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Money for nothing
Thanks to the regional coding to play any of this foreign bounty, you needed two things. Firstly a good deal of money, as buying imports was expensive, and a Games Converter.
It was the time of the importer, when vast amounts of money were being made by specialist independent retailers who charged small fortunes for import games from Japan and the US. They were also the only means of getting the converters to play said games. The back of games magazines in the early nineties were awash with adverts for mail order companies that would remove you from the sad sack world of waiting for official releases and make you a cool import gamer.
It was, in short, a license to print money. It was also, to be fair, a lot of fun.
Few things beat going into a games shop in the heart of the city, gazing with greedy eyes at the strange boxes of import games. Even having Games shop versions of ‘Comic Book guy ‘sneering at you for your inability to understand enough kenji to play the latest Japanese RPG hit couldn’t take away the joy . Being part of the import set, at the beginning at least, made you feel special.
We hardly ever got the best Japanese RPG's and when we did it was waayyy after the fact
There was nothing worse than just shifting through back of magazines, in the imported games classifieds creating wish lists, cursing the inventor of the PAL standard. Game converters were our way of breaking out of the cycle of being last to play everything.
A Square Peg in a Round Hole
Game cartridges, depending on which market they were released in, were of different shapes. The North American model had a rectangular bottom that had inset grooves which when inserted complemented the console's shape whereas the Japanese, Korean, and PAL cartridges had a smoothed curve on the front of the cartridges with no inset grooves. Since the North American console has protruding grooves, the Japanese/PAL cartridges could not be inserted without the removal of these grooves and North American cartridges being completely rectangular could not fit into the slightly curved opening of the Japanese and PAL console units. In addition to that, Nintendo and Sega employed regional lock chips that prevented Japanese and US carts from working in PAL consoles.
Game cartridges, depending on which market they were released in, were of different shapes. The North American model had a rectangular bottom that had inset grooves which when inserted complemented the console's shape whereas the Japanese, Korean, and PAL cartridges had a smoothed curve on the front of the cartridges with no inset grooves. Since the North American console has protruding grooves, the Japanese/PAL cartridges could not be inserted without the removal of these grooves and North American cartridges being completely rectangular could not fit into the slightly curved opening of the Japanese and PAL console units. In addition to that, Nintendo and Sega employed regional lock chips that prevented Japanese and US carts from working in PAL consoles.
Three classes. Guess who came last?
Fight The Power
 With a game converter players could plug the device into the SNES (either version) and then place a game that would normally not run on that particular SNES unit (e.g. a rectangular cartridge that would not run in the SNES unit designed for round cartridges) into the top. Then, into the back or behind the first cartridge, the player would insert another game that would work on this SNES unit. The adaptor would read the game from the main port and use the regional lockout chip programming from the back one. While it was the games that made the 16 bit era a golden time for gamers, without game converters we in the UK couldn’t have enjoyed many of the games. Or at least we’d have had to wait a long time for them.
 The coming of the internet and the arrival 32 bit CD based gaming pretty much killed of both the need for the converters and the lucrative import market, but the humble converter will always hold a place in gamers hearts. It was the way we beat the system and stuck it to the man!
Written by Sam Bandah
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