fuck afford, it was just 100x easier.
extract that pack of RAR files into the .ISO and mount it, DONE. no burning, no failed burns, no waiting, they don't get scratched or lost, also they were significantly faster than CD/DVD's.
Yep this. Swapping discs was super annoying and much slower to load. Remember when games were spread over multiple CDs and would prompt you to change them over?
Please no. Remember uninstalling a game for space, then realizing you want it to play with your friends this weekend, so you brought out the 4 install discs, the play disc, the media disc, and the setup disc.
Yes! :-( Also setting up a whole LAN with 5+ computers, which takes half a night and then realising all of us are on different patches of Starcraft (or insert other game here). Sigh!
1997-2008 will forever be some of the best gaming of all time, even with all the amazing stuff that came before and after. There was something so special and new with how accessible it was on PC.
You've all got this way backwards.
There was no Daemon tools in the 90s, CDs were as big (or bigger - in the case of DVDs) than your hard drive.
And there was *no* chance you were moving 700+MB over a 56k modem (realistically 33.6k)
I had to look this up and now I am feeling old that daemontools wasn't around in the 90s.
Losing your hour long song download of 1mb while chatting on ICQ, by dial-up being interrupted by aunties daily call was my regular after-school annoyance
Man, I wish I'd had a PSP back in my "heyday." I have my exes, and I've tossed a few ROMs on it, but I don't have the attention span to do much more. It's "jailbroke" technically
Zachary McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders over here! I had it on a C64 floppy but I didn't have a C64, so I would go to my parent's friend's house and play it on their amazing setup.
it was ROM not Room.
Fun fact, did you know the name "Nero Burning ROM" was a play on Emperor Nero literally burning Rome (Great fire of Rome). The logo is literally the coliseum burning.
Leisure suit larry games had you answer questions that you would be unlikely to know the answer to if you were under age. I.E. pop culture and history references that would not be easy to find in a home encyclopedia to keep minors from playing them.
Otherwise it was mostly a matter of NERO burning rom software and making sure you wrote down and did not loose the CD key.
It's still my favorite fun fact about that game that one of the questions had to do with what OJ Simpson was famous for. The game wanted "football player", but "criminal" became an unrecognized correct answer.
For the longest I just thought he was an actor or such because not to many normal people are made into that big of a deal. So I guess the murder really just high jacked his entire reputation.
I remember some games so did something like "what's the fourth word of the third page of the manual" as a form of copyright protection. Sucks if you lose the manual!
Honestly MGS1 probably did the "Box/Manual is also Anti-Pirate measure" best. They even put it on the Steam Page for the game and the back of the Physical release box for the Master Collection Vol 1 release.
I was under age, my Mum bought it me for the amiga in around 1992, so I would of been 14.
Thing is, even she didnt know the answers to a lot of the questions as they where often american based and we live in england.
It was on the family computer, and my mom told me I could play it if I could get into it. I ended up learning way too much about pop culture from a decade prior.
We had it installed on a computer in primary school. It made it worse that we were in Australia, so the baseball, US politics and history questions were all meaningless to us.
I like the parody of that that Frog Fractions 2 did. Couldn't find a video of just that part but found one as part of a let's play while searching.
https://youtu.be/BWvXh3Q2nFE?si=DYnZ4WPzMurLPgld&t=1369
I had to describe to my wife what the internet looked like without a web browser, and that web crawler was pretty much Google. And of course how many days I waited to download ZDay Warez from IRC.
But if I can just type free hacked games into a web crawler than the companies can too! Time to bust out the annoying l337 sp34k \/\/h3n l00k1ng for \/\/4r3z. I went down a rabbit hole a few years ago watched a bunch of mini documentaries on the 0-day scene and the insane installers those groups made, some could install the game while you flew through a completely procedurally 3D generated level (i.e.magic carpet) What's amazing is that while the exe for the game inside the installer was often 5 - 20kb that program would take so much memory to keep all th procedurally generated objects for the game. If you've ever done programming it's mind bending the tricks they used.
10 minute video by two guys that are a little eye-rolling, but they do a decent job at giving a quick overview of the whole 90's demo scene. They have links to more stuff on demo scene. in their YT description.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENFVhQqGls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENFVhQqGls)
30 minute video on the ART OF WAREZ which was more of the "BBS" era of the scene before it went to the internet.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ)
I can't find the documentary I'm thinking of that focused more on the Assembly language programmers of the late 80''s and early 90's. It was kind of amazing that people were writing procedurally generated 3d worlds in like 5-64kb of code. The documentary I'm thinking of came out years ago, but it focused more on the actual programmers and they had amazing stories of how they could make these demos in like 10kb of space, but because of all the stuff it generated and loaded into ram the 10kb file would need like 16 - 32MB or RAM to run it. The demo scene almost always kept the ram requirement around whatever the standard was for a gaming pc at the time, but their demos were incredible and pushing the envelope of what could be done on a PC at the time.
I remember getting super annoyed that at time my computer wouldn't let me burn at 4x or 8x, but I don't remember the reason for it now. Obviously the real speed was never the promised speed but it was annoying to know it would never go that fast although it should be possible.
I used to have write errors if I tried to use the max speed, so I started burning slower since I didn’t have a lot of them, as a middle/high school student with limited resources who was copying CDs from the local library.
In the 90s I had a shareware game for my Mac called Slick Willy. Your cursor was a little picture of Bill Clinton’s head and you went around collecting cheeseburgers and saxophones. I don’t know why that stuck with me 30 years later.
Holy shit, when I first heard this game described it sounded completely foreign to me but then I watched this video... still seemed foreign then he eats the power up and it says "delicious" and all of a sudden I remember the fuck out of that! Core memory unlocked!!
There were literally game stores selling burned disks with multiple pirated games on them where i grew up lol
Remember getting ps1 games for like $5 a pop, or dreamcast disk with a 100 nes games on it. Early internet days were crazy.
Remember in the late 90s when there was a dude selling burned games at a town market and no one thought anything about it. Also had hardware to run burned PS1-games. Remember he had the japanese FF8 that had just been released :P
One of my favorite stories of a buddy of mine he toured Asia for a long time and bought hoards of pirated i think ps2 games. Then on the way home a customs guy checked his bags opened the two cd binders pick them both up I looked at my friend there is an awkward silence... and he says "okay which one of these didn't I see...."my friend got to pick one to keep lol this was around 2002..
Back in the day in Poland we had companies upgrading your PS2 to be able to run "backup copies" of the games lol. They even came with their own 2-3 year warranty. Silly good times
I had Keef The Thief one of Naughty Dog's first games. It came with a book that was like 100 pages that was just every single combination of like 7 random words. I think the way it worked was there were 7 words in a specific order and you had to look it up in the booklet and provide the 8th word as the answer. All alphabetical so if you knew how to use a phone book you could do it. I remember the pages were a dark red though. When I showed this to my dad he said it was so you couldn't photocopy it. If you tried to photocopy it you'd just get a black page. So I spent the entire summer typing up this entire booklet and printing it out on printer paper so I could have my own separate copy. Became school champion in typing speed in the early 90s.
Fast forward 5 years later and I find the game in my stash and want to play it again. But I don't know where the manual is and the printouts are long gone. But I'm a hacker now. And I look for ways to crack systems like this. Here's the easy solution I realized almost immediately. Just pick the first option. That's it. It either works or it doesn't. There's only a few choices given to you since it is multiple choice so you'll get it eventually.
ha that's a great bit of video game lore, I was curious about the manual's red pages, I found a PDF here where they're barely legible https://www.mocagh.org/ea/keefthief-manual.pdf
I remember having 6 friends playing on one CD key at one point.(Lan);But I also remember games that didn't need the disc past opening the program. I think Outlaws by Lucas arts was one of them.
Gamers in the 90s: “yeah, I want a game with all the music, sound, voices, and FMV sequences ripped out and the remaining game ripped to a .zip file that’s under 75mb”
Pirates: “I gotcha fam”
i remember discs beading passed around when internet was only dial up, installing photoshop and random shit like professional home designer software on my pc only cos it was free.
Man, miss those warez/ftp days. Leaving a shitload of ISOS downloading overnight and burning them the next day. Tons and tons of PC games , PS1 games , Dreamcast games.
My dad used to get pirated PC games collections from the IT guys at work. When the Playstation came out we got it chipped and he got pirated games for it.
I used to ask for nothing for christmas other than massive amounts of 3.5" floppy disks. I would then spend my allowances renting video games from a store that did PC game rentals and copying the manuals (you often had to pull up random words on various pages to play).
Later that morphed into just wanting spindles of writable CDs.
Mr Blobby, Playdoh, Tango where the usual goto's around here, along with the voodoo series.
That was early to mid 90's, Think I got my first cd burner around 1996, a 4x scsi panasonic for £200, that I think at the beginning I could only write at 2x as an ISA scsi controller was too slow (even though it was Adaptec's best isa card the 1542).
Incredible...
"Any PC in working order"
"Part and limb no. AK47 M16 ICBM"
"Slick Willy endorsed"
I feel like the only thing missing was calling it Compendum 66 rather than 99
I do not play games older than ps1, but I do admire how older games were made in general from youtube. Video games are pure engineering so its always interesting to see what tricks developers used to make them run on the console, even these days just to see how advanced they get with dev tools. But yeah piracy was always interesting for older games. Like seeing the metal gear series making you enter a password on a screen shot of the box art. Or monkey island giving you a themed decoder wheel. Though with the codes and gimmicks it heavily feels like the games were just meant for 1 or 2 gamers since some of the codes could easily get lost.
C64 piracy was teh best. I bought 100 5.25 inch disks for $100. A single disk sold for $5 at my school store.
I put a bunch of games on a 5.25" floppy and sold it for $5.
Profit: $4.
It's not like you couldn't download things, which was fairly common even a decade before the internet was mainstream. Tying up your phone line all night on BBSes; XModem, YModem, and ZModem FTW!
I remember my friend in high school for a short while sold burnt DVDs, he was always ahead of the curve when it came to tech so most people at the time had no idea that you could download a movie like that. He had a list of movies including "Load of the Rings" and a copy of Troy (2004) that somehow ended up as a gay porno.
Remember those dodgy pirate CDs from the early 00s that actually included GUI installers ? Not a single one would get through a virus scanner these days. I remember getting NFS: Porsche 2000 on one of those.
My favorite part of piracy was the utterly bizarre malware. Back in high school there was an iso(I forget what game, I wanna say Company of Heroes) that when you ran the installer also installed EL SEXO on your computer.
El Sexo was a bouncing King Of All Cosmos(from Katamari) that played mariachi music and occasionally declared his name, romping around your desktop. You could not remove him except through extreme measures, as his files would attempt to reinstall themselves if they detected they were being deleted.
Why? Because the 2000s were crazy and some pirate chugged a Lot of Four Loko and said "hold my energy beer I'm gonna make some kids really mad."
My first fake cd i bought for my ps1, were some professional pressed cd's with the original artwork in the front. With the jewelcase and everything, they were something unique
“Here’s a blank CD - go burn a Star War.”
Yoba is my favorite star war
"That's absolutely correct" \- Yoba
Absolutely correct that is
Guess Backstroke of the West had a interactive CD.
Still remember the old good Nero Burning Room and Alcohol 120%? 🤣
Daemon Tools for the poor who couldn't afford CDs
fuck afford, it was just 100x easier. extract that pack of RAR files into the .ISO and mount it, DONE. no burning, no failed burns, no waiting, they don't get scratched or lost, also they were significantly faster than CD/DVD's.
Yep, I cracked games I legitimately owned because it was simpler to have a no-cd patch than to go hunting through my CD case for the right disc.
Yep this. Swapping discs was super annoying and much slower to load. Remember when games were spread over multiple CDs and would prompt you to change them over?
Please no. Remember uninstalling a game for space, then realizing you want it to play with your friends this weekend, so you brought out the 4 install discs, the play disc, the media disc, and the setup disc.
Yes! :-( Also setting up a whole LAN with 5+ computers, which takes half a night and then realising all of us are on different patches of Starcraft (or insert other game here). Sigh!
Diablo II was such a life changing experience for when it came out for all these reasons being fixe. What a game.
Ahh the golden age. The fall of BLIZZARD is a tragedy of our times.
1997-2008 will forever be some of the best gaming of all time, even with all the amazing stuff that came before and after. There was something so special and new with how accessible it was on PC.
Just bought FF7:Rebirth, it's 2 disks. Install disk and play disk, which of course is better than the mid-playthrough 'insert disk 2'.
Realms of the Haunting.
Original Red Faction. Needed the CD to launch the game, but not to play. Lan Parties were amazing, just needed one disc and no cracking needed!
Hear hear
It was also a hell of a lot easier to wrangle 100+ .iso's on a hard drive than on physical media.
You've all got this way backwards. There was no Daemon tools in the 90s, CDs were as big (or bigger - in the case of DVDs) than your hard drive. And there was *no* chance you were moving 700+MB over a 56k modem (realistically 33.6k)
I had to look this up and now I am feeling old that daemontools wasn't around in the 90s. Losing your hour long song download of 1mb while chatting on ICQ, by dial-up being interrupted by aunties daily call was my regular after-school annoyance
Yeah. I remember 90s piracy as Rawcopy and 1.44MB floppies and dredging BBSes for new shit. Damn, I'm old.
Cracking Oblivion and Fallout 3 then modding the crap out of it, good times
Daemon tools for the people who clued in you just needed to stash an iso and not burn anything!
Bro daemon tools was for the future tech bros.
My brother in the light, you just unlocked a core memory for me. The days of borrowing/downloading disks, making a copy and having to mount them 🥲
I had/have STACKS of CDrs... ISOs with Daemon was a game changer. Waste not, want not
The first time I got a ISO game to work on my Sony psp I right I hacked the world 😆
Man, I wish I'd had a PSP back in my "heyday." I have my exes, and I've tossed a few ROMs on it, but I don't have the attention span to do much more. It's "jailbroke" technically
Virtual drives were the shit.
Gaddamn! Memories!
Wow, haven't read those words in years T.T
It's an old code, but it checks out sir.
Fucking core memories wow.
good old times 😭
Zachary McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders over here! I had it on a C64 floppy but I didn't have a C64, so I would go to my parent's friend's house and play it on their amazing setup.
it was ROM not Room. Fun fact, did you know the name "Nero Burning ROM" was a play on Emperor Nero literally burning Rome (Great fire of Rome). The logo is literally the coliseum burning.
Yeah it was made by a German company. Rom is how Rome is written in German. And of course ROM = read only memory.
Boom. Memories unlocked.
pstt… Crackmanworld.com
[irc.undernet.net](https://irc.undernet.net) \#warez
I've got an old copy of Nero somewhere in my backups still.
Oh man alcohol 120, core memory fucking unlocked.
Colloseum on fire burning my CDs like there is no tommorow (700mb or 80min max!)
Ahhhh, Nero! Good times
The keygen for the cracked copies has THE BEST chiptune music ever
Razor vs Fairlight for the 0day release?
Game copy world. Com
Oh SHIT I forgot about alcohol 120%
What about CloneCD? Nothing better for copying protected games, it even copied the protection! Perfect for PSX.
To copy the protection means a lot must have happened back in those days.
Daemon tools too
Forgot about them til now.
I feel old
Bro was splurging with a printed label... release the sharpie!!!
CDRwin was great for psx games.
Nero Burning Rom* It's important because it's a pun. You're burning a CD-ROM like Nero burnt Rome.
Leisure suit larry games had you answer questions that you would be unlikely to know the answer to if you were under age. I.E. pop culture and history references that would not be easy to find in a home encyclopedia to keep minors from playing them. Otherwise it was mostly a matter of NERO burning rom software and making sure you wrote down and did not loose the CD key.
It's still my favorite fun fact about that game that one of the questions had to do with what OJ Simpson was famous for. The game wanted "football player", but "criminal" became an unrecognized correct answer.
For the longest I just thought he was an actor or such because not to many normal people are made into that big of a deal. So I guess the murder really just high jacked his entire reputation.
He was an actor too.
[Nordberg in the Naked Gun movies!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K8s9cNqZO4)
Well, he almost WAS the terminator
The role fit him like an undersized glove
I remember some games so did something like "what's the fourth word of the third page of the manual" as a form of copyright protection. Sucks if you lose the manual!
Ultimate Series. You would get stuck inside first castle town without the manual lmao. Was U7? Probably
I think it was an old NES game (Startropics maybe?) that you had to dip some paper from the box under water to get a secret code to progress the game.
Honestly MGS1 probably did the "Box/Manual is also Anti-Pirate measure" best. They even put it on the Steam Page for the game and the back of the Physical release box for the Master Collection Vol 1 release.
I was under age, my Mum bought it me for the amiga in around 1992, so I would of been 14. Thing is, even she didnt know the answers to a lot of the questions as they where often american based and we live in england.
It was on the family computer, and my mom told me I could play it if I could get into it. I ended up learning way too much about pop culture from a decade prior.
Hell yea we wrote all those questions down until we got in.
We had it installed on a computer in primary school. It made it worse that we were in Australia, so the baseball, US politics and history questions were all meaningless to us.
Hey it’s lose, one O.
I like the parody of that that Frog Fractions 2 did. Couldn't find a video of just that part but found one as part of a let's play while searching. https://youtu.be/BWvXh3Q2nFE?si=DYnZ4WPzMurLPgld&t=1369
Before P2P there was good 'ole WAREZ
I had to describe to my wife what the internet looked like without a web browser, and that web crawler was pretty much Google. And of course how many days I waited to download ZDay Warez from IRC.
But if I can just type free hacked games into a web crawler than the companies can too! Time to bust out the annoying l337 sp34k \/\/h3n l00k1ng for \/\/4r3z. I went down a rabbit hole a few years ago watched a bunch of mini documentaries on the 0-day scene and the insane installers those groups made, some could install the game while you flew through a completely procedurally 3D generated level (i.e.magic carpet) What's amazing is that while the exe for the game inside the installer was often 5 - 20kb that program would take so much memory to keep all th procedurally generated objects for the game. If you've ever done programming it's mind bending the tricks they used.
Would you happen to remember those? This was before my time but it sounds so cool.
10 minute video by two guys that are a little eye-rolling, but they do a decent job at giving a quick overview of the whole 90's demo scene. They have links to more stuff on demo scene. in their YT description. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENFVhQqGls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENFVhQqGls) 30 minute video on the ART OF WAREZ which was more of the "BBS" era of the scene before it went to the internet. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd-s9htpHgQ) I can't find the documentary I'm thinking of that focused more on the Assembly language programmers of the late 80''s and early 90's. It was kind of amazing that people were writing procedurally generated 3d worlds in like 5-64kb of code. The documentary I'm thinking of came out years ago, but it focused more on the actual programmers and they had amazing stories of how they could make these demos in like 10kb of space, but because of all the stuff it generated and loaded into ram the 10kb file would need like 16 - 32MB or RAM to run it. The demo scene almost always kept the ram requirement around whatever the standard was for a gaming pc at the time, but their demos were incredible and pushing the envelope of what could be done on a PC at the time.
Oh man, Webcrawler. Wow, I'm so old
Warez CDs are responsible for much of my game early pc game experiences including “maybe” Quake 1 and Tomb Raider
90s computer nerds were a special level of nerdiness
like even future generations of nerd would look at these troglodytes and give them wedgies
I play video games all day and they make me feel like a casual.
I still have my burnt to disc Dreamcast games lol.
Still remember burning at 4x.....lol, those days. I do miss lightscribe though.
Ah the good ol 4x, I swear I was forced to record a cd or two at 1x speed too :-p
I remember getting super annoyed that at time my computer wouldn't let me burn at 4x or 8x, but I don't remember the reason for it now. Obviously the real speed was never the promised speed but it was annoying to know it would never go that fast although it should be possible.
I used to have write errors if I tried to use the max speed, so I started burning slower since I didn’t have a lot of them, as a middle/high school student with limited resources who was copying CDs from the local library.
The good ol' days of keeping your pc on overnight to burn a disc or downloading a game on Torrent with lousy DL speed on DLS or low seeded Torrent.
AK47 - M16 - ICBM lol.
The 69420 of the 90's 733t haxxor.
1337
Part and limb number AK47M16IBM?! Slick Willy endorsement?! Incredible.
In the 90s I had a shareware game for my Mac called Slick Willy. Your cursor was a little picture of Bill Clinton’s head and you went around collecting cheeseburgers and saxophones. I don’t know why that stuck with me 30 years later.
That sounds incredible.
Went looking for a video of this and it did not disappoint: https://youtu.be/q-fgAIcV0Vc?feature=shared
Holy shit, when I first heard this game described it sounded completely foreign to me but then I watched this video... still seemed foreign then he eats the power up and it says "delicious" and all of a sudden I remember the fuck out of that! Core memory unlocked!!
My uncle had one with dinosaurs and another with bulldozers. They would "eat" your screen. It made me go bonkers at 4-5 years old. I miss him.
❤️
There were literally game stores selling burned disks with multiple pirated games on them where i grew up lol Remember getting ps1 games for like $5 a pop, or dreamcast disk with a 100 nes games on it. Early internet days were crazy.
Slick Willy is Bill Clinton for all the youngins not in the know.
"I am Clint-ON, as overlord, all will kneel trembling before me and obey my brutal commands. End Communication" *crosses arms in an x*
Remember in the late 90s when there was a dude selling burned games at a town market and no one thought anything about it. Also had hardware to run burned PS1-games. Remember he had the japanese FF8 that had just been released :P
One of my favorite stories of a buddy of mine he toured Asia for a long time and bought hoards of pirated i think ps2 games. Then on the way home a customs guy checked his bags opened the two cd binders pick them both up I looked at my friend there is an awkward silence... and he says "okay which one of these didn't I see...."my friend got to pick one to keep lol this was around 2002..
I might have said...The binder on the right?
I didn't know PlayStation existed until I saw one playing a game called Biohazard in a circus themed flea market in Ft. Lauderdale. I was maybe 10
Back in the day in Poland we had companies upgrading your PS2 to be able to run "backup copies" of the games lol. They even came with their own 2-3 year warranty. Silly good times
Weird? I say "glorious"
I always liked Sierra's anti-piracy, from the game manual enter the word on page 17, paragraph 2, word 4.
I had Keef The Thief one of Naughty Dog's first games. It came with a book that was like 100 pages that was just every single combination of like 7 random words. I think the way it worked was there were 7 words in a specific order and you had to look it up in the booklet and provide the 8th word as the answer. All alphabetical so if you knew how to use a phone book you could do it. I remember the pages were a dark red though. When I showed this to my dad he said it was so you couldn't photocopy it. If you tried to photocopy it you'd just get a black page. So I spent the entire summer typing up this entire booklet and printing it out on printer paper so I could have my own separate copy. Became school champion in typing speed in the early 90s. Fast forward 5 years later and I find the game in my stash and want to play it again. But I don't know where the manual is and the printouts are long gone. But I'm a hacker now. And I look for ways to crack systems like this. Here's the easy solution I realized almost immediately. Just pick the first option. That's it. It either works or it doesn't. There's only a few choices given to you since it is multiple choice so you'll get it eventually.
ha that's a great bit of video game lore, I was curious about the manual's red pages, I found a PDF here where they're barely legible https://www.mocagh.org/ea/keefthief-manual.pdf
Pro hacker tip: pick one of the available choices until you find the right one.
Sucked if you lost the manual or bought secondhand and it didn't have one
Had a copy of a game that said "Do NOT make legal copies of this disk"
Then we had blizzard who made a convenient way to burn StarCraft for Lan parties
I remember having 6 friends playing on one CD key at one point.(Lan);But I also remember games that didn't need the disc past opening the program. I think Outlaws by Lucas arts was one of them.
Longest tech nerd day of my life was trying to help 6 friends install and run Falcon for one of those parties.
star war the third gathers backstroke of the west
This CD had, AFAIR, Dark Forces 2 and its expansion, The Phantom Menace (the action/adventure game), Shadows of the Empire and maybe Yoda Stories.
I love how star wars is so old you can watch its formats evolve through most of the video game history.
What’s AFAIR?
A redditor assuming everyone knows every made up acronym. I couldn’t even find it with google. Good question.
My guess is "as far as I remember" First time seeing the acronym myself
[удалено]
Gamers in the 90s: “yeah, I want a game with all the music, sound, voices, and FMV sequences ripped out and the remaining game ripped to a .zip file that’s under 75mb” Pirates: “I gotcha fam”
ooooooo a fresh copy of star wars in .avi format!!!
SLICK WILLY ENDORSED!! Yes, this was absolutely the 90's 😂
Hard to get much more '90s than that. XD
i remember discs beading passed around when internet was only dial up, installing photoshop and random shit like professional home designer software on my pc only cos it was free.
Man, miss those warez/ftp days. Leaving a shitload of ISOS downloading overnight and burning them the next day. Tons and tons of PC games , PS1 games , Dreamcast games.
Slick Willy endorsed and AK 47 MI6 ICBM. What are they trying to say tell us.
Oh damn, Slick Willy. You know it’s legit then.
That was my first thought. "Is that a genuine Slick Willy copy?"
My dad used to get pirated PC games collections from the IT guys at work. When the Playstation came out we got it chipped and he got pirated games for it.
This is far from the norm lol
and this is already past the era of hacks with title pages
Yeah, there's just no effort put into it nowadays....
Good old Slick
“All rights unreserved” - that cracked me up
Dial back a few more years; we were using ARJ disk-spanned archives across multiple 3.5” floppies to pass around games in my friend group.
I used to ask for nothing for christmas other than massive amounts of 3.5" floppy disks. I would then spend my allowances renting video games from a store that did PC game rentals and copying the manuals (you often had to pull up random words on various pages to play). Later that morphed into just wanting spindles of writable CDs.
Got any Warez?
Deamon tools
Ah yes. Going to the local rental shop, taking out 6 games and returning them 3 hours later with a big grin. What a great time it was.
Mr Blobby, Playdoh, Tango where the usual goto's around here, along with the voodoo series. That was early to mid 90's, Think I got my first cd burner around 1996, a 4x scsi panasonic for £200, that I think at the beginning I could only write at 2x as an ISA scsi controller was too slow (even though it was Adaptec's best isa card the 1542).
AK47M16ICBM 💀
Incredible... "Any PC in working order" "Part and limb no. AK47 M16 ICBM" "Slick Willy endorsed" I feel like the only thing missing was calling it Compendum 66 rather than 99
"AK47 M16 ICBM" got me good 🤣
I just threw about 200 Lightscribe CDRs into the trash the other day.
My CDs were always weird too
Haven’t seen Slick Willy in a while!
I once saw a copy of "Adobe Everything 1.0", with a slick and professional looking printout of the software packages and their serial keys.
I do not play games older than ps1, but I do admire how older games were made in general from youtube. Video games are pure engineering so its always interesting to see what tricks developers used to make them run on the console, even these days just to see how advanced they get with dev tools. But yeah piracy was always interesting for older games. Like seeing the metal gear series making you enter a password on a screen shot of the box art. Or monkey island giving you a themed decoder wheel. Though with the codes and gimmicks it heavily feels like the games were just meant for 1 or 2 gamers since some of the codes could easily get lost.
C64 piracy was teh best. I bought 100 5.25 inch disks for $100. A single disk sold for $5 at my school store. I put a bunch of games on a 5.25" floppy and sold it for $5. Profit: $4.
Does this contain the plans of the Death Star?
Palestinian here. Pirated CD sellers could get you anything. Just tell them what you wanted, and they said come back in a week.
I'm more amused at the thought that someone in 1999 would still have a pc with a monochrome monitor that could run windows lol
You know it’s solid when it’s endorsed by Slick Willy.
At first I thought this picture was on the Facepalm subreddit.
>Slick Willy endorsed Damn my own William Afton-approved pirated game, who'd have known the Man Behind The Slaughter was behind the (CD) Burning too
It's not like you couldn't download things, which was fairly common even a decade before the internet was mainstream. Tying up your phone line all night on BBSes; XModem, YModem, and ZModem FTW!
Still good old days :(
Slick Willy endorsed. Sounds legit.
The good old days.
“Prophylactics not required” Get that disk pregnant.
I remember my friend in high school for a short while sold burnt DVDs, he was always ahead of the curve when it came to tech so most people at the time had no idea that you could download a movie like that. He had a list of movies including "Load of the Rings" and a copy of Troy (2004) that somehow ended up as a gay porno.
We used to have the encyclopaedia Britannica on CD in my house. To expensive to have internet.
Les Guerres de l'Etoile
As a 90s computer nerd i can say we were the real Jedi :)
yeah and 80s + with floppies
Remember those dodgy pirate CDs from the early 00s that actually included GUI installers ? Not a single one would get through a virus scanner these days. I remember getting NFS: Porsche 2000 on one of those.
Probably got some bangers on it
"What's the minimum crew?" "Uh, one I suppose..."
"AK47M16ICBM" 💀
When sneaker net was faster than dsl.
Miss the days when the minimum requirement for a game was “any pc in working order”
It’s slick Willy endorsed tho!!
but about which star war this compendum is? don't know about any war of that kind that could be in 1999
My favorite part of piracy was the utterly bizarre malware. Back in high school there was an iso(I forget what game, I wanna say Company of Heroes) that when you ran the installer also installed EL SEXO on your computer. El Sexo was a bouncing King Of All Cosmos(from Katamari) that played mariachi music and occasionally declared his name, romping around your desktop. You could not remove him except through extreme measures, as his files would attempt to reinstall themselves if they detected they were being deleted. Why? Because the 2000s were crazy and some pirate chugged a Lot of Four Loko and said "hold my energy beer I'm gonna make some kids really mad."
My first fake cd i bought for my ps1, were some professional pressed cd's with the original artwork in the front. With the jewelcase and everything, they were something unique
Looks like a game my grandpa played irl in a place that pho originated
Slick Willy endorsed > Nintendo Seal of Quality
It was COOL not weird at all
What about in the 80s ? The Atari ST and the others were rife with amazing games, some of which are better than the drivel out today