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.
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??”)
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.
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.
Late 90s I was in Computer courses in College. Remember one guy bringing in stacks of floppy disks. Internet speeds at home were expensive but the school had good enough speeds to pirate games.
In my experience it was very common but also PC Gamer magazine would come with free demo games that kept me pretty happy.
We didn’t really have internet access when we were at school but we’d coordinate days where someone would bring in the floppy disks for something you wanted and you’d bring in a stack of blank disks and copy them on the school computers lol.
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.
The Internet before enshittification was a great thing. But also I’m commenting this on a small pocket device that I would have killed for in the 90s.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
thats beautiful
He’s the one who introduced me to piracy, I think I was like 5 when we pirated my first copy of Windows 3.1
Based grandpa
Yeah he was gangster, at one point we were running an underground piracy ring on the school holidays.
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily… If you had an older model PS1 (forget the serial number), you could use a gameshark-like device that plugged into the back.
Also, I’m unsure if this was only for early models, or all PS1s, but there was a little plastic button under the CD tray that is how the system determined if the top was open or not. If you put a little twist tie or paperclip in there to keep it pressed down, you could do the disc swap trick.
You would use a real PlayStation game to load the Sony splash screens, with the top open. After that, the disc will pause for a moment, before loading the game. If you quickly swapped out the real game with the CD-R at that moment, then the CD-R would load just fine.
It was awesome.
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.
Sneaker-net was legit back then
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 knew nobody with a mod chip, but everyone definitely knew about the disk swap trick.
The disk swap trick! I forgot about that. Boot the game, open the tray, replace with pirated game, close tray, pray. Am I remembering correctly?
Exactly! I had to open mine to tie down some switch, but that was the only modification I ever did.
Ohhhh yeah. I have a really vague memory of a friend telling me they needed to do something like that. I had completely forgotten. How cool! I have so much to discuss with my Step-Dad!
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).
EDIT: Just to give you an idea of the network we were dealing with.
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!
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?
Yea, calling it all torrenting, when referring to an era before torrents even existed is wild. Dude is making up their own language about it at this point.
Remember when we’d just torrent movies from the Blockbuster?
