In 85 we were phone phreaking to get free long distance so we could dial up a bbs in California to illegally download the game Paperboy.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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The main reason we didn't have scalpers was that there was no way to sell these games on.
There were no online auctions until the tail end of the 90s, and even then virtually nobody trusted them. There was no digital payment - you had to send cash, cheque or postal order in an envelope. There was no Facebook. Essentially there was no way to sell to a large audience.
There was no digital payment - you had to send cash, cheque or postal order in an envelope.
Usa over there? ;-)
Here we had reliable money transfers through the banking system (very affordable, provable) for decades earlier, and it was made accessible online in the 80s, long before the www was invented.
UK 🙂
Heck, that would have been tons easier! I remember the dread of seeing the seller say they don't accept cheques, and having to hoof down to the Post Office to pick up those stupid Postal Orders.
The closest things we had back then was USENET (which required you to already have a connection to a provider that hosted a server) and BBS's (which required you to dial in to connect to a local server, which proabably did not have its own USENET connection). I suppose there was also Compuserve, and QuantumLink/AOL, but they were metered dial-in providers, and when they finally connected to USENET, they ruined it.
There was no concept of a device that was always connected to the Internet in the 80s for most users. Most home computers were islands. Maybe if you were on a University campus you might have access to a computer with that permanent wired connection, but that was about it.
My kids have grown up in a world where everyone is connected, all the time. We'll see what they do with it.
There was no concept of a device that was always connected to the Internet in the 80s for most users.
I knew people who used "finger" on unix like systems for same purpose as people use a "status" today (ok without pictures because of low bandwidth)
It seems like some people are maybe thinking of the 80s here. Console games were big business, popular, and widespread from the NES onward, at least among younger audiences.
You didnt see many scalpers mostly because there was less random zero day hype. You got your video game ads in a magazine, so if a game had big hype it was because the publisher had spent big on marketing, which meant they had printed a shit ton of launch day copies, and there would be pallets of them sitting at your local Best Buy, Walmart, Circuit City, etc.
Not sure, but my experience is when I was a kid my parents told me later on that they couldn't really afford to get me a console, but they were able to get one for a fraction of the price by buying one off the back of a truck which was a lot more common back then for lower income neighborhoods. Lots of stolen goods sold locally that way as long as you had the hookup. As for games the only thing I remember was in the 90s some of my asian friends had some awesome toys from chinatown. They had this adapter that plugged into the snes and it played games that were on cards which were basically copied roms so you didnt have to buy full games anymore. My mind was blown at the time. Idk about scalpers, but this was what I remember for that market at the time.
Zero scalpers in my town.
Bought Half-Life on release day, by walking in to a store.
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If anyone would try to sell a boxed copy secondhand, there is no way to tell if the CD key had been widely disseminated, and therefore would be worthless.
Video games were less popular (less demand, mostly restricted to nerds), etc. The PlayStation changed that mentality a bit, but it was not the 90s anymore.
The Playstation changed the demographic, but it was towards an older audience.
Sony's marketing team realised that while kids only got given consoles and games on special occasions, adults can just buy them whenever.
It's the classic disruption technique - in a saturated market, find an underserved audience and lean into it hard.
I don't remember lines in front of stores. I would split the decade roughly into two halves. The first half was one person buying a game that came on 15 floppy disks and a million people of friends and friends of friends and their friends would copy it. The second half was more about CD-ROMs but we figured out how to copy those two. In the background Nintendo was picking up steam and then PS. But for my money console gaming was still a bit of a niche business in the first half for sure. The geeks were excited but it wasn't a mass phenomenon.
People stood in line to buy Windows 95 though. Imagine that. People stood in line waiting to give their money voluntarily to Microsoft. I'm sure there were scalpers there as well. In my memory that was more impactful than any game release.
The only time I heard of a line for a video game was one of the WoW expansions, but I never played those games. I guess it made some sense because, being a live service game, there was an element of value attached to how soon you got access to a shared world.
I remember a guy would show up at our house every now and then with the most random shit including game consoles and sell it to us at a low price. We lived in very low income government housing.
As an adult I now realize my family was purchasing stolen goods 😹
We did everything in the 90s. Even if I don't know what you mean :)
I believe they’re referring to buying up all of the copies of the hot new game or console, then reselling them above MSRP to make a profit in a time of scarcity.
I don’t remember scarcity being as much of a problem back then, nor was demand high enough for scalping to be common. It might have been less legal, too. As far as tickets to sporting events and concerts, back then it was illegal to resell them for more than face value in my state. That changed 10-15 years ago thanks to lobbying from Ticketmaster and affiliates.
As far as tickets to sporting events and concerts, back then it was illegal to resell them for more than face value in my state. That changed 10-15 years ago thanks to lobbying from Ticketmaster and affiliates.
I think that it was the other way round for games. Laws have been developing all the time towards advantages for copyright owners.
Most people tried to get software (games) for free rather than paying more :) but as I said, everything was done back then.