Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series
"Attention Users, Please Refrain from Modifying Your Ataris": Corporate Region-Locking Practices and Creative Computing Responses in Türkiye
- Ivo Furman
- Date
- Thursday 10 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- What's New?! Spring Lecture Series 2025
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.30
Home computers and video game consoles began arriving in Türkiye shortly after the economic liberalization program announced on the 24th of January 1980. With this program, the Turkish state abandoned its import-substitution industrial development model, encouraging private enterprise and investment from abroad. All restrictions on international trade were lifted and imported consumer goods flooded the Turkish market. Taking advantage of the new economic regime, Atari Inc. was one of the first companies to arrive, striking a deal with a local electronics company (Meta Elektronik Endüstri, ME-TA) in 1984 to produce and distribute licensed Atari 2600 consoles in Türkiye. The Atari 2600 consoles produced in the ME-TA’s Istanbul factory would be distributed throughout Türkiye using the Shaub-Lorenz sales network. The company also sold localized Turkish language versions of popular Atari games such as Pacman (Dobişko), Space Invaders (Uzay Korsanları) and Missile Defence (Füze Savaşları).
At the time of the license sale, Atari Inc. was facing significant losses due to the video game crisis of 1983. The Warner Bros management had begun to break up Atari Inc into pieces. After a few weeks of ME-TA's electronic console production, the home computing and game console divisions of Atari Inc. were sold to Jack Tramiel, the famed founder of Commodore International. Tramiel renamed Atari Inc. to Atari Corporation, while Warner Bros. retained the arcade division, renaming it Atari Games. Under these conditions, ME-TA continued production and implemented a special hardware modification to limit the consoles to only play games manufactured by ME-TA. This limitation, applied by ME-TA, making consoles exclusively compatible with ME-TA manufactured games, stands out as one of the first hardware-based region-locking implementations in the world, predating Nintendo's region-locking feature on NES games by a year.
Despite the initial promise and aggressive marketing, ME-TA's attempt to control the Turkish video console market through region-locking proved unsustainable. The local consumer base, savvy and resourceful, found creative ways to bypass these restrictions, leading to widespread modification of consoles. To push back at this worrisome trend, ME-TA began running adverts in national newspapers warning users about the dangers of modifying Atari consoles. Yet ME-TA's efforts to curb this trend through advertising warnings were ultimately futile. The company's inability to adapt to the consumer's demands led to the cessation of console production within a mere two years. Nevertheless, until the company’s bankruptcy in 1994, ME-TA continued to import and market various Atari ST models in Türkiye.
The story of ME-TA and the region-locked Atari 2600 consoles remains a fascinating chapter in Türkiye’s video game history, illustrating how corporate, profit-motivated technological fixes can lead to unintended (and undesired) consequences.
About the speaker
Ivo Furman is currently a visiting fellow at Leiden University Institute of Area Studies and associate professor of New Media at Istanbul Bilgi University’s Faculty of Communication. He completed his PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015. His research has been supported by numerous institutions including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education, Turkish Science and Technology Foundation (TUBITAK) and Stiftung Mercator. He is the co-editor and co-author of “Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey”, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. He is also management committee member and grant awarding coordinator for “Grassroots of Digital Europe: from Historic to Contemporary Cultures of Creative Computing” (GRADE), a 4 year research grant funded by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST). He is currently working on a book about computer magazines in Turkey during the pre-Internet era.
His research interests include digital sociology, creative computing histories, computational methodologies and Turkish studies.
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