When I was at college in the early 90s, PC game piracy was rife. Disks were changing hands every day at college :-) Before that, I had an Acorn Electron with disk drive and we’d be swapping BBC and Electron games at school regularly, too. It was handy that my Electron ran many BBC Micro games with no trouble :-)

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 chopped (something you had to do before it could play pirates 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.

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

PC? All the time. NES/SNES? I bought the carts; I was never aware of any other method in the 90’s as a kid.

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 had a neighbor that had a big reader on top of his n64 that took those zip disks. I remember being extremely jealous.

We pirated heaps of PS1 and PC games at the time. I remember my school cleaner running a PS1 chipping business on the side. Great times

Dreamcast and Genesis were not very popular. Most people had an n64 or ps1, most people did not have a dreamcast or genesis. To my knowledge, torrents did not exist in the 90s. Downloading games was prohibitively bandwidth expensive, you were lucky enough to download a single image in the 90s. Digital music piracy didn’t really catch on until 2001. Hell, digital music didn’t even catch on until 2001.

Pirates existed, but it was extremely rare. Most people knew it existed for consoles, but most people didn’t do it.

It really wasn’t until DSL and cable broadband internet connections to the home made downloading a game remotely feasible that piracy was really even possible. Keep in mind, even piracy is a kind of market, and if nobody’s buying, it would be foolish to be a seller. This stuff HAS existed, definitely, as long as time has been a thing, but buying bootleg copies from a dealer wasn’t popular in the 90s to my knowledge, in MOST circles, or at least in any that I was in. It was like… In The 2000s when buying porn magazines was viewed as cringe and only for old people. Bootleg copies existed - people buying porno mags existed - but it was wildly unpopular and being replaced by waaaayyyyy cheaper and more convenient methods, or not at all.

Also, mod-chipping a console as a kid was too risky and not worth it, so most people just only had a few games and watched tv and played in other ways, like using your imagination, possibly with friends, possibly even oUtSiiiDe~ oooOOOOoooohhhh~

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.

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?

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.

Very common. Mostly PC games. It was much more decentralized as internet access was almost nil. So we had BBS’s (google it if you don’t know what that is). At the time a BBS would typically have better transfer speeds than internet would.

Very common, but internet access from home wasn’t as common so if someone wasn’t curious enough or didn’t have friends/relatives who knew about the matter it would be a myth to them. Videogame companies like Nintendo didn’t talk about it that much back then, and copyright notices on VHS tapes and CDs made it sound like something out of a gangster movie.

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.