Hacker News Reader

Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of region locking was also one of the best things about most of the handheld consoles Nintendo released beforehand. The original Game Boy, the Game Boy Colour, the GBA and the Nintendo DS were all region free as well, and it likely helped their popularity a ton, especially given how it meant you could travel with the system and be sure any games you bought while away would work with it.

Those systems may not have had an eShop, but in the days before it, I suspect not having region locking was as helpful there too.

View on HN

I remember the lack of region lock being a boon for the GBA and DS. The game "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" was popular in Japan, but Nintendo refused to localize it. It became an import favorite in the West, driving up prices on eBay and the like. Nintendo took notice and eventually made Elite Beat Agents as a Western-tailored sequel / successor to it.

Additionally, when Phoenix Wright first got localized for the DS, the print run was very small. Someone realized that the English script was already embedded into the Japanese version of the game--you simply had to go to the language options and toggle a button to switch it to English. This made importing a popular option for people who couldn't find--or didn't want to wait--for the Stateside version. I remember vividly discussing with my brothers whether we wanted to "risk" waiting for the US edition and not being able to find one, or importing and having to deal with toggling the language at every startup.

Originally region locking was more a byproduct of TV's having different output standards (NTSC vs PAL). But we're talking back in the 8bit era (and to a lesser degree, 16bit as well).

Which might explain why most handhelds were never region locked.

I don't buy that. DVDs were region-locked with multiple PAL regions, later consoles which didn't have that problem were and are region locked.

It's about price differentiation between different regions.

Hence the "originally" part prefixing my post. I absolutely agree it later become a monetary thing (bare in mind DVDs came a long time after the time period I was discussing) but many early consoles didn't have region locking and some that did, did so because games timed for NTSC consoles would have ran slower on PAL systems due to the difference in refresh rates between PAL and NTSC (50Hz and 60Hz respectively). You can see this in effect whenever you play games on a modded Mega Drive (for example).

That all said, some NTSC games were still released for European markets without changing their timings. Sonic is one example of this - it runs slower, the music plays slower etc. For that reason I usually play Sonic on NTSC console rather than the PAL one (yeah, I have a whole room full of old computers and games consoles. It's sad but I love it).

> It's about price differentiation between different regions.

I thought the DVD region locking had to do with the old school movie distribution rights systems that were in place. i.e. Fox would sell the rights to their movies to multiple companies in different regions for redistribution outside of North America. Allowing a person in one region to buy a DVD from anywhere would mean that those regional rights holders would otherwise lose money on their investments.

Region locking tended to occur between the US and Japan frequently, despite them both using NTSC.

Indeed. Though that was sometimes used to switch languages. eg the same Streets of Rage Genesis cart will display English text when the console is set to NTSC-US but would display Japanese text when set to NTSC-J

I always guessed (a guess not based on facts) that it had more to do with music licensing rules and how those work geographically, since most games have music?

Music was generally composed by an employee until the CD era, so the licensing rules would be basically the same as the game art.

The 8bit region locking was started by Nintendo, and it was trying to combat piracy and unlicensed games. The Famicom released without protection in 83, but they changed it internationally as a response to the video game crash.

>it likely helped their popularity a ton, especially given how it meant you could travel with the system and be sure any games you bought while away would work with it.

Surely this is quite a minor feature. I think it's unlikely that it helped their popularity "a ton".

My GameBoy Colour was originally from a Japanese exchange student that stayed with my family. It was originally from Japan, with a Japanese copy of Pokemon Gold, and it had no issue playing any of the NA games that I put in it.

It is however technically against the ToS to buy digital games from a different region than the one you are a citizen of, but that's not MS/Sony/Nintendo/Valve cares to enforce until nations tell them to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com