I did a little digging and it appears that there is a standards organization that publishers/manufacturers get in contact with and once they get assigned a unique number range, they can essentially implement their own barcode sequencing in line with various rules. So, it's possible that Sega Europe was considered a different company than Sega of America and therefore they couldn't simply use the same barcode. It's also possible that they just did this for internal reasons or maybe the distributor and not Sega was required to put their own unique manufacturer number and UPC on there in line with their own sequencing plan.
Yeah. I was working on a program a few years ago with publishers and a high profile company that handles their data. The program was scrapped because of all the issues with regional UPC matching.
I don't want you to hate me, I want you to want to hate me - GamersUniteMagazine.com