Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I bought the original Gameboy on launch week. A couple of years later I bought a bootleg cart that was like 100-in-1 games.

I still have the Gameboy, but I don't know where that cart is.

I don't think I had a PC game that wasn't pirated. Literally everyone shared PC games. There used to be programs that would crack the copyright protection codes when they tried to use those little discs in the early 90s.

Console game piracy existed, but it was super rare until the PS1 era. PS1 kind of fell into the same timeframe that cd burners started becoming more common in the household, especially as the millennium approached. Once those mod chips showed up, it was a piracy explosion. PS2 onwards was a little harder to crack, so it wasn't as popular as PS1 piracy.

When the world started commonly getting online in the late 90s, that's when the ROMs and the emulation scene started appearing. I think I discovered emulation sometime in 1997. It has been around for a little bit, but was just becoming a bit more widespread at that time.

A couple of interesting reads:

https://thenvm.org/exhibitions/piracy/

https://www.ifixit.com/News/42453/five-weird-ways-old-games-tried-to-prevent-copying

I had a pack that plugged into the back of my ps1 and a spring that held the door open and the door button down. You placed a boot disc in and let the Playstation logo go by, this was the DRM of that system. After that you could put in the cdr that you burned from Hollywood video(fuck block the Buster) and it would play like a normal purchase game.

In conclusion: 90% of my collection was "pirated".

Note: This device also let me play games from the Japanese market like the Dragon Ball Ultimate Battle 22. As you unlocked characters the title card would change the number. Pretty cool for the 90s.

I remember growing up, one of my dads friend ran like a pirated blockbuster. We would go to his house, and he just had bootleg movies on vhs, ps1 games, music, anything you wanted.

I remember it like it was wall up and wall down in every room of the apartment, but thats probably just my childhood memory version lol.

I remember getting my first ps1 for Christmas, already chopped (something you had to do before it could play pirates games, i dunno) and going to this guys place to pick out games.

None of the games had covers, they just came on cd's, with the title written on the disc. And like i was 7 or 8 years old, i didnt know any games, so i just picked a bunch of randoms, and my dad made sure to get a few known titles like Tekken 3 and Crash Bandicoot for me.

He even rented out pirated movies too, lol. This guy had it figured out.

I used to go to a computer club

I was one of "those" kids. This was during the height of the Commodore Amiga, the most beautiful piece of hardware I've ever owned. It was magical

Those computer clubs were on paper all about teaching, exchanging ideas, showing off hardware, etc

In reality, when you'd enter the room, there would be hundreds of Amiga computers running xcopy, copying one floppy disk after another. Everyone had their floppy boxes open, I had a few hundred 3.5" disks, in a Feib boxes. People would just walk by, rummage through my collection, take what they wanted to copy, and bring it all back later.

Everything was super respectful and so so so much fun. It was every last (or first?) Saturday of the month, and if look forward to it for weeks

Piracy was life at that time. I had no idea where to buy games, I barely realized that people would pay for software. I had zero money anyway, I would never buy anything because I didn't have the money

It was a magical time and I yearn for it

In reali

When I was at college in the early 90s, PC game piracy was rife. Disks were changing hands every day at college :-) Before that, I had an Acorn Electron with disk drive and we'd be swapping BBC and Electron games at school regularly, too. It was handy that my Electron ran many BBC Micro games with no trouble :-)

I was a Mac girl back in the 90’s and there were not many of my friends who also used Macs, so pirating was not much of a thing until I discovered emulators. I really enjoy NES games particularly Super Mario Bro’s 1 and 3 so I had emulators to play those. My parents would not let us get a system until I was in like high school, but I also became disabled before grade 8 so I got a Windows laptop and let me tell you did I ever pirate stuff then, in the early 2000’s.

Then I grew a conscience thinking artists made money from sales of their music, and I started paying for stuff. I understand things so much differently now a days, so I have gone back to the high seas!

Everyone I knew with a PS1 had a mod chip in it to play copied games. Cracks and CD-keys for PC games were everywhere online. It was dummy easy to do even before Napster or Kazaa, but those things definitely accelerated it. I remember people in college having pirated copies of photoshop, mathematica, and autocad because they needed them for classes and didn't have $600-$1000 to shell out on software on top of books - I know that isn't games, but the principle of pirating them was pretty similar at the time.

I never heard of pirating NES/SNES/Genesis back then, so I don't think it was very common. Renting was pretty cheap, and you could always trade or borrow games with friends. We didn't get a computer until the late 90s when the WWW was taking off, but yeah, pirating games is probably one of the first things I did. Downloading a large number of RAR files from warez sites over dial-up, taking multiple days, IIRC. And ROMs and emulation. Someone in my school would put cracked PC games on a shared network drive, so you could play them in the library. Later, I went to a technology focused high school, and we'd all play (cracked) Half-Life or Unreal Tournament multiplayer before class started every day (usually with the teacher).

PC? All the time. NES/SNES? I bought the carts; I was never aware of any other method in the 90’s as a kid.

it was easier it just took longer and less common only because many people just didn't know about it or even how to to do it.

Take for example the SNES. the thing was region free. yup, you could play SNES games from Japan, Europe, etc on a US SNES quite easily. how? well there was a notch in the US SNES that you would have to cut out or sand down. that's it. that was Nintendos region lock and anti piracy measure. a plastic notch. pirating games was word of mouth type stuff. Someone knew someone or knew a place you could mail away for games etc. A friend of a friend's cousin in some random college dorm room had a t1 line and could rip the games from the internet OR had one of those special carts like for the N64 that could rip games when you plugged a cart into it. OR you'd go to a flea market and hope you got lucky that ONE dude would show up with all his warez/pirated stuff that you could score for dirt cheap.

For the PSX it was a bit harder as you had to get a mod chip and solder that into the board in order to turn your console region free and pirate stuff. So you had to find someone that sold the chips and then install it yourself. luckily for me a local comic book shop actually sold them. But it was stuff like that, in most cases word of mouth to find the stuff.

Dreamcast was a hell of a lot easier. literally download and burn to disc, that's it. but again this was '99/00 and most people were still on dialup so it took time. I'd get all my dreamcast games via IRC channels which mean a direct IP2IP connection to someone to download the stuff directly from them. So you had to ask them first if it was ok. Warez on the PC pretty much worked the same way. There were plenty of Warez sites but finding the good and honest ones took time. again a lot of asking on IRC.

I had a neighbor that had a big reader on top of his n64 that took those zip disks. I remember being extremely jealous.

We pirated heaps of PS1 and PC games at the time. I remember my school cleaner running a PS1 chipping business on the side. Great times

Using the "torrenting" to mean both physically copying something and downloading is fucking me up.

But yeah, in the US, pirated cartridge games weren't really a thing.

For PC games, it was stupid easy to copy a game and give it to a friend. Copy protection for floppy games was usually just like "look up the 5th word in paragraph 3 on page 16 of the manual" which was easily defeated with a photocopier. And if you were on BBSes, you could gain access to the "private" file section or just find a pirate board. The limitations in hardware made it time consuming, but doable. Having a dedicated phone line was a huge boon.

And then you get into CD based games, broadband, stronger copy protection ... And that hasn't really changed a whole lot. Where there's a will, there's a way.

But man, the entire PC industry in the 80s was built on and thrived on piracy. If sharing programs and games hadn't been so common and easy, what would the home market have looked like? Would Doom have secured the same space it now occupies? Would Windows have become the prominent UI?

For pc, very. I spent hours downloading rips of games off a BBS. One of the few games I bought was duke nukem 3d and that's just because I wanted the build level editor that I couldn't find a download of.

For consoles, less so. I had a pirated "100 in 1" nes cart of from China but all the games were crap. Cartridge copying wasn't a thing.

I vaguely remember a n64 device that could load cartridge images off a zip drive or something. Nobody had one though.

Piracy became bigger again when the ps1 mod chip came out and we had brand new cd burners. Dreamcast too.

My grandpa and I would go to the video store , hire out a bunch of overnighter ps1 games, go home, copy them all, go back to drop off the ones we got earlier that day and grab the rest, go home copy those and return the others again, we did this every time they got new games.

IRC, ftp, bbs, usenet were huge. Torrents didn't exist yet. Piracy was rampant.

There was a pirate scene even in the 80s, during the 8-bit computer era. Transferring games to floppy from a 300 baud modem.

Parents had a good friend of theirs that gave us a ton of games every time he visited. Most of them were game selection startup menus, because the uploaders wanted to use up all of the space on the floppy, so they crammed it up with 6-8 games each. You can still find these disk copies on certain C64/ATARI XL game torrents.

All the while SPA was still pushing anti-piracy commercials on PBS channels. "Don't copy that floppy" was always their silly tagline.

And yea, once Napster turned into a household name, piracy was mainstream.

In Australia in the 90s, you would get your PS1 modded to play pirated discs for about $40, and then when your weird uncle came back from his third Bali trip of the year, he’d bring you about 100 pirated games and 1000 pirated movies that he bought for $10. I think I owned 3 legitimate PS1 games back then.

Common enough that they made a silly rap song about copying floppy disks https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI

I remember the IRC channels where you would interact with channel bots to have them list what they had available. You'd make a selection, possibly end up in a queue, and then start downloading at 56k.

Honestly, none of it felt like or was treated as piracy. You were just sharing games (a physical thing you lent your friend). Even the game manual anti-piracy stuff was just treated like something you needed to work around. Your friends would just write down a few examples (like pg 43, line 26, word 12 = "punisher") and just retry until that question was asked.

It didn't really exist. There were "backup" devices that coat about $700 on today's money, and backed games carts up to floppies.

Wildly impractical and now I wish I had one.

As a child in the 90ies I did not know you could buy games, the only way I knew was to copy it from a friend.

Later my cousin traveled to Poland where he bought pirated floppy disks, this is how I realized that you could somehow pay to get access to many new games.

Those were the days!

NES and SNES games fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, and there were piratey disk drive peripherals that you could insert into the cartridge slots on those systems. The peripheral had a cartridge slot on top, so you inserted the cartridge, copied the game to floppy, or floppies, and gave those to your friends, as they gave you their copies. You could rent game cartridges from video stores.

PS1 games you just installed a modchip and then you could play CD-R copies of game disks

PS2 they had the flip top cases, and "magic disc" that was a special disk printed with the "official authentication code" but then ran a program to stop the drive, allowing you to lift up the lid, then press a button to load whatever game was on the CD-R/DVD-R copy.

For PC Games there was the mighty GameCopyWorld that allowed you to patch games to bypass CD/DVD disc checks. If you had the right tools, you could make your own virtual CD, bypassing the risk of viruses from rando downloading.

Even before that, people could write fully working games by hand, and shareware was fully functional before it all became crippleware or nagware.

These days, you can't play tic-tac-toe without the game connecting to a server, and forcing you to log in after watching 30 minutes of ads, and that's after you've paid your monthly subscription fee.

My uncle was an electrical engineer back in the day and our family would get hand-me-down PC's, and every DOS game I ever played as a kid was pirated. I'm guessing my uncle would get them on BBS or something it's that far back. I was 10 in 1993, and I remember struggling with Leisure Suit Larry (which, because one needed to type in English taught me a great deal! Including the "prove-you're-an-adult quiz" to even get into it). I also remember thinking how easy Civilization 1 was but it turns out I was playing with a "trainer" the whole time and could just pump out units at near 0 cost 😄. But as a kid I didn't know any better.
In 1996 I bought my own PC, AMD K2 200mhz, 3 GB HDD and who knows how many ram, but only a measly Matrox 2D card to begin with, and yep, even then a lot of the games were pirated, and a few years later, probably 1998 I got my first CD-rom drive which just made piracy even easier. A friend from school had a dad who would get pirated games, almost like it was linux distributions. Most of these CD-rom's would be repackaged games without cutscenes but with custom installers with music. It's how I got into Blümchen at the peak age of 15.
Then in 1999 I began going to a local computer club which was mostly a way to play LAN games with friends and share pirated stuff and use a faster dedicated internet connection. Oh and lots of LAN parties were if course had from around 1998 and onwards into the mid 00s, which is how I was introduced to anime like Rurouni Kenshin (aka Samurai X for y'all yanks (why?!)). And then home internet got good enough that one could pirate at home and LAN's began falling off after the mid-00s.

As for consoles, I never pirated. I went from Sega Master System to Sega Game Gear (gifted to my brother and I from a German family that my parents were friends with) to Sony Playstation. And funnily enough I never played any pirated games on any of these consoles, but that's also why I stuck with PC from there on afterwards, with the exception of a PS3 in 2011 which I never really played on..

It was the golden age of piracy I think, just when broadband internet is started to grow and writeable CDs became cheap.

torrents were small back then, and everyone downloaded games / programs zipped in 10-20 zip partitions.

Dreamcast and Genesis were not very popular. Most people had an n64 or ps1, most people did not have a dreamcast or genesis. To my knowledge, torrents did not exist in the 90s. Downloading games was prohibitively bandwidth expensive, you were lucky enough to download a single image in the 90s. Digital music piracy didn't really catch on until 2001. Hell, digital music didn't even catch on until 2001.

Pirates existed, but it was extremely rare. Most people knew it existed for consoles, but most people didn't do it.

It really wasn't until DSL and cable broadband internet connections to the home made downloading a game remotely feasible that piracy was really even possible. Keep in mind, even piracy is a kind of market, and if nobody's buying, it would be foolish to be a seller. This stuff HAS existed, definitely, as long as time has been a thing, but buying bootleg copies from a dealer wasn't popular in the 90s to my knowledge, in MOST circles, or at least in any that I was in. It was like.... In The 2000s when buying porn magazines was viewed as cringe and only for old people. Bootleg copies existed - people buying porno mags existed - but it was wildly unpopular and being replaced by waaaayyyyy cheaper and more convenient methods, or not at all.

Also, mod-chipping a console as a kid was too risky and not worth it, so most people just only had a few games and watched tv and played in other ways, like using your imagination, possibly with friends, possibly even oUtSiiiDe~ oooOOOOoooohhhh~