Videogame companies would often license their consoles for sale in countries in which they either couldn't or didn't want to sell directly. For example the Sega

Videogame companies would often license their consoles for sale in countries in which they either couldn't or didn't want to sell directly. For example the Sega Master system in Brazil and the NES and SNES in South Korea. So this was an attempt by the company who was the legal distributor of Atari 2600 in Turkey to prevent 2500 games from elsewhere to work on their system. That sounds like a region lock to me even if it was easy to circumvent.