this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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They're not even connected to the internet. Why would region matter?
DVD players used to be (probably still are?) region locked, and those didn't require internet service either. The region was either hard coded or could only be changed like 5 times.
It was an attempt to enforce geographic licensing fees and stop piracy.
Yeah, if media companies can torture consumers they will usually try to. See also the Sony Rootkit.
In that light it's actually surprising that the Gameboys never had region locking.
Regional game releases were language limited
Yeah, I have not given Sony a dime since they thought they could install malware on consumer computers. When they got caught, they doubled down and released a "fix" that was even worse malware. FUCK Sony.
For some media formats there were legitimate issues.
For instance, American NTSC encoding's 30fps (29.97 actually, but not diving into color encoding right now) refresh rates were due to the 60Hz American electrical grid, whereas PAL encoding's 25fps was due to a 50Hz electrical grid.
It's also why American tvs showing a panning shot of a film (24fps) or a European TV program will sometimes look choppy. They added filler frames when re-encoding for NTSC.
You wouldn't be able to play American cartridges on a Japanese one if they were region locked. I ran into that with a dvd drive in my PC once. It's not checking anything online, it was something on the disc/drive.
The GBA was region free, but Nintendo was region locking their consoles from the start. For example, the n64 is capable of playing games from any region, but the Japanese games had different tabs, and wouldn't fit in a US console without modding the slot.
PS2 was region locked as well, although you had the possibility for a network upgrade I never had that extention.
My father brought over Crash Bandicoot from the states one day and it had a red label instead of the black/blue one we had in the EU and completely refused to play on our PS2.
Nintendo did it to control their three markets separately. JP games came earlier and Nintendo carefully planned when games were available in each market. They also did it cause some regions were cheaper and they didn't want anyone not paying NintendoTax™.
People will argue Switch 2 isn't region locked, but I'll be fucked if Japanese only language in JP Switch 2 isn't a region locking mechanism. That thing is half off in Japan compared to EU. Maybe its not a traditional lock but they're doing selective exclusion.