ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Please Refrain from Modifying Your Ataris”: Region Locking and Vernacular Engineering in Türkiye

• In Event: Peripheries of Power: The Political Economy of Technological Transfer in Late Cold War Europe

English Abstract

This paper investigates how early video gaming in Türkiye produced competing technological imaginaries and plural epistemic worlds during the turbulent post-1980 liberalization period. As global consumer electronics entered the country through formal import channels, suitcase trade, and extensive gray markets, the locally assembled ME-TA Atari 2600 introduced one of the earliest documented hardware-based region lock-in systems. This mechanism restricted users to a catalogue of thirteen sanctioned game cartridges and attempted to impose a centralized regime of technological control. Instead of stabilizing market conditions, the lock-in system generated contested forms of knowledge and practice. Users confronted incompatible hardware, improvised solutions, and ambiguous claims regarding the legitimate use of gaming technologies.

Drawing on advertisements, hardware schematics, press archives, and oral histories, the paper reconstructs how Turkish users, technicians, and electronics workers circumvented these restrictions through rewiring, soldering, cartridge modification, and the installation of compatibility switches. These practices illustrate a vernacular engineering culture that operated parallel to, and often in defiance of, corporate expertise. They also reveal how global gaming systems were reshaped within local political economies defined by rapid liberalization, scarcity, and uneven access.

By analyzing the ME-TA Atari 2600 within the broader transformations of Türkiye’s post-coup technological landscape, the chapter argues that early gaming cultures functioned as sites where technological authority was negotiated rather than simply received. The case demonstrates how locally situated forms of adaptation, bricolage, and repair contested corporate narratives of technological standardization and produced alternative pathways of computing knowledge that complicate linear histories of video game diffusion and digital modernization.

Author

• Ivo Ozan Furman, Istanbul Bilgi University