PAL vs NTSC: Why European Retro Games Ran Slower

By · October 30, 2026 · 6 min read

If you grew up playing a Mega Drive in the UK or a Super Nintendo in Australia, there's a good chance you played slower versions of your favourite games than players in America and Japan, without knowing it. It wasn't a bug or a cheap port. It came down to the television standards of the time.

Two kinds of television

Old televisions drew their picture a fixed number of times per second, and that number depended on where you lived:

  • NTSC, used in North America and Japan, refreshed at about 60 times a second (60Hz) with 525 lines.
  • PAL, used across most of Europe, Australia and elsewhere, refreshed at 50 times a second (50Hz) with 625 lines.

Consoles were wired to match the TVs in their market. Most games of the 8-bit and 16-bit era did their work once per screen refresh: move every character a little, play the next slice of music, check for collisions. A game written for 60 refreshes a second therefore ran at five sixths of its intended speed on a 50Hz PAL console, roughly 17% slower, unless the developers rewrote it.

What that meant in practice

  • Slower gameplay. Characters walked, jumped and fell more slowly. In a game like Sonic the Hedgehog, built around speed, the difference is easy to feel once you've played both.
  • Slower music. Soundtracks driven by the same timer played at a slower tempo.
  • Black borders. PAL's extra lines meant a taller picture. Games designed for NTSC often filled only part of it, leaving thick black bars at the top and bottom.

Not every game suffered. Some developers adjusted the speed for European releases, and others built their games for PAL first. But plenty of big releases shipped with the slowdown, and many European players only discovered it years later.

The fix arrives: PAL60

By the late 1990s most PAL televisions could also display a 60Hz signal. Consoles from the Dreamcast onwards began offering a choice, and many PAL Dreamcast games ask at start-up whether you'd like to play in 60Hz. If your TV handled it, you got the full-speed version.

Can you play an NTSC game on a PAL console?

Usually not out of the box. Besides the TV standard, most consoles also had region locking, which stops cartridges and discs from other regions working. That's a separate system with its own workarounds, covered in our guide to region locking and playing imported games.

Which version should you play today?

  • For the game as designed, play the NTSC version (or the PAL version in 60Hz mode where there is one). That's the speed the developers tuned the difficulty and music for.
  • For nostalgia, play what you grew up with. If the PAL speed is how you remember a game, the "correct" version can feel strangely fast. Neither choice is wrong.
  • Modern TVs handle both. Almost any current television accepts a 50Hz or 60Hz signal, and emulators let you choose the region of the game you load.

Official re-releases and collections often include both versions, and some let you switch. If a game you loved as a kid suddenly feels too quick, now you know why.

Not sure what to play? Let the Matrix pick

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