this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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How common was video game piracy in the 90s? (piefed.social)
submitted 2 weeks ago by SilentStriker@piefed.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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This is during the era when the N64, PS1, SNES, Dreamcast or Sega Genesis were popular. Games back then were released physically via disc or cartridge, meaning distributors or publishers would've implemented anti-piracy (like Lenslok) measures onto physical copies but some knew how to tamper with anti-piracy if they have a computer using other sources of capturing data (floppy disks).

Also, games at the time were 'simple' to torrent but with a catch (dial up was still a thing at the time meaning downloads could take a while if you have a PC). Discs were more straight forward than "torrenting" cartridges (unless you have connections with the manufacturer on smuggling circuit boards). Like with movies, games that came on discs were "torrented" through CDs by using a PC.

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[–] BogeyTheSwear@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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 chipped (something you had to do before it could play pirated 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.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

We had a little pirate movie ring going in college - this was in the UK in the 90s and there were certain films that were banned that you couldn't get, like Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Reservoir Dogs etc. Someone somehow had access to Swedish satellite TV and so had shitty VHS copies of them with Swedish subtitles, so we had a counterfeit ring going that passed around 3rd-generation VHS copies of all these banned films.

Then DVD arrived and all these movies were just released on regular DVD so it destroyed our whole operation lol. The Exorcist was the first movie I bought on DVD.