What was it like during the days of region locking via video game consoles for avid collectors?
I remember when the 3DS was region locked (cartridges can only be read if the console is bought in the same country those games are from) meaning it's a headache having to switch between two variants of the handheld (I had a Japanese 3DS XL and an American 3DS regular back then, alternating on each one depending on which game I wanted to play). The switch alleviated this by making the cartridges / console region free.
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For the most part I only bought imports on systems without region locking or ones where it was trivial to bypass the lock.
One of the main reasons I hacked my 3DS was to make it region free (and custom themes and game mods). That having been said, I have exactly one import game for the system (it's Picross 3D: Round 2 which received a physical release in Europe, but not North America).
My Dreamcast is a MIL-CD compatible model, so it's possible to get past the region locking with a burned CD-R. I don't have that many games for the system, but most of the ones I have are imports.
I remember being jealous of how America and Japan always got games months or even years ahead of us, and hoarded some amazing games Luke EarthBound and Final Fantasy for themselves.
Oh, and when I was little, my aunt and uncle bought me The Adventures of Rad Gravity when they were in France, because they knew I liked games. I wasn't able to play it because France was region B while Ireland got the UK overstock and so was region A.
But also, region locking was way less common than it might appear; as far as I know, the only consoles that had actual region locking were the 3DS and NES. What people now think of as region locking was actually a technological issue.
America and Japan use 60Hz AC electricity, while most of the rest of the world runs on 50Hz. Until the 2000s, CRT TVs' refresh rates were hard-synched to the electrical frequency, and would not display properly if plugged into the wrong socket. The upshot of this was that an NTSC game, designed for 60Hz TVs, would physically not work in a PAL or SECAM console which operated at 50Hz and vice versa. This wasn't specifically a game issue, by the way; VCRs and videos had the same compatibility issues.
In the DVD era, TVs started to appear which were compatible with 60Hz as well as 50Hz input. This was obviously handy for movies, which could be released as a single DVD all over the world. Video games started taking advantage of this; quite a few came with optional 60Hz modes, meaning you could play it slightly smoother and the way it was originally designed. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes caused a bit of a stir by operating in 60Hz mode only, so I and many others couldn't even play it without upgrading our TVs.
Nowadays, of course, we don't use PAL, SECAM, or NTSC; flat screen TVs can handle 60Hz input just fine, so games only need one version.
You're right about the incompatibility between NTSC and PAL, but deliberate region locking was common, even in the 8-bit era. It was very much the norm rather than the exception. Also, on older consoles they simply slowed the main CPU speed down for PAL so that everything in the system matched up with the video framerate. If you've ever read about how PAL versions of 8-bit and 16-bit games run slower than the NTSC versions, that's why. And it meant that you could plug out-of-region cartridges into your console, and if you could get around the region locking, they'd often work with minimal or no visual issues, just a little slower, because the video output was hardwired for PAL in the console. I played a few Japanese games on my PAL Mega Drive and SNES back in the day, on a PAL-only TV.
The PS1 and PS2 (both very much with region locking) had a weird thing going on where any console from any region could output both NTSC and PAL, depending on what the software asked for. I believe the GameCube and Dreamcast were similar; I ran original NTSC game discs on PAL versions of all of them.
In terms of what TVs would support, you're right that it wasn't until the late 1990s that fully dual-mode PAL/NTSC TVs started to become common, but that's not the same thing as 50Hz vs 60Hz. CRT TVs were designed to work best at a certain frequency, but they were also designed to cope with variations in the signal and power supply. Most PAL CRT TVs are actually capable of synching at 60Hz, which is where "PAL-60" comes in. PAL-60 is an unofficial "standard" in which the video signal runs at the NTSC framerate and vertical resolution, but with a PAL colour subcarrier. I used PAL-60 on many TVs, some produced as far back as the early 1980s, and never found one that wouldn't sync with it. I had a very inexpensive (Under AU$15 IIRC) NTSC-to-PAL-60 "converter" for the PS1/2 that I used to play NTSC games. You mentioned VCRs; there were VCRs that specifically played NTSC video cassettes as PAL-60. They weren't common, but they existed.
I remember when Metroid Prime 2 came out (I still have my copy) and there was indeed a small controversy in the gaming press about the PAL version being 60Hz only, but it was PAL-60, not NTSC, and I played the whole game on a PAL TV that definitely did not support NTSC, without any trouble.
For stuff like the SNES it wasn't a big deal. just open the console. cut out the plastic peg and you're playing Japanese SNES games. a grade school friend of mine at the time showed me this. His Dad travelled to Japan for business all the time and would bring back SNES games for him. His dad tried playing the games in the US SNES but noticed that the games wouldn't slide in correctly. then he saw that on US SNES cartridges there was a notch in all the cartridge cases while the Japanese cartridges didn't have this notch. Looked inside the console and sure enough there's a plastic peg sticking out that lined up with the US cartridges. so he figured "what if I remove the peg?" sure enough once the peg was cut out the US SNES could play Japanese SNES games. That was Nintendos region lock prevention, a plastic peg.
For the PS1 a local comic shop was selling chips for it. bought a chip, my dad took the PS1 and chip into work with him one day and got his buddy to solder it in for me. worked like a charm.
For the PS2 I just ended up importing a translucent blue PS2 from Japan. it was just easier that way.
For the Dreamcast literally just had to get a boot disc and you were good to go.
I remember I had to use an adapter to play US games on my PAL SNES to bypass the security chip. So the adapter has two slots one for the PAL Snes game for the security check and the other for the US or JP game you want to play.
Friends of mine got their Playstations chipped so they could play Japanese games
It was that, or what I did was have consoles from the other regions + stepdown power converters as needed.
Annoying and potentially expensive. The thing about region locks is, sometimes games were market specific. So the game only had one or two region variants available at all. As a result, you'd have to buy a region specific system to play them. I also seem to recall the possibility of bricking a system or disk/cartridge when putting it in the wrong region system so there's that. From a collection standpoint, if you only wanted to buy the systems and games and not play them, it was probably expensive but fine. Import fees and scarcity of special edition consoles may possibly have been extra pain points in the event that you had to have that region specific variant of a game or console.
Biggest headache is to make sure your country is following what region if you're not anywhere near those region. Like US region consist of the whole America(make sense), but for some reason also include Saudi Arabia and UAE(should be EU as it's closer), and Singapore and Malaysia(should be TW as it's asia and closer), while HongKong is with TW alongside Taiwan(where HongKong should be with CN but i guess this one makes sense as HK is autonomous region before the recent crackdown).
I feel like it affected collectors more than anything. Whenever I bought a game it was waaay easier to get a hold of PAL copies (my region) than any others. So I don't remember it ever being an issue