How common were pirated games for consoles in the 90s/00s?
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It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
How common were pirated games for consoles in the 90s/00s?
How common were pirated games for consoles in the 90s/00s?
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
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It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
Very, also the fricking idiot trimming his discs could have saved himself a lot of trouble by removing the Gamecube case so he could fit full-sized DVD's, that's what I did.
Or you can buy mini DVD-Rs.
oh damn i didn't know it was possible to burn discs for gamecube i thought modcchip was only for launching swiss kek, might get a proper modchip and burn discs i prefer them to sd card loading
>stealth gore thread
Of course.
Zoomers will never understand soul like this. They just go to a website and click on a torrent
>Using a less efficient method of piracy is soul
Hipsters are so moronic. It's not even that much effort to burn to discs
they keep going "hurr durr what about the indie devs" or "but it's illegal and virus ridden!"
like motherfricker I am not paying 70 dollars for a game that is borderline unfinished just because it's made by less than 20 people (game in question is Ready Or Not)
Viruses are only there if you're a dumbass and immediately go for TBP or now, SteamUnlocked.
Most countries don't give a shit if you pirate and the last time people got sued for piracy was by RIAA in the mid 2000s.
Zoomers don't know how to torrent
Pretty uncommon on the US East Coast —I know one guy with a chipped PlayStation. Became very common with the Dreamcast for obvious reasons.
>soul
Yeah, right... if I could easily load ISOs over the network like I do nowadays then the laser in my first PS2 would still be functional.
They don't even do that, zoomers don't torrent or really even pirate in general. It was my generation that torrented an ISO and burned it to a DVD-R so that I could play it on my PS2 via Swam Magic.
Swap*
>zoomers
I wouldn't say zoomers, just first world morons. However back then yeah I would agree everyone pirated in the late 90s and 2000s
Zoomers are the most chickenshit consoomers en masse, they're too scared or too tech illiterate to pirate games.
This. I’ve never met a zoomer who torrented, most don’t even know what it is and asking them if they know TPB results in blank stares. We just have to accept that ~~*propagandists*~~ successfully retrained the younger generations to passively consoom media that isn’t worth shit, in most cases.
>la baies des pirates
>in Anno Domini 2024
It should be noted that piracy is going up, and corporate greed is unironically 100% the reason. Movies and tv shows is the perfect example of this and I can explain it with an anecdote. When EVERYTHING was on Netflix and they weren't charging much for it, yeah I didn't actually have an issue with paying a monthly subscription for the access and stopped pirating movies. When every goddamn studio pulled their shit off of the service and demanded you subscribe to their exclusive shit so you would have to juggle a dozen services to watch what you want, hell yeah I went back to torrenting. And so did a lot of other people for the exact same reason.
The fat man keeps being proven right, pic related.
Ironic that I haven't given a dime to the fat man in half a decade. Game Passant provides a better service than he does.
It's not ironic, it means the system is working. If there was a service problem then you wouldn't be paying at all.
Netflix was just too convenient. It was the "first" (or first big) service in a landscape of clearly dying cable TV, it just accelerated the obvious demise of it
The problem was obviously however, all these companies can't just provide and makle content for Netflix, it's not profitable. But then everyone making their own subscription service isn't either, especially since it's just easier than ever to subscribe, watch whatever you wanted, and then frick off, compared to a TV channel... Plus it doesn't help most of them has been making garbage that won't have any worth in the future
I'd say the most healthiest way to go is the MP3 way. Sell your shit DRM free for a certain amount per eps. You'd make way more than a subscription from shows and it entirely solves the ownership problem and no need for a big service and servers and yadda yadda
no one cares gay, when steam sales and key sites exist
You're a fricking moron
paying to steal shit, so soulful
I never bought a single PS2 game
Extremely common. Even if you weren't a poorgay, new games were expensive, so many people only bought pre-owned or pirate copies. Like, a new game costing 49.99 seems like it was the same as now, but we are still talking 20 years ago, when wages were lower and there's been a ton of inflation since then.
I played most of the PS1 library entirely by demo disc and rental, until I got a modchipped one late on, like 1999. My family got a PC with disc burner in maybe 2000-2001, so after that I would rent them from Blockbuster and burn a copy myself. I remember my dad seemed really proud and told me the story how back in his day they used to copy tapes for the Spectrum on his friend's stereo system.
Funny how the industry seethes so much about piracy but the games market today would probably be way smaller overall without it.
Games were expensive true, but your dollar was worth a lot more before 2008. Like you weren’t spending 200 dollars on groceries a week and gas was generally a lot cheaper ect ect. I knew people making minimum wage that would buy a brand new or recently used game from GameStop roughly once a month. Piracy in my area exploded w the Xbox. As soon as that one guy in an apartment complex learned how to solder it was on. I still bought games but burning half the Xbox library and having all arcade games and nes-genesis era games on one box was pretty amazing.
>tapes for the Spectrum
>dollar
uhhh
Not counting bootlegs, the only piracy/mod that felt completely widespread was chipped PS1s. Even in richgay countries it seemed like every other person was burning discs for their PS1.
GBA emulation was a pretty big deal too since it was basically the first time a new console could be emulated during its life span, and pretty much any PC could emulate GBA.
>GBA emulation was... the first time a console could be emulated during it's lifespan
We were emulating SNES and PSX and the original Pokemon games during their lifespans as well. You're a moron.
nds flashcarts were extremely prevalent most people i knew had an r4 card and they were pretty easy to get here in england
very common, especially for the PS1.
2000s? PS2 and GameCube came later, but the original Xbox had piracy galore.
Also, if you lived in a non first world country, frick it all of your games were pirated.
PS2 was common within its life time, freemcboot was roughly around 2007, and even before then there were modchips like the Messiah.
GameCube though, I don’t really remember anything besides the Code Breaker disc allowing for disc swapping, but you needed rarer hardware to burn discs that size, which I guess means Nintendo’s anti piracy decision to use those discs was actually a pretty good idea.
>you needed rarer hardware to burn discs that size
Don't really know what you mean here, I remember being able to burn mini-DVD's towards the end of the Gamecube's lifetime. But also I think disc burners were rarer in general at that time, so I guess that's what you're referring to.
I don't think my city had any store selling legit games or unmodded consoles until PS3
Brazilian or Euro? More burnt CDs than stars in the universe. From a civilized country? None.
Very. In England there was always that one dodgy guy your uncle knew who could 'chip' your ps1 or sell 'chipped' games. It was a great time. Some even printed out the covers to go with a thin shiity case.
yeah my uncles neighbour did this, there was also some chink who used to go around selling pirated dvds he'd knock on your door with all the latest camrips it was based
haha yeah. Again, in england, up until say 10 years ago, there used to be what we called 'lucky lucky men' (chinks) who patrolled all the bars/pubs in city centers selling pirate dvds to drunk people.
i remember i was at sainsburys a while back i saw boxes with a shit tonne of them at the bins i think someone just dumped all the ones they used to sell they were in a sleeves with printed art work, i was gonna go grab a bunch went back a couple days after but the bins had been cleared out
argh man. you could have had a nostalgia fest there
In Spain, 20 out of 10 psx, dreamcast, pc and ps2 had piracy games, you could go to gas/fuel station and "Paco Pirateo" could get you a resident evil 2 fro 800 pesetas (like 5 American Dollars) back then in late 90s
I played resi 2 the other way, bought a psx for 10 ten bucks from a stranger which obviously didn't werk but didn't checked it before buyan RE2.now back home with it it mad as hell mom buys the damn ps1 new as a sooner birthday gift=profit.
ALMA
>800 pesetas
>Got some rare things on sale, stranger!
does this actually work?
no
>90s
Extremely uncommon if you lived in a first world country
>early 2000s
relatively uncommon
>late 2000s
rampant
>Extremely uncommon if you lived in a first world country
Except on PC. Warez were common.
yeah seeing bootleg cartridges was very rare. A friend of mine had an NES multicart that his dad bought him from Singapore, but that was the only one I ever saw. It wasn't really until CDs and the PS1 that I saw any pirated console games. Pirating on the PC was very common though, everyone copied everything pretty much ever since PCs existed. The first PC game I had was a pirated copy of Kings Quest 3 and just about everything after that was either shareware or pirated games because I had no money and making copies was so easy
I'd say in the US it reached "rampant" level in the mid 2000s, not late. Espeially since that's also the time that anime fansubs online really started being a thing.
In Brazil to this day most people still dont know that there were genuine games for ps1 and ps2
Yes they do.
Simple logic would tell them that.
Brazil have soccer n64z
Uncommon in the 90's. Started to become common in the early 00's once Dreamcast started to get pirated, tbus forcing Sega to go third party.
I remember owning a computer with a CD burner installed, I sold a lot of Dreamcast games for $5 each back in the summer of 2000.
Figures you contributed to the Dreamcast's death.
the Dreamcast would have had better sales and maybe survived the piracy if the software library wasn't so weak. If anything, piracy motivated the hardware sales.
Dreamcast software library was very strong. Piracy killed the Dreamcast, otherwise sales should have been through the roof, especially knowing you can play SNES games on a Dreamcast via DreamSNES. But this clearly wasn't the case, piracy led to Sega exiting the console making business.
The arcade killed the dreamcast
100% False
Cope.
You've been destroyed by fact and logic.
There's no fact or logic in blaming arcades for killing Dreamcast.
>Piracy promotes sales of the console
Yet Dreamcast died, so your logic makes no sense. If piracy drove sales of consoles, Dreamcast should have been a huge hit.
>Yet Dreamcast died, so your logic makes no sense. If piracy drove sales of consoles, Dreamcast should have been a huge hit.
It's almost like Dreamcast piracy didn't have much impact on its survival...
More like piracy killed Dreamcast, ending it's lifespan. Hence why Dreamcast didn't survive.
FACT: Sega was losing money before the Dreamcast was even released, let alone when piracy was available
FACT: The near-total collapse of arcades in the west and partial collapse of arcades in Japan directly caused this loss
FACT: Sega dug themselves into a billion-dollar hole before any piracy was even possible
LOGIC: (The lack of) Arcades killed the Dreamcast
Blame arcades all you want, but none of what you say is remotely or factually true. Especially considering the fact that arcades to this day still exist(Dave And Busters), even Sega are still making arcade machines(I played House Of The Dead Scarlet Dawn at a movie theater).
Piracy forced Sega to stop making hardware because...
Fact 1: Lack of sales for physical copies of games, means lack of money for Sega to make.
Fact 2: If piracy drove console sales, why even bother to offer to sell Dreamcasts at $99 or give them out free(with a 2 year deal to SegaNet) at the end of their lifespan? It's because their profits are made with software and they need a huge fanbase to buy that software. Hence why they need to combat piracy and why they made it impossible to play pirated games on later revision models of the Dreamcast.
Fact 3: Because of the rampant piracy, Sega was making no money. Thus they had no choice but to exit the console business.
>none of what you say is remotely or factually true
All of it is true, backed by Sega's financial reports.
>arcades to this day still exist(Dave And Busters)
Irrelevant. The subject is 1998, when Sega had a base load of tens of thousands of arcade locations, and suddenly some 80% of them disappeared. Even Dave and Buster pales in comparison to the arcade's heyday, they have under 200 locations.
>Fact 1
>Fact 3
It was not possible to pirate games on the Dreamcast prior to June 2000. What was causing Sega to lose money in 1998-2000? (Sega files annual reports in March)
>Fact 2
Because their console wasn't selling and they needed any kind of legs up on the PS2 to be able to ask for further loans. Like hey we're selling a lot more than the other guy, give us some money and we swear we can repay later. The PS2 in its first year sold more than the Dreamcast ever did in 3. That snuffed any chance of further loans.
False.
1) If Sega was losing money on arcades, then so was Namco and Capcom. Arcades was a non-factor.
2) Sega was doing well until piracy became an issue. PS2 wasn't out until November of 2000, didn't have much impact on the Dreamcast's demise. Piracy was impacting their finances.
>so was Namco and Capcom
They did you fricking dunce.
>Sega was doing well until piracy became an issue
Bullshit. These losses and debt didn't appear out of thin air just in time for the 2001 annual report.
funny to see how their net income takes a nose dive after they switched to the Saturn and turned into loss once they started the Dreamcast.
Kalinske was the only thing making them profit in the entire 90s.
True. I thi k people who support piracy, doesn't want to admit fault in destroying the gaming industry. They especially don't want to take credit for the Dreamcast failing. So they'll blame it on anything BUT piracy, no matter how weak their logic or reasoning are.
We were Europoor kids, and somebody's dad happened to have a cd-writer in the neighbourhood.
Makes sense.
The facts are not on your side.
All you have is "IN MY HEART OF HEARTS I JUST KNOW PIRACY KILLED THE DREAMCAST".
Facts is on my side because whether you want to admit it or not, piracy kills any profit companies are trying to make. Music and movies has these issues. So does video games. It affects these companies negatively to the point of either going out of business, selling off their IP's or assets to other companies, or merging with a bigger company. Capitalism is all about profits. Communism and socialism is all about stealing. Communism does it by piracy. Socialism does it by tax dollars. Companies are capitalistic, so they need to combat piracy in order to survive. If piracy was a good thing and make companies profit, these companies would not care. But as we all know, piracy kills profits.
The Soviet Union was responsible for Sega posting 3 years of losses in 1998-2000. Piracy must have been an incredible force to cause Sega to lose money before it's even possible to pirate. Good philosophizing.
>Music and movies has these issues
No the frick they do not. You could make a case for music in the early 2000s, but then they actually got better than the pirates (then worse again)
Xbox piracy and modding was rampant. It sold fine.
DS R4 cards were easy to find. The DS sold more than 20 million units.
Piracy on the Amiga was rampant. It died because of mismanagement and barely any good software in the first few years of its life.
Does it affect the companies bottom line? No, because the pirate does not buy the console anyway. They choose another or a PC. Most normal people usually aren't aware of it, and that's why piracy has always stayed low unless an extremely easy way to pirate exists, e.g Napster.
>Communism does it by piracy
See attached photo.
ah shit didn't send
>If piracy was a good thing and make companies profit, these companies would not care
Why should I care what's good for the companies though
>Communism and socialism is all about stealing. Communism does it by piracy.
Wow cool then I'm a communist now
I mean there were other factors for sure, but the Dreamcast didn't even need any modding. Anyone could make a boot disk and then every game was free. It was so much more widespread at the time than PS2 bootlegging and impossible to deny that fricked the system over very badly. Publishers soon realized sales were never going to be as good for the same user base so why bother.
You're that guy who will only look at sales data and can't use his brain to realize that piracy would have doomed the Dreamcast in the end if Sega had continued to support the system. You can't make the theoretical logical leap of why people say "piracy killed the dreamcast".
It's not about the sales that happened, it's about the future sales that did not and would not have happened due to piracy.
I bought a Dreamcast on 9/9/99. Bought five or six new games for it until about 2001 when I started pirating all my games. I did not and would have *never* bought another new Dreamcast game after that. Neither would the vast majority of Dreamcast owners. That is two years into the system's lifespan. Even if you try to course correct by releasing new Dreamcasts with better piracy protection (which Sega did near the end) it's pointless. A gigantic chunk of your potential install base already has a Dreamcast which can play burned games and there's nothing you can ever do about it.
THAT is why people say "piracy killed the Dreamcast". It's a doomed business concept after that point.
>would
>would
>would
what's up with segays and moronic hypotheticals?
no one cares
We had anecdotes shared by a guy over here who worked in a store. He said that the minute the utopia boot disc was available in the black market, dreamcast software sales completely dropped in their stores. Only the consoles would sell.
granted this was in eastern europe so not the most important market, but the fact is that piracy DID kill software sales.
To be fair I got a day 1 dreamcast and didn't buy any games after 6 months either without knowing I could pirate games for it. I probably wouldn't have put it in a closet if I could have pirated the arcade ports I knew I'd play for 2-3 hours tops
>dreamcast software sales completely dropped in their stores.
Dreamcast sales dropped because PS2 came out shortly after.
This is right. The Dreamcast was so easy to pirate games for and they were so available that the system never really had a chance. In university at the time people swapped disks constantly.
>TBP
A zoomer is gonna read this, go to TBP and get 1000 viruses like the dumbasses they are.
That doesn't make any sense.
Piracy promotes sales of the console since it means you get games for free on it.
And the console sold poorly, not just the games for it.
Consoles are sold at a loss since the fifth generation. The PlayStation basically popularized that strategy to instead profit off software sales.
The same applies to printers that use ink cartridges, incidentally.
Must have been a nice time to be a tech savvy guy in the 90s mod chipping and selling burned ps1 games. israelites fear the pirates
Not many people mod chipped their PS1, nor heard of it back then. Communazis fear capitalism.
ahahahahah
I got a ps1 in 1997 and never bought an original game.
this was before fast internet and I was a dumb kid so I didn't know how to copy a game,
so all my money went to buying pirated cd games from the usual shady places.
I'm from Brazil. All games of the PSX-PS2 era were pirated.
Also, I wonder how long these disks would last without crumbling with these ragged edges
>Dreamcast
Ubiquitous. Everyone who owned a Dreamcast had at-least one or two burned disc games.
>Xbox
Very common, about 1/3 of the people I knew with Xboxes had them modded in some way to play pirated games.
>PS2
Less common but you'd see chipped PS2's here and there. Became very common after FMCB became a thing.
>Gamecube
Much-less common. Gamecube was virtually impossible to softmod and Swiss/SD2SP2 wasn't a thing until nearly a decade after the Gamecube was discontinued.
>PS1
Fairly common but probably moreso in Europe than it was in the US but I knew someone with a chipped PS1.
>Saturn
Pretty common for people who knew and were good at doing the swap trick, since Pseudosaturn only became a thing within the past decade or so.
>N64
Not common. Few people knew what the Hell a Doctor V64 was and even fewer people knew where to get them or afford to buy them.
>GameBoy/Color
Very common. Cheapass pirate carts were ubiquitous at flea markets and some people even had fancy early flash carts they could load a rom or two onto from a serial port on a computer.
>SNES/Genesis
Same as N64, but pirated Sega CD games were quite common obviously since it had no copy protection.
Funny because everyone I knew had at least 100 or more burned disc dreamcast games. Cheap bastards.
It had no copy protection, nothing really stopped us from doing it.
Thought this was fun in college until I realized there's not that many great games anyway and just bought the good ones
If anything, there's more music than you can listen to in a lifetime than video games
DUDE. WEED.
99% of music produced is nothing more than crass degenerate garbage.
Realistically how would you fix the edge? Belt sander?
Put it on something like a lathe where the disc rotates and you can either cut or sand the edges
I don't care if it's "superior" I want to burn discs in peace without sd shills shitting up any modding discussion with their following bullshit
>"Burned discs!? B-b-b-but muh laser!"
>*Rips out disc drive*
>"You're going to burn out your laser, bro!"
>*Poorly installs gcloader like the champion he is*
>"Xenogc? heh, nope. I use an sd card it's SOOOOO much faster and easier than switching and potentially damaging all those discs! Discs rot y'know?"
>*Downloads yet another swiss update*
>"I saved so much time and space by selling all my games!"
>*Waits 2 hours for isos to copy to sd card*
>"I wish we had this YEARS ago!"
>*Puts console in a gaudy transparent shell*
>"They don't make electronics like this anymore! Just like the heckin' 90s!!!"
>*Installs rgb fans*
>*Mangles backplate to install hdmi output*
>"Ahhh, now that's more like it!"
>*Turns on gamecube*
>"Can't believe I can play my childhood favorites all in one place!"
>*Scrolls down game list*
>"Nostalgia here I come!!!"
>*Waits for game to load*
>"You're going to destroy you're gamecube playing those burned discs, anon."
>*Plays smash bros melee in stretched 16:9*
Rinse and repeat. I hate these morons so fricking much.
Seek help you fricking sperg
Normal people just softmod a Wii and just drag and drop the GameCube isos onto a HDD and move on.
The only console you need actively burn games for is Dreamcast and ps1
>Normal people just softmod a Wii and just drag and drop the GameCube isos onto a HDD and move on.
Exactly, I'm glad we're on the same page, anon. I'm never going to stop burning gamecube discs though.
No one's stopping you from wasting your time dclinging onto your "good ol" method.
>tell me you've never modded a GC without telling me you've never modded a GC
Thought the transparent shells are dumb on the GC specifically.
Don't think there's a single softmod/ODE user that cares about the laser dying or discs getting damaged so I must conclude you're imagining a person to get mad at.
I mean, I know you are slow to update, but modern mods don't deactivate the dvd player...
On usenet, PSX pirated discs was pretty common with many sellers in HK. Yeah. CD-R burners came out, but blanks were $10 at the time, and my friends burned several coasters before a getting a successful copy.
By the time the Dreamcast came out, discs were cheap, and fast internet got pretty common.
I had a GameCube shell that was cut for full size disc's
>how common were pirated console games during the peak era of pirated console games
???
For PS1 we had our trusted "people of colour" in the streets selling fake Gucci belts and PS1 games.
And then the cool kids, or at least those whose parents knew how to use a computer and had a cd-writer, they would make copies for the other kids. We would photocopy the covers at school.
Damn... miss those days.... the late 90s were one hell of a time
In portugal during summer festivities there were usually fairs ran by blacks or indians/paquis selling bootleg gameboy games for cheap. Pokemon romhacks were very common.
I don't remenber there being widespread piracy for other consoles thought but It was still present.
Pretty common. I remember my parents pirating pc games so the whole family could have a LAN party for the price of one game.
In latin america? You either pirated everything on sight, or owned 1-2 games forever.
In slavic countries it was rampant.
All these bootlegs and burned discs, I had maybe 4 legit PS1 games...
I remember talking to people back then that treated so-called "licensed copies" like how westerners treat blu-rays now; they'd only get them if it was something that they really liked, and everything else was watched off of 8-in-1 collections of dodgy quality burnt on two-sided DVD's since most people didn't have cheap internet yet.
>How common were pirated games for consoles in the 90s/00s?
Having actually lived through that era...not that common.
Gamers still bought official games. Sure a tiny amount of people modded their consoles and tried to play burn games. But the vast majority of people thought it was a small novelty at most. They would see someone playing burned games and think, "Huh? Oh...that's neat I guess. But I don't want to mess with my system."
Then go right back to buying official games from stores. Not much value was placed in burned games or modded systems.
Even today, modded consoles and burned games have no re-sale value. Most people want to buy original items in box, or unmodified. People value original items.
>They would see someone playing burned games and think, "Huh? Oh...that's neat I guess. But I don't want to mess with my system."
Very British outlook.
Americans would be slavering for the opportunity to play all the games they want for free.
That's not true at all, piracy was super rampant, especially for the PlayStation. It was weird seeing people who had loads of legit games. Even those with rich parents maybe had 10 or so proper copies and then 100 burnt ones.
Agreed 100%. I grew up during the 90s and piracy wasn't a big thing in my age group or the teens at my school. We all wanted to own legit games. It was a mark of pride and prestige. I grew up in California, USA. So perhaps anons in other poorer countries were more inclined to mod their consoles and play free games. I'm not insulting them. Just stating my thoughts.
I agree and disagree, I was about 6 when the PlayStation 1 came out and I had only ever heard of a single person talk about their uncle copying game discs.
This doesn’t mean it wasn’t common, just it wasn’t going to be common among my age group since I was pretty young at the time.
>no re-sale value
I wish. Frick you here's a 300 dollar PS3 because it's modded.
Burned games? Yeah I agree, unless it's a flashcart. That shit costs a lot, unless you're talking about the DS.
Que basado!!!
It depends on where you're from. I grew up in the US, and the only kid I knew during my childhood with pirated vidya was this one Asian kid that bought a bunch of PS1 games from Indonesia that were all burnt on blanks, he was the one I learned about swapping black discs with white discs on the PS1 from. None of the other kids I knew ever did something similar, but I also grew up in a rich (upper middle class, but rich by today's standards) area where I guess most kids didn't need to do that. I wish I knew you could burn pirated Gamecube ISO's a lot sooner, unfortunately my parents basically banned me from owning consoles by the time I learned about torrents, so I didn't get to pirate on original hardware until much later in life.
i used to rip my buddies PS games and then run them with bleem
that was fun
when i got a PS2 i put a HDD in it and ripped their PS2 games too
if you mean bootleg consoles and/or cartridges youll have better luck looking in places like BR. high tariffs, and nintendos unwillingness to let macacao build hardware in BR for them meant pretty much all nintendo products in BR wouldve been bootleg back then. unless you were some richgay paying extra to import an NES or something
i know slavs had the dendy too, so thats another whole c**t full of bootleg shit
Dreamcasts anti piracy efforts are fricking hilarious. They went yamahas gd-rom for the games thinking they wouldn't need to do any sort of disc checks for CD ROMs by the system . eventually publishers distributed games via CD ROMs as cost cutting measures making it piss easy to burn games since the console never had any sort of check.
I had a jailbroke wii and had 2 jailbroke xboxs at 2 different points (with 2 different front-ends), and I wasn't even savvy in that kind of thing as a kid, my mom would usually find it.
I did not know a single person growing up who had a pirated game for anything except PC, I live in the US. Was also born in 91 so would have been highly unlikely to meet a kid elementary/high school age who knew how to pirate games.
Interesting, also 91 here. Everyone I knew who had PS1/PS2/GC in eastern europe was pirating, 100%. We even shared tips how to boot games without modchips lol.
We didn't pirate all of the games, but most of the games for sure.
89, US. No one I knew as a kid. Even high school was just music. Never even knew most of these tricks until last year. I just assumed people emulated these days.
In the UK, it happened, but generally people would have a mainly legit library with perhaps one or two burned discs. You'd need to get some consoles chipped for discs to work.
I'm sure pirated cartridges were possible but I knew no one who had these in the 90s/00s.
PC Games on the other hand - once LAN parties and broadband were a thing, pretty much it became a free for all.
what sort of fricking zoomer question is this
please leave 4ch
In the UK piracy was rampant for the following consoles. PSX, Dreamcast, NDS, PS2, XBOX 360.
I can only speak from a UK perspective and my main systems (PS1, gameboy, PC).
PC was basically green light. Everyone pirated games like kingpin, command and conquer, quake etc.
Gameboy was pretty much emulator. Information technology was awesome in school, trying to keep a small window open playing pokemon gold (which wasn't released until months later). Hard to go back to normal speed after being spoiled by frameskip.
PS1 was very much pirated. Bootlegs were ubiquitous. Everyone knew someone who could get FFVII for £5. What held me back was the chipping process. I was too protective of my console to trust someone to mod it.
I also had the warranty in mind because Sony wouldn't repair if tampered with. I did actually need to claim because I had an original model with the sled problems. They gave me a refurbished unit.
Back in the day it was edonkey/emule downloading images for days on 5k modem. The anticipation is not something you get nowadays. You actually cherished the pirate image almost as much as the real thing. Digital feels more disposable now. Back then it was burn the bin and cue using CDRwin x1, DA0 on good quality verbatims (remember those blue tinted 650MB discs that were actually decent Taiyo Yudens?) good times.
A friend of mine got a chipped playstation 1 in flyover US, but it was kinda late in the lifespan, maybe 99, so I wasn't too interested in doing the same with mine.
Part of the mid-late 90s logic of console piracy is that I didn't have broadband and downloading a game image was a big ask, and I didn't live in a big city that had some gray market where I could buy a 10 pack of burned games for $10. So the most feasible way to get copies of games was to borrow from a friend or rent the game I'd burn. My friends all had their own tastes and the PS1 library was big by 97 so I didn't usually like anything they did unless it was something that was already broadly popular enough to have a cheap greatest hits version, and if I was renting something I probably could just play it until I had enough. So the cost/risk of chipping was never that compelling. The people I knew that were really into piracy did it to collect a big library of games they'd never play just out of some hoarding instinct.
In the early-mid 90s the cost of floppy disks encouraged PC devs to keep sizes down so it was a golden age of BBS PC piracy.