Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

As a child in the 90ies I did not know you could buy games, the only way I knew was to copy it from a friend.

Later my cousin traveled to Poland where he bought pirated floppy disks, this is how I realized that you could somehow pay to get access to many new games.

My uncle was an electrical engineer back in the day and our family would get hand-me-down PC's, and every DOS game I ever played as a kid was pirated. I'm guessing my uncle would get them on BBS or something it's that far back. I was 10 in 1993, and I remember struggling with Leisure Suit Larry (which, because one needed to type in English taught me a great deal! Including the "prove-you're-an-adult quiz" to even get into it). I also remember thinking how easy Civilization 1 was but it turns out I was playing with a "trainer" the whole time and could just pump out units at near 0 cost 😄. But as a kid I didn't know any better.
In 1996 I bought my own PC, AMD K2 200mhz, 3 GB HDD and who knows how many ram, but only a measly Matrox 2D card to begin with, and yep, even then a lot of the games were pirated, and a few years later, probably 1998 I got my first CD-rom drive which just made piracy even easier. A friend from school had a dad who would get pirated games, almost like it was linux distributions. Most of these CD-rom's would be repackaged games without cutscenes but with custom installers with music. It's how I got into Blümchen at the peak age of 15.
Then in 1999 I began going to a local computer club which was mostly a way to play LAN games with friends and share pirated stuff and use a faster dedicated internet connection. Oh and lots of LAN parties were if course had from around 1998 and onwards into the mid 00s, which is how I was introduced to anime like Rurouni Kenshin (aka Samurai X for y'all yanks (why?!)). And then home internet got good enough that one could pirate at home and LAN's began falling off after the mid-00s.

As for consoles, I never pirated. I went from Sega Master System to Sega Game Gear (gifted to my brother and I from a German family that my parents were friends with) to Sony Playstation. And funnily enough I never played any pirated games on any of these consoles, but that's also why I stuck with PC from there on afterwards, with the exception of a PS3 in 2011 which I never really played on..

IRC, ftp, bbs, usenet were huge. Torrents didn't exist yet. Piracy was rampant.

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.

My grandpa and I would go to the video store , hire out a bunch of overnighter ps1 games, go home, copy them all, go back to drop off the ones we got earlier that day and grab the rest, go home copy those and return the others again, we did this every time they got new games.

Those were the days!

NES and SNES games fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, and there were piratey disk drive peripherals that you could insert into the cartridge slots on those systems. The peripheral had a cartridge slot on top, so you inserted the cartridge, copied the game to floppy, or floppies, and gave those to your friends, as they gave you their copies. You could rent game cartridges from video stores.

PS1 games you just installed a modchip and then you could play CD-R copies of game disks

PS2 they had the flip top cases, and "magic disc" that was a special disk printed with the "official authentication code" but then ran a program to stop the drive, allowing you to lift up the lid, then press a button to load whatever game was on the CD-R/DVD-R copy.

For PC Games there was the mighty GameCopyWorld that allowed you to patch games to bypass CD/DVD disc checks. If you had the right tools, you could make your own virtual CD, bypassing the risk of viruses from rando downloading.

Even before that, people could write fully working games by hand, and shareware was fully functional before it all became crippleware or nagware.

These days, you can't play tic-tac-toe without the game connecting to a server, and forcing you to log in after watching 30 minutes of ads, and that's after you've paid your monthly subscription fee.

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.