In that era , for me, it was primarily to get around region encoding.
We didn't officially have PlayStation in our country (India) at the time. The only way to get original games instead of pirated ones was to import, usually when a friend was traveling. But region locking was a curse.
I'm so glad region locking is pretty much dead. I believe the 3DS was the last mainstream region locked console? Which again was ridiculous given its the one people would take when traveling.
The 3DS also happens to have perhaps the most fruitful console homebrew scene in recent memory, having full on all-versions unpatchable exploits that are very simple to perform. I wonder if that's in some part the reason that Nintendo has moved away from region locking, given how absolutely trivial it was to bypass it on the 3DS.
We didn't officially have PlayStation in our country (India) at the time. The only way to get original games instead of pirated ones was to import, usually when a friend was traveling. But region locking was a curse.
I'm so glad region locking is pretty much dead. I believe the 3DS was the last mainstream region locked console? Which again was ridiculous given its the one people would take when traveling.