10 Video Game Traditions That Are Dead And Buried
5. Chipped Consoles
Hearing your friend had the new Final Fantasy you’d both seen in the magazines was exciting… hearing he’d gotten a hold of an American copy a few months early was something else entirely.
Chipped consoles had numerous uses and were controversial from the get-go. Playing games from other regions was massive, especially in the UK where players would often wait six months or more for a game to arrive. There was also the ability to play copied versions of titles, avoiding the RRP and opening players up to a library of illegally sourced games.
Clearly, this was the most alarming thing as this relatively easy tweak to most consoles of the 1990s was eating into potential profits. Considering modding was as simple as removing a protection chip in most cases, industry heads could do very little except warn that the practice was potentially damaging to your hardware.
The practice kept going for many console generations, morphing over time, with Freeloader discs and homebrew software even into the days of the Nintendo Wii. Once more, it was the reliance of the internet that brought the change. With consoles being connected 24/7, it meant that fixes to these mods could be rolled out very quickly.