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.
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 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.
@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.
My junior high computer lab (full of Apple IIs) was basically one giant copy party.
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.
When I started, I was downloading mp3s and recording them on to cassettes. Use what you have. As for console games, there were DOS based SNES NES and geneses emulators for those who didn’t have the hardware.
Pj64 was emulating Nintendo64 titles while the console was still releasing titles.
Napster, limewire bearshare, winmx DC++ were all around before bit torrent was used for downloads.
Hooked up the family computer to the tv using a video card with s video output and impressed the whole family!
I think the first time I tried N64 emulation must have been in late 2002. There were indeed still games released for this system at the time, although not many. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (ported to the console in 2002) was one of the last big games for it. Fun fact: The PC version at lowest settings looks almost identical to the N64 port.
Early N64 emulation was spotty, but the fact that it worked at all absolutely blew my mind, especially since I was just in the process of switching from N64 to PC as my main gaming platform. Super Mario 64 was one of the first titles to be properly playable with next to no issues, but outside of that game, it was a bit of a gamble and remained so for years. Performance could vary wildly, glitches were very common (some titles remained unplayable until surprisingly recently, like the excellent voxel-based Command and Conquer port for the system) and the plugin system proved to be a nightmare, as it fractured development resources.
It was a struggle to get the right combinations of plugins going for pj64. I never had the console myself so I was happy with whatever I could get. Zelda64 and Majora’s mask were really all I was interested in. The SNES NES and PSX were really where I spent most of my time emulating. PC piracy was another beast. Cdcopyworld and all the DRM cracks or mini-iso files loaded up with daemon tools or alcohol to bypass cd checks. What a time to be alive.
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).
Reading through the thread I see a lot of people had to go through hoops, like getting peripherals to make copies of ROMs on floppy… discovering this was probably for a few more tech-savvy kids who had an older brother or friends to introduce them to it… and no solution for N64.
I guess this kind of contraband would be harder in first world countries, but third world countries are a huge market for piracy simply because a large portion of the population can’t pay for original stuff.
Common enough that they made a silly rap song about copying floppy disks https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI
I liked the super catchy “copy that floppy” part.
Just need to say fuck DRM and a huge part of how copyright law is applied / enforced.
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.
!LetMeIn27
Good old mIRC. I remember using those bots too. It was on when I started college and got hold of high speed Internet for the first time.
IRC is still there. I still use it from time to time just to feel a rush :)
I use IRC daily. Theres rarely a time when someone is not speaking. And its not like I’m on 300 channels. I’m just on two. One of them is very active, the other one is for me and a few friends and is less active.
Sure, theres not thousands of channels full of people chatting all the time anymore. But once you find a nice server/channel, you’ll have a great time. Apparently the file sharing places are still going as well but I haven’t bothered to look into those.
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.
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.
Holy shit… I finally found one of the screenshots for these loaders:
You could load up a disk full of games and tie it to a boot loader menu like this.
C64 sneakernet swapped floppies were huge at the time, no modem required.
I mean, that’s how we ultimately got them. We must have had most of the popular ATARI XL games in two wooden floppy boxes.
But, you gotta respect the networked distribution even back then. Pirates would create their disk packs, upload it to some national BBS. It gets picked up by more local BBSs, and tech-saavy modem users would download it to floppies. All the while sneakernet would carry it down the last mile to fill in the gaps. Some of this shit even went international, as long as somebody dealt with the long-distance fees (or phreaked their way out of them).
Reminds me of Sneakers, it was a great movie
Good flick, but to be clear sneakernet is just handing over physical media in person.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard disks (or a suitcase full of microSDs on a plane).
The latency tho!
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.
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…
I’m a couple years younger than you, but a lot of this resonated for me. Custom installers were some of my early inspirations for making apps that didn’t have the traditional gray box aesthetic.
However, I will say that Kenshin was a thing in the US. Samurai X was only the name of the OG movies where he was still lethal AFAIK.
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.
I had a disc with Roller Coaster Tycoon burnt onto it.
