Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Early 90s the pirate BBS scene was still going strong. You could dial in and tie up your phone line for days at a time. My guess is it was about as common then as it is today, relative to the size of the game industry.

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.

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.

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..

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

@SilentStriker I was one of the Gen X “computer babies”

About 95% of the stuff I had was pirated throughout the 80s and 90s.

It was common as hell.

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?

I guess it depends on the country. I have an American friend who said he didn't have many games because cartridges were too expensive in the 90s. Well, I never bought an original cartridge here in Brazil - the pirated ones were like 4 to 8x cheaper, and they were as easy to find as the originals. Now for Saturn and PS1, well, unlike cartridges that had to be imported from Chinese manufacturers, vendors could make copies at home, so games were dirt cheap, same for PS2 - stuff like $1 to $5 per game, while originals were like $30 to $60. My friend said that, as a kid, he never came across pirated games (he was from Detroit).

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.

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.

Just need to say fuck DRM and a huge part of how copyright law is applied / enforced.

To give some perspective: BitTorrent was released in 2001. So in the 90s, you'd be looking at some precursor to that. And the first CD recorder to cost less than $1000 was sold in 1995. Before that, they'd cost something like a car.

We definitely shared and copied a lot of floppy disks back then. And music on tapes.

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.

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.

Almost everyone with a playstation 1 I knew, had the 'special' version with a custom chip so you could play copied discs...

Same with pc games, copying was very common and not even looked down upon by others, more sort of admired ("can you copy this one for me??")

You could get bootleg floppies. Also, emulators for early consoles were common enough that several people I knew had them. I loved playing snes games and romhacks on my Gateway computer.

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.

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

quite common. i vividly remember friend doing careful calculations whether to buy double or quatro speed cd rom burner and whether he will be able to make up for that big price difference with a number of cds he can burn and distribute among his friends...

before that when it was floppy disks, it was even simpler, because any floppy mechanic was able to both read and write. some of them had some clever anti piracy features though, like asking you "what is the fifth word on page 27 of the manual?" 😆

that is for pc, i have no idea about consoles.

Anyone remember trying to copy the spectrum games on tapes. Not sure if that counts as piracy.

As the consoles get locked down it is logic video game piracy might spike.

So many people have been happy to pay…pity that wasn’t enough for the corps.

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

It was reasonably common in the floppy disk era. Some games allowed you to play for a set amount of time, after which it asked you for something external to the game itself. Some examples I remember:

• Dune 2 asked for some units stats that could be found in the games manual
• Day of the Tentacle needed you to complete a battery blueprint sketch in game. The missing info could be found in the manual
• Monkey Island 2 asked for a voodoo recipe. To find the correct measurements, you had to spin two overlaid sheets to align something, which revealed a value.

All of the above could of course be copied and/or guessed, but it did at least introduce some bar of entry.