/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.6211792]

Zoomer here. Earliest exposure to piracy was through these ads on DVDs.
I'm curious to know more about the early game warez scene. I've heard tales of bootlegged Apple II games being distributed at computer conventions and meetups and would like to hear some stories regarding the culture surrounding piracy if there was any beyond "hey, free shit!"

[Anonymous No.6211813]

Up until the mid 2000's when home broadband became basically universal, A sizeable chunk of piracy was basically commercial counterfeiting: Skeevy dudes with milk crates full of bootleg discs in the backs of their cars, charging you a couple bucks for games and software. They'd even charge you for free software, or, when the internet was still young, they'd charge you for a disc full of demos and trials!

When it comes to 'culture' though, the most visible difference between piracy then and piracy now, imo, is cracktros. Crackers used to put sickass intros and chiptunes in their installers and keygens, but it slowly died out as the demos became less and less visually/audibly impressive compared to common multimedia content of the day.

You still encounter them from time to time, but these days, the coolest thing you're likely to see in your average crack folder is a readme or an .nfo with an ascii art header next to steam_api.dll

[Anonymous No.6211824]

>>6211813
Yeah I find it funny how in those anti-piracy pre-rolls they'd show guys selling stuff out of cars like they still did that in the 2000s. It may not have been from the You Wouldn't Download a Car series but I remember seeing a few like in a similar style.

[Anonymous No.6211826]

For me, being in a third world country, piracy was a huge market (it's even huge now, but it abandoned the videogame industry to focus on other media, like movies on bluray).

It was always a blast going to the flea market to buy the lastest demos or full games for PC, PS1 and PS2 too. The market would sell absolutely everything you can imagine, I get to know King's Field, R-Type Delta, Azure Dreams, Journey to the West and many other onscure games just for a couple of bucks. The chipped console market was also immensely huge, to the point that today is pretty hard to find a non-chiped PS1 comsole.

[Anonymous No.6211852]

>>6211792
There was piracy culture starting basically from the beginning of commercial software. In the late 70's and early 80's it was yuge. You can even find stuff from/about it today because a lot of stuff from old BBSs has been preserved. It probably wouldn't any sense to a zoomer but at the time the maymays were ebik.

[Anonymous No.6211853]

>>6211792
Depends on a huge number of factors. America was different than Mexico, big cities were different from small, etc.

For me in a mid sized American city it was two ways. Either the guy working at Radio Shack/Software Etc/Electronics Boutique made copies on the side to sell for a few bucks if you were a regular or you'd see long haired high teens in the mall parking lot doing it. Probably got them from the employee, who knows? There was a very very small group of people, very cliqueish, that more or less pooled together and one guy made copies but if you weren't in that group you weren't getting in. They were the ultra nerdy DnD types that actually knew what they were doing.

Now later, say 97-99 or so, it became pretty common for high schoolers to group around whoever had a CD burner and get copies. It was me in my school. Basically if you gave me a disc I'd get whatever for you. That's how everyone played Counterstrike and Unreal Tourney together here. I probably made 100 copies of each.

That didn't last long. Things didn't go full digital for a bit but it got a lot easier very quickly to do it yourself if you cared.

[Anonymous No.6211861]

>>6211852
Any place to see these BBS archives?

[Anonymous No.6211870]

>>6211792
Piracy in the early years/decades was dudes copying games onto disks for their friends and/or coworkers and passing them around and you'd end up with some games being pirated by more people than actually paid for them (Doom being the ultimate example of this).

>>6211813
What time period are you talking about? Like 30 years ago and even later it was all free and done on people's spare time. I sure as shit don't remember anyone ever charging money for it. The general rule was that you had to provide your own floppy disks, but that was it.

[Anonymous No.6211882]

>>6211861
textfiles.com has quite a few BBSs archives. I'm sure there is other places too.

[Anonymous No.6211890]

>>6211882
Thanks. This (in particular this http://textfiles.com/piracy/)) seems right up my alley

[kuuhaku No.6211890,1]

what fucked up piracy was well sony and microsoft with their drm fully invasive and clearly illegal practices (sony retired from those practice a long time ago and microsoft still does it and worse)

>>6211870
piracy is still going on for example in my travel to USA there was a guy on corner selling pirate games on a usb drive 64 Gb (the game i saw was gta V,red dead redemption and some of those heavy as fuck little gameplay) for 15 dollars was a good deal and just in case i can delete the game and just use it as a normal usb drive.
as you see piracy is still alive and in your corner besides avoiding the download of 60 Gb for the base game and after that having to download other 30 Gb on updates is enough to say "Fuck it i'm going pirate in that way i can play the game inmediatelly"

[Anonymous No.6211906]

>>6211870
>What time period are you talking about? Like 30 years ago and even later it was all free and done on people's spare time. I sure as shit don't remember anyone ever charging money for it. The general rule was that you had to provide your own floppy disks, but that was it.

In highschool computer club and college campuses, sure.

But out in the real world, on the streets? There were tons of bootleggers trying to make a quick buck.

Funnily enough, I was in Toronto's chinatown some time around 2015, and amidst countless other blatantly illegal business practices I saw being conducted out in the open literally by the side of the road was three guys hunched over with what must have been several thousand discs of god knows laid out on an old blanket in boxes. It was like going back in time to mid 90's computer fair.

[Anonymous No.6211913]

>>6211906
Not really surprising. In China they have whole mall size buildings of bootleg copies of everything. From hardware to software.

[Anonymous No.6211947]

>>6211792
The ole five finger discount its good if you are a poorfag like me.

[Anonymous No.6212124]

Torrents changed everything. Before that you either had to have some connection to a community that could pass stuff around or you'd use something like Kazaa.

[Anonymous No.6212129]

>>6211906
>But out in the real world, on the streets?

This is exactly what I was talking about. Back in those days most people got their pirated games from coworkers or friends. You'd buy some floppies and they'd copy shit for you. Again, what time period are you talking about? Maybe the bootleggers were a more recent (relatively speaking) thing.

[Anonymous No.6212146]

>>6211947
>five finger discount
could have also been a euphemism for handjob

[Anonymous No.6212161]

>>6211853
>Now later, say 97-99 or so, it became pretty common for high schoolers to group around whoever had a CD burner and get copies. It was me in my school. Basically if you gave me a disc I'd get whatever for you. That's how everyone played Counterstrike and Unreal Tourney together here. I probably made 100 copies of each.

I remember around the time flash drives started getting big enough to hold full games, I'd download cracks for what I had and put tons of games on them and just pass them around. Most of the people I gave them too weren't exactly gamers who would actually buy anything, so my hope was that by handing them a flash drive full of games, they might find one or two they like and go deeper down the rabbit hole so that the local community of people playing video games would grow.

Eventually, I worked part time for my old high school as IT, I set up a network share with almost my entire library on it and just gave the network link to anyone who wanted it. //vgs01/games was what it was, a read-only folder with a ton of cracked games that anyone who liked games could copy from. I eventually took it down though because people were playing them in the computer labs during class, which not only caused trouble with people not paying attention, but also ate up a lot of bandwidth since they were running them directly from the share. In hindsight, I should've put everything in a .zip or .rar file.

[Anonymous No.6212205]

>live in Finland in the 90s
>no domestic pirate scene whatsoever, at least that I knew about
>any time anyone visits Russia or Estonia, they always come back with a ton of pirated CDs

[Anonymous No.6212297]

>>6211861
Google "real pirates guide"

[Anonymous No.6212308]

>>6211824
Muh dik

[Anonymous No.6212376]

>>6212205
>no domestic pirate scene whatsoever, at least that I knew about
You had legendary PC demoscene back in the day and no pirate scene whatsoever? Weird...

[Anonymous No.6212386]

"Computer club" meetups for me were just everyone copying everybody's floppy binders, hardly any legit games. Mid to late 80s, C64 kid

[Anonymous No.6212391]

>>6211792
In NYC dudes were selling bootlegs spread out on the streets until the police told them to kick rocks and then they set up else where and come back later

[Anonymous No.6212581]

>>6211813
>Skeevy dudes with milk crates full of bootleg discs in the backs of their cars, charging you a couple bucks for games and software
While I don't doubt these skeevy dudes existed, most piracy wasn't quite like that. Piracy proliferated online long before the internet was mainstream, through BBS'es (which, for the zoomers, were basically servers you connect to directly over phone lines) Cracker groups usually had their own BBS on which they distributed their cracked games, from which they spread to other BBS'es from where ordinary modem users downloaded them. From there they spread to kids who then exchanged floppies at school.

Cracktros were also a thing long before installers and keygens were a thing. Pretty much any pirated game on the Amiga or C-64 booted up with a cracktro, usually filled with trash talk between pirate groups (which imo is the most amusing part of the "culture" surrounding early piracy)

Here's a couple of compilations of cracktros to get an idea of what they looked like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFqBkSJOYOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50WWFEBsgfk

[Anonymous No.6212606]

>>6211792
I'm a millennial, but I do remember a lot of piracy, mostly through downloading, but some physical. I first played Star Craft thanks to a burned copy my big brother got from a friend (later bought my own copy because it came with Broodwar), and my friend really liked Baldur's Gate so I took it to his place and I let him burn a copy of all five discs. His dad was a little bit annoyed that he used that many without asking, lol.
Also got one of those "32 In 1" pirate cartridges for my Gameboy as a kid way back in like 1997, it was more like, uh, 12 or 16 games or something, then listed multiple times with different names.

Other than that, me, my big brother, and all my friends would play games on emulators, downloading all sorts of roms. It was the early 2000s and it was just really attractive to be able to go online and download just a bunch of games for free, and a lot of them were really good. I never had a SNES growing up, just an NES and later an N64, so I experienced SNES games on computers as a kid, and I remembered I thought the SNES games mostly looked a lot better than the N64's 3D models (though I liked its games too). Oh yeah, I first played Pokémon on emulator as well, also Link's Awakening, on some old Game Boy emulator.

We knew it was illegal, but we didn't care, what where they gonna do, arrest us?

>>6211813
>A sizeable chunk of piracy was basically commercial counterfeiting: Skeevy dudes with milk crates full of bootleg discs in the backs of their cars, charging you a couple bucks for games and software. They'd even charge you for free software, or, when the internet was still young, they'd charge you for a disc full of demos and trials!
I've heard a lot of stories about this kind of stuff. Crazy to think about, and pretty cool, in a way.

>>6211824
Nice.

[Anonymous No.6212607]

>>6211813
nostalgia hit hard when i read this

[Anonymous No.6212610]

>>6211852
True. Even with like punch cards and shit, people made unauthorized copies of them, which is just neat as fuck to me. Also reminds me that a typical method to pirate vinyl records was to plain make a mold of the thing and then cast your own.

There's some nice craftmanship in some of this.

[Anonymous No.6212634]

>>6211870
>(Doom being the ultimate example of this)
With Doom, that was part of the shareware market model, the first episode was free and you were encouraged to share it and just give it to as many people as you wanted, because it was free advertising on iD Software's part.
I imagine the majority of normies didn't ever buy the full version, but enough did that it still made iD stinking rich, to the point that piracy wasn't of much concern to them, or, not in the traditional way.

There were companies like Wizard Works (and a lot of small fly by night companies and what not) who would just scrape BBSs for .wads people made and then stick them on compilation disks to sell them, shovelware, which did piss off iD because a lot of this stuff was fucking low quality crap (and quite a lot of it contained copyrighted material) which Wizard Works happily slapped Doom branding onto.
iD would ironically do exactly this later with Maximum Doom, 1830 .wad files (for a total of 3201 levels) downloaded from the internet, most of fucking terrible quality, funnily also with some unauthorized copyrighted content, the notion was to somehow upstage these shovelware hawkers, by hawking their own awful shovelware. Yeah! Take that, Wizard Works!
Also, Maximum Doom contains a version of TNT Evilution's Map 17, before TNT Evilution was bought and then sold as a commercial product, which is a little funny to me.

Other points of piracy with Doom would be published retail games using plagiarizing content from Doom, like Operation Body Count, or the Chinese bootleg game Mars 3D, which used reverse engineered Doom code, with mix of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D assets, some transformed, some not.

[Anonymous No.6212641]

>>6211870
>Like 30 years ago and even later it was all free and done on people's spare time
From friends and family members, sure, but people did legit print up copies of games and software to sell for a quick buck.

"You wanna play Quake? It's awesome, it's yours for $10."

[Anonymous No.6212647]

>>6212146
>>6212641
>"You wanna play Quake? It's awesome, it's yours for a handjob."

[Anonymous No.6212727]

>>6212647
Sounds like a win win.

[Anonymous No.6212729]

ah man I remember buying PC games from Walmart and copying the discs for all my buddies so we could play games together. Back when DRM was super bad there were tons of games you could install on multiple pc's and if you weren't connected to the internet when installing you could reuse codes. good times man

[Anonymous No.6212753]

>>6212606
>We knew it was illegal, but we didn't care, what where they gonna do, arrest us?

cops arrested pirate peddlers on the street pretty often AFAIK. in asia anyway. china burned pirated copies in huge bonfires, though they seem to totally ignore western/japanese software and movies.

[Anonymous No.6212795]

Imagine not pirating in the current day
Heros never die

[Anonymous No.6212798]

>>6212753
That's the bigtime physical distributors though, we were just kids, we were just a couple of users.

[Anonymous No.6212824]

>>6211813
I wish I could find the keygen music I used to hear so frequently. It is stuck in my head and yet I cannot find it online these days.

[Anonymous No.6212828]

>>6212647
That's how I got it from my uncle.

[Anonymous No.6212830]

>>6212795
I don't pirate because I love to support the developers of the games I buy, which will lead to more sequels for games I like.

[Anonymous No.6212835]

>>6212610
This set of images has been passed around a lot, I think it's just really cool to do. Casting double sides might be less easy for the average person to do, but it could probably be done. Worst case it's split to two discs.

[Anonymous No.6212850]

>>6211792
I only download games that 1) I already own. 2) Too expensive to buy on eBay($500 for an old game is a joke). 3) Unreleased to the public. 4) A hacked rom.

However if older games are available on newer platforms, I buy it. I did this with Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 via my Xbox 360, especially since Dreamcast emulation is shit right now.

[Anonymous No.6212863]

>>6211792
My first bootlegged game was bushido blade for the PSX. I was so impresed with these hongkong silvers, i started buying & selling them en mass in order to afford original sega saturn games. Yeah FUCK YOU SONY.

[Anonymous No.6212867]

>>6211792 (OP)
My first bootlegged game was bushido blade for the PSX. I was so impresed with these hongkong silvers, i started buying & selling them en masse in order to afford original sega saturn games. Yeah FUCK YOU SONY.

[Anonymous No.6212873]

>>6211792
I know this is largely unrelated to the point of this thread, but the word "piracy" carries an assumption that you might want to avoid.
>Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)
>If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy

[Anonymous No.6212878]

>>6212873
>gnufags

[Anonymous No.6212914]

>>6212873
common vernacular > being correct. I'm a GNUfag too.

[Anonymous No.6213168]

>>6212610
I'm fairly certain the record casting thing is a reddit meme. Even in the 70's we were using record cutters for small runs and you could get as few as 100 pressed. LSR didn't exist so stuff like >>6212835 never happened until more recently. I imagine it sounds like shit as well.

[Anonymous No.6213173]

>>6211824
liked the one where the family was singing happy birthday to the father in jail from outside across the street and then they implied prison-rape was going to occur, kek.

[Anonymous No.6213192]

>>6213168
I admit I'm highly ignorant of vinyls, I just thought it looked neat and took it at face value.

[Anonymous No.6213197]

>>6213192
Screw vinyl anyway. It's all about reel to reel tape

[Anonymous No.6213207]

>>6213197
Admittedly never cared for tape, too sensitive to being used.

[Anonymous No.6213221]

>>6213197
Phonograph cylinders > *

[Anonymous No.6213246]

I never got discs in person or anything like that, but there were warez or "gamez" websites where there would be links to ISOs and things, sometimes hosted on public FTPs that were improperly configured, or sometimes split into a shitload of files using winrar and uploaded to some sort of early file hosting sites. I mostly found these sites on search engines. My family just had a dialup modem, but that was pretty standard. I just left it on overnight or sometimes for a few days for full ISOs. I was able to pirate Deus Ex, GTA2, etc. And I had a prerelease/cracked copy of Windows XP way before it was released. This was before a long way before Bittorrent was a thing otherwise I would have used that.

[Anonymous No.6213269]

>>6211826
This, in my town the only dedicated videogame store only sold pirate copies, they would even "chip" your consoles so they could run pirate games, even in the ps3 era

[Anonymous No.6213341]

>in middle school
>the internet was still dial up and not everyone had it yet
>don't buy lunch for a week to save money
>go to the local computers store after school on a friday with your friends
>you got video games?
>they pull out the secret catalogue
>a bunch of game names printed on paper and put together with paper clips, made in word 95 with the corny text effects
>uhh I want uhh Delta Force, Diablo 2 and uhh Heroes 3
>wait an hour for the games to get burned on CDs
>they write the installation instructions alongside a cd key on a piece of paper and put it in each cd case
>game names are written with marker on the discs
>go home and wait for your older brother to go out for the night so you can use the PC
>discuss game strategies next week at school

Those were the days.

[Anonymous No.6213392]

>midn to late 1980s
>sneak into photocopier room at school (it was a whole room, the fucker was huge and needed special ventilation for heat and fumes)
>copy game manuals and code wheels for computer games
>truth be told they were copies of photocopies, no one knew who or where the originals came from
>if caught just say a teacher asked you to make copies of handouts for class
>middle/upper class school so everyone had a decent computer at home I stead of a C64
>school was more into sierra adventure games and SSI stuff than nintendo
>no one paid for any of it but within a week of a new gam emerging, the whole school had it

They did their best to counter us with their load screen riddles of "what is the 5th word of the 3rd paragraph of page 28". Our 6th grade class was one step ahead thanks to the power of Xerox.

[Anonymous No.6213839]

Good thread

[Anonymous No.6213849]

>>6213392
>>6213341
thanks for sharing. Early nerd culture is my new area of interest. I got into 4chan at age 12 in 2007 and fell in love and I've been looking for that feeling ever since.

[Anonymous No.6214197]

>>6211792
I remember that episode of Smart Guy in the 90s where TJ and his female friend meet a man who sells them some bootleg games and then ends up trying to make them do CP. I think the moral of the episode was that if you pirate games some old creep will try to fuck you.

[Anonymous No.6214229]

>>6213246
>And I had a prerelease/cracked copy of Windows XP way before it was released.
Whistler or an actual beta? Pretty cool either way.

[Anonymous No.6214691]

>>6211792
I would download a car. no problem.

[Anonymous No.6214737]

>high school in the late nineties
>playstation modding became a thing
>have to look up local classifieds (actual newspapers) for modders
>guys charge from $50-$100 to mod your playstation for you
>a guy or two from school whose older brother had a CD burner would charge you 10 bucks a game
>would give you a print out of games he had to pick from
>also sells rap burnt CDs like Snoop Dog and Master P, various No Limit shit

The only reason i got a playstation was the $10 games. And this is in Australia btw, not many people had PCs with the capability to burn CDs.

[Anonymous No.6215165]

>>6214737
Nice.

[Anonymous No.6215316]

>>6213221
Gotta be careful with those.

[Anonymous No.6215562]

>>6214229
>>6213246
kek

[Anonymous No.6215569]

>>6215316
Good old TechTV. Fuck G4. May it rot in hell for all eternity.

[Anonymous No.6215679]

35 year old boomer here. My first introduction to piracy was Satellite Television in the 80's. No, not that PrimeStar crap. Then it was games for the C64 that we got from my father's co-workers. And then IBM/PC Games latter on when we got a 386.

Basically if it wasn't for piracy in the 80's and early 90's I wouldn't know much about anything with pop culture at the time.

[Anonymous No.6215693]

>>6212795
I'm still pirating the old stuff. Brand New Stuff I hardly ever bother with. Files are too big. Or the media just isn't worth my attention like with movies and tv shows.

[Anonymous No.6215697]

>>6212835
If I wanted to hear a record pressed on cheese I'd buy the cheese. No one did that because the sound you got was compete garbage.

[Anonymous No.6215702]

>>6213197
Woah... now you're getting into some money. I don't feel the need to fuck with Reel to Reel unless I find an awesome player for cheap out in the wild. I'd rather buy the vinyl and transfer it to cassette with my Nakamichi.
And that's something that was done back in the day with music cassettes. Either by radio. Vinyl, or even CD's.
Little did people know that with the right equipment and media you could have a 1:1 copy on cassette and not loose any quality.

[Anonymous No.6215709]

>>6213849
>4chan at age 12 in 2007

This both makes my head hurt and wonder if you thought "What is This" over and over as you whacked off to the garbage we were spewing all over the place back then.

[Anonymous No.6215715]

>>6214737
I'm so fucking dumb. My father and I modded a few play stations and I modded a few Xbox's but we never thought about doing it for money. I never even bothered with the 360 and stopped worrying about modding consoles after that until I got the Wii. And then stopped again after that.

[Anonymous No.6215786]

>>6212795
I don't pirate games anymore, but I don't buy games either. Whereas I used to get quite a few new things every year, now I just spend all my time playing old games or mods.

[Anonymous No.6216127]

>>6211792
My neighbor had hundreds of bootleg commodore 64 diskettes. Not sure who copied them but there were a lot

[Anonymous No.6216169]

>>6215709
I was like, I want to say 15 when I came around here in like 2008 or 2009. It's been good times.

[Anonymous No.6216203]

>>6215679
>35 year old boomer here
No, you're not a boomer you fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.6216325]

>>6216203
Get with the memes, grampa.

[Anonymous No.6217289]

>>6216325
Stop perpetuating stupidity with this "boomer" shit when it's completely erroneous.
Quality posts make for a better board, if you don't like it fuck off back to /b/ or /v/ you cretinous mouthbreather.

[Anonymous No.6217346]

>>6217289
*sip*
Yep.

[Anonymous No.6217356]

>>6217289
Fck you

[Anonymous No.6217361]

>>6212798
they might call your uncle at nintendo.

[Anonymous No.6217363]

>>6212835
>Casting PVC records
Seriously literally any other format was easier to copy. Unless it includes some space-age DRM that needed a 24-core server CPU to decrypt.

[Anonymous No.6217367]

>>6215562
early WinXP was just Win2000 with shitty bloat. literally no reason to use it. WinXP SP3 was the real jam, which supported duocore CPUs.

[Anonymous No.6217393]

>>6217289
stfub

[Anonymous No.6217683]

>>6211792
Used to have a shop/shops in malls where you went through a catalogue of games they had and 'copied' them for a price. Price was per disk, and you either brought your own disks or could buy from the shop (markup).

Totally got classics like X-wing, Ultima 7, even Windows 95 that way. I remember Office used to come in like...12+ disks.

[Anonymous No.6217739]

>>6217367
Sounds like ME