Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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 :-)

For my Spectrum I didn't really need to. Magazines gave away several free full games every month on the covertape, and most games were like £2.99.

For my Amiga, fuck yeah I pirated everything because the games were £25 a pop and fuck that when you're 14 years old and you have a mate who can copy you anything for 50p a disk.

Since becoming an adult, with a job, I just buy games. I've got much more money than energy and time, so I'm a lot pickier about what I play.

I don't remember seeing pirated stuff before Dreamcast / PS1, although to be fair, I was at a lot of PC conventions back then grabbing freeware disks and stuff, so I probably saw a lot of pirated stuff without knowing what I was looking at, just by virtue of being too young to be into the pirating / modding community.

Very common, but internet access from home wasn't as common so if someone wasn't curious enough or didn't have friends/relatives who knew about the matter it would be a myth to them. Videogame companies like Nintendo didn't talk about it that much back then, and copyright notices on VHS tapes and CDs made it sound like something out of a gangster movie.

Games and software for PC where commonly cracked and shared among my friends and I back in those days. We started a 8 person Quake II clan with one legit copy of the game.

It wasn't common at all for consoles outside of emulation which wasn't as polished or ubiquitous as it is now. I remember spending hours trying to get a Super Nintendo emulator to run a Chrono Trigger rom correctly. We heard about custom mod chips for Playstation that you let you play Japanese games and copied games but we thought it was elite hacker shit and never bothered.

For my copy of "The incredible machine" I had a copy protection challenge page in the manual, the game gave you a challenge phrase and you had to enter the proper password. I think different game versions also existed for which you needed a different manual. Goal was to make it harder to just copy the floppy disks, you also had to remember to copy and print the paper, which was an additional hurdle.

Later, I also had lots of burned CDs from friends with games on them.

I'd say the piracy was mostly real life friends sharing their games with each other (which, since everyone knows different people, was quite a big network), which yes, still made it common and quite a problem for publishers.

not common, but cheating was pretty common with gameshark on consoles. starting 2010s is when things started taking off like homebrew for 3ds and what not.

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!

I remember buying cd with 5-15 pc games on it (depending size ) for like 5$ that i choose from a printed warez list it’s was really easy or just downloading a crack so we could install a game on multiple pc from only one copy it was the good day

On the pc and c64 it was pretty easy. Are we also talking about how everyone ran the WinZip eval?

Bible Games - Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)

Aaaah, the PS1. I have a good memory of visiting my cousin in Mexico City, where he told me he had someone tinker with his PS1 so he could play pirated games. Next time I visited, I brought my PS1 and it worked!

Back in my days, all my PS1 and PS2 games are pirated. I never have Xbox, but I'm sure they're pirated as well. Basically all CD/DVD based ones are.

I don't think the ROM based cartridges are pirated tho, as they're mask ROM, for which you'd need a semiconductor facility to create.

I had a disc with Roller Coaster Tycoon burnt onto it.

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~

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.

Around that time, my uncle was paying a boy in his school to give him a physical drive containing a bunch of pirated games every month

Very common. Mostly PC games. It was much more decentralized as internet access was almost nil. So we had BBS's (google it if you don't know what that is). At the time a BBS would typically have better transfer speeds than internet would.

I used to get pirated Amiga games via snail mail for $5 a disc in the eighties. A friend and I would do a joint order, and then make an extra copy for each other once they arrived.

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).

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.

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.