My first experience with video game piracy

My first experience with video game piracy

A short narrative about my first experience with video game piracy and why it showed me that consoles weren't the only place one could play video games.

Grumbeld

This might be an odd article to have for my debut on Cortex, but it is what came to mind when I looked at the blank screen so here we go.  Now, you might think that this will be a twist, like I'll start talking about Secret of Monkey Island being my first taste of video game piracy because it was a video game about piracy, but no, I am aiming for the literal this time.  No clever play on words in this article title, I'm sorry to say.

No, this is a story of an eight year old boy-child who was happily trying to figure out to program Basic on his family's Apple IIGS.  I remember that my dream program to own for the machine was LOGO, as that was what I had used on the Apple IIs back at my elementary school.  My parents told me that it was too expensive, however, and my allowance wasn't really sizable enough to purchase it anytime soon.  

I didn't fully appreciate the machine as being capable of playing video games, as I didn't really have any on it.  My Atari 2600 was still the console that we turned to (we didn't have an NES at that point, though you best believe that was also on my wishlist).  For me, the Apple computer was made for Carmen Sandiago, Oregon Trail, and LOGO.  I had two of those, and I wanted the third.

I can't recall the time of year (though I know that it wasn't summer) nor the weather outside when my dad brought the discs home with him, but I do remember those glorious 5.25 inch bad boys.  They both had a label taped to the top.  On both labels were a series of names, "Conan the Barbarian", "Hard Hat Mac", and "Spy Hunter" are the three that still leap to mind, 33 years later.  What my father had brought home were two discs filled with game executables for a bunch of early Apple games.  

This is surprising for a number of reasons.  The primary one was that my dad never took much of an interest in computer games.  When he played games, he generally would play things like solitaire or casino games, and most of these hadn't even come out at that point.  He didn't make the discs as he didn't have the know how to do so.  What he did have, however, was a career where he worked with a large number of people who did have that skillset.  That's right, he was a middle school PE teacher and coach.  Scores of students attended his class every day, and he was incredibly well liked too.  I have no idea how the conversation went, but one day, a student gave him those two discs as a gift (much better than the cliche apple a teacher normally receives).  

I loved those discs for a long time. Suddenly, I had what felt like a multitude of new games to dive into.  It also lead to me (my parents around the holidays and my birthday) buying actual games for the system, now that I could see what it was capable of.  Mean 18, Skate or Die, and Bubble Bobble were all more polished and stronger games than most of the ones on the disc, and I loved all of them dearly too; however, I will never forget that completely random time a student gave my father two discs filled with computer games (aside from all of the details that I can no longer recall).

From The Chatty
  • reply
    December 11, 2020 2:40 PM

    Grumbeld wrote a thing!

    Read more: My first experience with video game piracy

    • reply
      December 11, 2020 2:48 PM

      [deleted]

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      December 11, 2020 2:53 PM

      That was a lot earlier than I was introduced. First time I remember piracy was at LAN parties when we all needed a copy of a disk to play Starcraft together when someone inevitably forgot to bring theirs and we just burned a couple.

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      December 11, 2020 3:05 PM

      This is an interesting topic. My dad was an electrical engineer, and shortly after we got our Atari 2600 he opened it up and soldered a chip reader on it. Then he borrowed all his co-workers 2600 cartridges, opened them up and copied the chip on the cartridge. So I eventually had a couple hundred 2600 games on little chips that I stuck into a chip reader.

      V2 was a chip reader on a cartridge - he made a few of those for my friends.

      Later, we fully embraced piracy by purchasing a Copy 2 PC Option Board which was a floppy controller that let us make copies of copy-protected floppies. There was a software rental place in town, and we probably copied half their stock.

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        December 11, 2020 6:43 PM

        I had a similar thing on a C64 cartridge.

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      December 11, 2020 3:54 PM

      I photocopied every iteration of a code wheel. forgive me.

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      December 11, 2020 4:19 PM

      Mine was really dumb. My parents got me an Atari 800 after I demonstrated an interest in programming, and the store we bought it from just straight up gave us a couple disks of pirated games on it. Super weird sales tactic seeing that they sold software there.

      Same thing happened with the keyboards I had - I was lucky and had an Ensoniq and Emax 2 when I was older, and I’d go in and hang out with the store’s keyboard guy and just copy tons of sound libraries.

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      December 11, 2020 5:30 PM

      Back in the early 80s pretty much all we had for the C-64 was cracked stuff. I only remember a couple things being bought. As I recall even the BBS software we used was cracked (we ran a BBS).

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        December 11, 2020 6:41 PM

        Yeah, same here. I had hundreds of games and several boxes of floppies. I went to a Commodore user group in the next town over that was pretty much based around piracy.

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        December 11, 2020 6:44 PM

        High five, C-64 brother! I have a similar story, but I did get a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? game, and Pool of Radiance (original boxed games), at some points.

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          December 11, 2020 6:47 PM

          The only one I clearly remember being purchased was Pinball Construction Set for Christmas, from the grandparents.

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