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.
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.
@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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 number 27 of the manual?” 😆
that is for pc, i have no idea about consoles.
Those were the days!
NES and SNES games fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, and there were disk drive systems inserted into the cartridge slots on those systems.
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.
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.
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 $60. My friend said that, as a kid, he never came across pirated games (he was from Detroit).
Reading through the thread I see a lot of people had to go through hoops, like getting peripherals to make copies of ROMs on floppy… discovering this was probably for a few more tech-savvy kids who had an older brother or friends to introduce them to it… and no solution for N64.
I guess this kind of contraband would be harder in first world countries, but third world countries are a huge market for piracy simply because a large portion of the population can’t pay for original stuff.
My grandpa and I would go to the video store , hire out a bunch of overnighter ps1 games, go home, copy them all, go back to drop off the ones we got earlier that day and grab the rest, go home copy those and return the others again, we did this every time they got new games.
Based grandpa
Yeah he was gangster, at one point we were running an underground piracy ring on the school holidays.
thats beautiful
He’s the one who introduced me to piracy, I think I was like 5 when we pirated my first copy of Windows 3.1
I remember buying cd with 5-15 pc games on it (depending size ) for like 5$ that i choose from a printed warez list it’s was really easy or just downloading a crack so we could install a game on multiple pc from only one copy it was the good day
Just need to say fuck DRM and a huge part of how copyright law is applied / enforced.
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.
Oh my disappointment when I got a 56K modem and only got 28.8K speeds.
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!
