove past it on the way to Gothenburg. Their address is Marios gata 21 (Mario's street 21).
I have to agree with what @kukabuksilaks wrote.
I'm from Denmark and my experience with Bergsala is way below par as well. Nintendo should indeed have cut ties with them long ago.
All in all I do not like that this article sort of hails Bergsala. It might have been important back then in the 80's, but that's history. They suck now.
Some of the biggest business moves in the world started with a lie. Very famously, Bill Gates did not own DOS the day they sat down and pitched it to IBM.
@Nego
of course Finland is a part of scandinavia.
plus iceland and fareislands = nordics
@Masticore Finland is part of the Nordic countries. Scandinavia = Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
how many times did he play on them before he sold them? sketchy.
Wow! That's quite a story! I wonder if Ninty ever caught on?
Some of my N64 and GC games have the code SCN and play in English, but have some of the Scandinavian languages on the box and in the manual. I’ll have to check if they mention this company somewhere on the box/manual, never heard of them until this article.
Also, it sounds like this guy would have done well at Argonaut Software. They were always economical with the truth with Nintendo. Didn’t do them any harm either.
Remember, it's not a lie, if you believe it!
Interesting there's comments about the definition of Scandinavia. Technically it's only Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and it's based on language. They generally can understand each other. Regionally, with Finland and Iceland, it's the Nordic countries. Icelandic is a very distant relation to Scandinavian languages and is similar to Old Norse, while Finnish is entirely its only branch with Estonian (the country just across the Baltic Sea) its closest relation. Finnish and Estonian come from a distant broader group that now includes Hungarian.
@Kalmaro I wonder if this is an editor problem or a proof reading problem. I see a lot of grammar issues and typos across a vast amount of websites.
@Tharsman Peter moloneaux didn't make games when he was chartered to make a game. He happened to own a different company with the same name as a game company.
My only real problem with Bergsala is how their autonomy from Nintendo of Europe has consistently left us out of reward programs like VIP 24:7 and Club Nintendo. By lying about our country on registration we could get wallpapers and digital stuff just fine (as long as we had points from those scratch codes, which were usually removed from localized copies), but for physical rewards like the Game & Watch Collection for DS you were out of luck and had to resort to Ebay.
To this day I look at things like the Nintendo Official UK Store with a great deal of jealousy.
I'm from Sweden and I was an intern at a Swedish toy store that sold video games so I know all about Bergsala and I have both bad things and good things to say about them...
@Masticore It's actually not. Scandinavia is Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. It's both a cultural region as well as a geographical one as it refers to the peninsula, the mountain range and the history and culture of the countries. Finland is a special case considering we have a shared culture with both Sweden and Russia, having been part of the latter for a while after the Swedish reign was ended.
If you want to include Finland to the mix, the proper term is Fennoscandia (the area covering the Scandinavian peninsula, Finland, and the Kola peninsula is called the Fennoscandian Shield), and if you want to include Finland, Iceland, and the sovereign regions controlled by the countries, it's called the Nordic.
I like doing my homework.
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