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.
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.
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.
IRC, ftp, bbs, usenet were huge. Torrents didn’t exist yet. Piracy was rampant.
For my copy of “The incredible machine” I had a copy protection challenge page in the manual, the game gave you a challenge phrase and you had to enter the proper password. I think different game versions also existed for which you needed a different manual. Goal was to make it harder to just copy the floppy disks, you also had to remember to copy and print the paper, which was an additional hurdle.
Later, I also had lots of burned CDs from friends with games on them.
I’d say the piracy was mostly real life friends sharing their games with each other (which, since everyone knows different people, was quite a big network), which yes, still made it common and quite a problem for publishers.
I had a disc with Roller Coaster Tycoon burnt onto it.
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.
not common, but cheating was pretty common with gameshark on consoles. starting 2010s is when things started taking off like homebrew for 3ds and what not.
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.
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.
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.
C64 sneakernet swapped floppies were huge at the time, no modem required.
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).
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…
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!
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.
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.
