the Master System was the highest-selling console in Europe, though the NES was beginning to have a fast growing user base in the United Kingdom. Sega continued outselling Nintendo in the UK into 1992; a reason cited at the time by Paul Wooding of Sega Force was that, "Nintendo became associated with kids playing alone in their rooms, while Sega was first experienced in the arcades with a gang of friends". Between 1991 and 1992, NES sales were booming in Europe, partly driven by the success of the Game Boy which helped uplift NES sales in the region. By 1994, NES sales had narrowly edged out the Master System overall in Western Europe. Among major European markets, the Master System led in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain, whereas the NES led in France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. In Australia, the NES was less successful than the Master System. South Korea In South Korea, the hardware was licensed to Hyundai Electronics, which marketed it as the Comboy from 1991. After World War II, the government of Korea (later South Korea) imposed a wide ban on all Japanese "cultural products". Until this was repealed in 1998, the only way Japanese products could legally enter the South Korean market was through licensing to a third-party (non-Japanese) distributor, as was the case with the Comboy and its successor, the Super Comboy, a version of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The Comboy sold 360,000 units in South Korea by 1993. This was less than half of the Master System (marketed as the Gam*Boy or Aladdinboy by Samsung), which sold 730,000 units in the country by 1993. Soviet Union and Russia After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the introduction of the NES was attempted in two ways. The first was the launch through local distributors. The second, much more popular method, was in the form of an unlicensed Taiwanese hardware clone named the Dendy produced in Russia in the early 1990s. Aesthetically, it is a replica of the original Famicom, with a unique color scheme and labels, and with controller ports on the front using DE-9 serial connectors, identical to those used in the Atari 2600 and the Atari 8-bit family of computers. All Dendy games sold in Russia are bootleg copies, not licensed by Nintendo. In 1994, Nintendo signed an agreement with the Dendy distributor under which Nintendo had no claims against