Nintendo wasn't the first to introduce region locking, after all
nintendolife.com
nintendolife.com
This made me laugh because when I was a kid living in Europe, my dad would often travel to the US and bring back unreleased in Europe and/or NES games from the US because they were much cheaper. To get them to work with PAL/Secam NES, we took our NES to this (shady?) electronics shop that installed this silver mechanical switch. You would insert the US cartridge and if memory serves, the screen would blink and when the image was on, you flipped this switch and the blinking would stop, permitting you to play the US cartridge in the European console. That was my 'Nintendo Switch'
>> Though I am entirely curious how the games would play given that there'd be timing and other small differences between the consoles.
It's been too long for to remember any differences, plus I was quite young, but I am now going to blame the fact that I was never any good on this timing tidbit...
A different trick in games that don't have an internal clock, but are instead timed by wall clock is to use a region platform where the text loads faster. For example for Zelda Ocarina of time, the Japanese Wii Virtual Console version is used almost exclusively because of faster text and loading times: https://www.speedrun.com/oot#100
As a developer I find Speed running extremely interesting. The creativity used to eek out performance gains is incredible.
Using a GBA (and later, a DS) emulator on a PC to (re)play Pokémon, I was absolutely stunned by how much of the wall time was spent waiting for the ridiculously slow page-after-page of speech bubbles to scroll into view.
I don’t think it’s an accident that they’re that slow (because this is with the “text loading speed” in the game options set to so-called “fast”) but rather a much-gamed and an integral part of stretching out the “playable campaign hours” metric. When you 16x the speech scenes with a keyboard shortcut, the whole game is laughably short.
That may be the case in many games, but in most games that were translated from Japanese, the reason is that Japanese is a much more compact language (many words are just 1 character long, for example) so the speed is OK in Japanese, but horribly slow in Western languages. A few devs actually increased the text speed for oversea releases, but most didn't.
What we did not realize was that there of course was no way to switch the game to English as it had not been translated yet. Playing the game entirely in Japanese was for sure a challenge but I think I still vaguely remember the symbols for Poke Ball and the Health restore items. This was of course still fairly early internet days so there was not a ton of online help and translators were much less accurate.
You should read this article as being tongue in cheek seen in that context. It allows a Nintendo fan to go "Well technically.." as a joke, because obviously some minor Atari reseller in Turkey is not really relevant on the global scale.
They wanted to be very sure they didn’t run into that. So with the US launch they controlled publishing, licensing, lockout chips, the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”, etc.
They were trying to avoid another disaster. And it worked. So they stuck to it. Combined with being very conservative and opinionated (for better or worse) it continues to this day.
Yes, they’ve loosened compared to the NES days, but that’s why.
Sony and MS came along MUCH later to a very different industry. By that generation consoles were normal and gaming was there to stay. The risks were different.
Do you mean bad like you think they're bad people, or do you mean bad like you think they left money on the table?
I probably should have used a word like poor instead of bad.
https://www.retronintendoreviews.com/retro/10nes-lockout-chi...
(It’s not exactly a technical deep-dive but it’s a good enough overview. I was surprised that something as studied and reverse-engineered as the 10NES didn’t seem to come up with a “golden standard reference” article as the first google hit, not even on hackaday or eeevblog).
As an aside in respect of regional restrictions in history, then the era prior to railway time - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time would certainly see some regional locking in a way as local time varied. Then the whole utility market, surely beyond country variations has some aspect of restrictions.
In my opinion, the Turkish "Atari" is a sabotaged fork of the original Atari rather than a region locked console. I can yank open a bunch of Magnavox Odysseys and swap pins around in the console and in the cartridge but that doesn't mean the Oddyssey suddenly becomes region locked.
I was personally wondering if main reason for the the region lock was Meta wanting to lock out European games, or Atari wanting to lock out (cheaper?) Turkish games from the European market. Either side has reasons to want it.
I'd also kinda note that although not a direct region lock, AFAIK the way the 2600 handles video timing (generated by the game programme, not the video chip) would have basically mutually locked out 50Hz and 60Hz regions at the time, as 1980s TV usually didn't "multisync" (plus there are palette differences between PAL/NTSC/SECAM systems as well).
Are you an official Magnavox licensed distributor?
So this was an attempt by the company who was the legal distributor of Atari 2600 in Turkey to prevent 2500 games from elsewhere to work on their system. That sounds like a region lock to me even if it was easy to circumvent.
edit: this is a "cynically muttering to oneself."
lol, that's exactly right.