Confessions of a software pirate.

            Recently Brad has dived back into  the topic of game piracy online. Here is my two-cents.

            I am a game pirate from way back in the day before the internet and even before BBS systems. In the stone age we would pirate games by receiving cracked copies of Apple II games on 5.25 floppies (Dig-dug, Loderunner, Zaxxon…). In order to get these precious gems you had to know somebody, usually somebody in a college computer department who was working with advanced copy algorithms or someone who was in contact with the very early pirate BBS systems.They would then allow you to have a copy of their cracked games which you would have to learn to copy (Apple games were BIG into weird copy routines) and give to your friends.

            Why did we do this you ask? Because then (as now) Apple had nice computers and a shitty software distro system. As a 10-14 year old kid you simply had no vehicle to get a large city where you could track down that lonely software store back in the 80’s. The one software joint we had in Brainerd, MN sucked beyond words and only did games as a side item. In effect the pirates became Apple’s distributor in our eyes. After all if the damn company couldn’t be bothered to put the games where we could buy them then we could not be bothered to pay for them. Tit for tat.

            When I leaped into IBM/Pentium based computing (with the intro of the ⁸⁰⁸⁸/₈₆ processor not the later 286 mind you) I found a whole new wold of piracy! You see even back then the MS-DOS file system had zero built in file copy protection. Copying went from an arcane science involving sector read sequence and parity to a one line operation that was 100% sucessful every time! Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

            I soon found that despite this obvious pirate feature of MS-DOS there were simply less folks doing the pirating! The games were far more readily available than anything Apple had and were of higher quality to boot! With many of these games the manual or at least the printed materials accompanying the games were requried to fully realize the potential of the game (Wasteland (for the love of ghod (not a misspelling) someone make Fallout 3!) , The Bard’s Tale, Elite). Instead of pirating these lovelies I instead wheedled my mother into buying them for me until I got a job and could afford them myself.

            After joining the Army and moving to Korea I once again resumed my rapine of software. This was again due to the poor software distro system in my locale. It was far easier to get a copy of a game from a friend who had mail ordered it rather than see him playing it while I waited 3 ghoddamn weeks for my copy in the mail.

            Once I came back to the Land of the Big PX I once again bought games at a frenzied pace. Afterall this was the time frame in which games were CD size and the Net was all dial-up. Who pirates a 650MB game over a 28.8 connection? (a very patient pirate that’s who!)

            Since bandwidth has sort of caught up to code bloat in modern games I have once again resumed occasional piratical raids on software companies when they can not be bothered with providing a demo or even a decent amount of box copy. I mean if your game is not good enough to warrant some print on a game box well I ain’t buyin it until I have seen the full version of said gaming abortion.

            Bottom line dead last : If your game has a bad distribution system or your company has a history of crappy games I am far more likely to pirate your game rather than gamble 50-70 dollars on your latest Beta. Brad is right all the way. That’s why his company gets my buck and others don’t.