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.
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
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.
GameCopyWorld is still around today and still being updated. Looks the same as it did decades ago.
My go-to method was to create a disc image of games from the local library and then use either DaemonTools’ copy protection emulation feature or a crack from that site. They had and still have a really good selection of the latest titles (nothing 18+ though, the equivalent of the American M-rating), although it’s almost entirely console games now due to mandatory online activation with most PC games.
I used Alcohol 120%, which was based off DaemonTools. Eventually I learned how to make my own “mini disc images” to load on my virtual CD drive, because some little bit on the CD was all the games installed on hard drive were checking for, with regards to copy protection.
I experimented with this as well, but since I was keeping full copies of the discs on my hard drives anyway, it was unnecessary in my case. I still have most of these disc images; now on my NAS.
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.
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.
IRC, ftp, bbs, usenet were huge. Torrents didn’t exist yet. Piracy was rampant.
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?
@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.
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.
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 we had here 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just need to say fuck DRM and a huge part of how copyright law is applied / enforced.
