Videogame Piracy: The Definitive Review
“Remember, friends -- The answer to game preservation is always piracy.“
While I’m typically late to the game with comments on the Video Game History Foundation’s claim that 87% of classic videogames are unavailable on the open market, I feel somewhat compelled to mash together some thoughts on the best solution to this problem: piracy. The quote for the subhead comes from the brilliant/possibly infuriating Lord Voultar1 and to my mind, it’s hard to argue with. Piracy has been cataloguing and preserving the videogame for decades. Long before retrogaming ever gained enough cachet to prompt Nintendo to charge £5 per game for NES ROMs. The fact that a CDR costing less than £1 can hold the entire NES library highlights the sheer power of piracy, but when you consider the academic degree of rigour in things like the TOSEC catalogues, you have a non-legal, non-official solution that absolutely towers over any commercial interest or legal judgement.
Preservation is the greatest imperative, after all. The latest TOSEC2 release catalogues 1.2 million ROMs across more than 195 platforms, and calculates a total size of 7.95 terabytes. Ask yourself - when have you ever seen TOSEC covered by mainstream gaming media? Officially, the volunteer-run initiative is nothing but the catalogue, but it’s really not a problem to find instances where the resourceful have compiled the necessary ROM files (according to the TOSEC specifications) for public distribution. This is where TOSEC has a unique power, to standardise the illegal, to unify the ROMs and give profound integrity to videogaming’s history. And, much like MAME, this is something the commercial sector will never get close to achieving, yet it’s the library of Alexandria as far as gaming is concerned. It’s a wonderful thing, a real jewel in the crown of videogaming culture, yet even more criminally undersung than the all-consuming omni-emulator that MAME has become. And TOSEC’s astonishing comprehensiveness is directly thanks to software piracy, as the project was started to unify the swathes of disparate ROM images spread across the Internet in the late 1990s, nearly all of which had some origin in copyright-violating releases. Having been a long-time user of emulation, and a virtually penniless gamer right up until my mid 20s, I’m no stranger to piracy. In fact, I have a perverse love for it and feel a wrench of sadness at how the overground commercial industry ignores its culture and its contribution to preservation, all because of its damning illegality. But in that illegality lies a far more valuable effect than its potential corrosion to the market; democratisation.
It’s likely a phenomenon that resonates most with Generation X, but our wonderful affordance of media curation came thanks to illegal copying. We indulged with everything we could; mixtapes and radio-snaffles via a boom box for our Walkmans, personal VHS tapes full of televised cartoons and movies. Our music took what it wanted too, via Hip Hop and sample-heavy dance music, we ended up with Drum and Bass. You only have to watch that famous documentary about the Amen break3 to understand how the illegality of sampling matters little when it drives an entire, unstoppable musical revolution. So it’s easy to understand how videogames could be so easily swept up in the same culture, seeing as they came on the same magnetic media. Our 8-bit machines enjoyed the same appropriative freedom as our personal stereos. With the illegal copying came diffusion, which meant the media spread far further than its commercial reach. Anecdotally, I didn’t know a single ZX Spectrum owner who didn’t have a C90 packed to the leaders with pirated games, complete with handwritten counter indices. I remember visiting a distant relative with teenage sons and seeing a bedroom, walls covered with shelves and shelves of copied Spectrum games. It was the norm, not some criminal aberration. And the market completely absorbed it. The UK giants were doing perfectly well despite this rampant piracy culture. And if we’d all kept to the right side of the tracks and only played what we bought, our cultural exposure would have been so much smaller.
I started with scenes on the Commodore 644 and Amiga, using pirated stuff in period. I was lucky enough to have a disk drive and remember being annoyed at a Tri-Star intro for some C64 disk game, but on the Amiga I recall the tune for the intro of a cracked copy of Paradroid ‘90 being far funkier and listenable than the game’s actual music. With the Amiga I also saw my first bits of piracy’s respectable arm, the demoscene, via the Red Sector Megademo. I still have a deep fondness for that wildly inventive subculture, which in itself built a particular invaluableness that again, the commercial sector could never achieve and the modern videogame critics rarely recognise. I spent a short and emotionally catastrophic time in playtesting in 1993, and had my eyes boggle at SNES coders receiving EPROMs through the post, shoving them in a dev board and booting up the latest Japanese release. The Ranma ½ fighting game, no less. The coder in question played it for about 5 minutes, syphoned the ROM images via SNASM and that was it. Less an enthusiast playing games and more an archivist acquiring stock, but I was amazed that piracy occurred at that level. And of course, it occurred at all levels. Everyone pirated games in the 90s, especially as the PC rose to dominate5. As wondrous as Steam was for the commercial viability of PC gaming, I have to admit that I loved Gamecopyworld’s6 exhaustive trove of No-CD cracks. Late into my time as PC gamer, when I was buying everything I played, I would still crack the fuckers because putting the disk in the drive was a ludicrous inconvenience I could easily eradicate. As is so often the case, and contrary to the mainstream narrative, the pirated experience is often superior to the legal, commercial one.
One of the thornier issues surrounding the modern gaming landscape is the nature of publisher-owned infrastructure dependence. Itself a kind of anti-piracy measure, what happens to server-dependent games when the publisher ends support? Well, they fucking die. A problem highlighted early in the MMO craze at the beginning of the century, it remains something for which there is no formal, agreed solution, but the best answer for the culture is obvious - you allow player-owned servers. But in so many cases, the publisher doesn’t care or more obstinately, doesn’t want this to happen. And thus, games or culturally-relevant aspects of them are fully extinguished; entire worlds have been isolated, landscapes rich with human toil and emotional investment are simply removed. Once again, piracy steps in where industry bodies or governmental oversight fails to act. The best result comes from appropriating what the player cannot legally obtain. The most notable example for me is the Metal Gear Solid 4 multiplayer servers, which were reverse-engineered by dedicated fans and are still accessible today. An earlier example was Sega’s Phantasy Star Universe, which allows the game’s multiplayer component to live on. While both these examples are so indescribably niche that their player counts are likely under a hundred, we should pay heed to preservationist-par-excellence Jason Scott7 with this paraphrase: “who are we to decide which artefacts of our culture will be of interest or value to future generations?”
Another thing I found particularly amusing was that despite the VGHF’s claim, anyone can buy a retro handheld from Amazon loaded with a vast proportion of console games from 1983-1993. Again, the fact that this is actually less than legal doesn’t really concern me, but the availability of the specifically-tasked hardware does. It’s an ongoing phenomenon of accidental preservation, where unbounded commerce is producing evermore capable hardware platforms. It’s wonderful that a suitably inclined user can replace the handheld’s OS with one far more fitting for the task, and with a big enough SD card, shove quite a bit of the TOSEC catalogue into their pockets. They make Evercade8 and its game licensing strategy look almost silly in comparison, reducing it to a charity case of sorts. And while Antstream seems to have a virtuous underpinning, it’ll never best local storage, nor will it secure anywhere near the volume of a format’s TOSEC torrent. I do own an Anbernic device, and it's wonderful, but wanting to play DS games I took another route. DSi handhelds with new batteries can be bought for as little as £35 on eBay at the moment, and of course there’s a wonderfully easy softmod process to blow the system wide open. Thereafter, the DSi can do everything the illegal retro handhelds can do short of the 3D machine emulation.
These days I eye the optical drives in my ageing hardware collection with worry and concern. These moving parts are the weaker links in these machines, and I don’t fancy replacing them. But fear not; the definitely illegal world of modchipping and flashcarts offers, once again, the very best solution. I’m looking at converting a PS1, GameCube, Wii and Dreamcast to SD-based drive replacements9. I put a hard drive in my PS2 and used Free McBoot to fill it with my own ripped PS2 games. There are torrents for the NTSC-U, NTSC-J and PAL PS2 catalogues, should you lack an absurd urge to buy physical games for old systems, or wish to stump up the inflated eBay prices. As is commonly the case for all sorts of machines, the tools run free in the open air if you’re curious enough to search for them. Despite the existence of organisations like the VGHF, the noble act of preservation relies on us, the players. We just have to recognise the part we can play, if we care enough. We owe the culture and its future generations of fans to participate in a generational act of distributed preservation through piracy, particularly when we owe the platform holders and publishers far less support. In the words of a very confusing but terribly compelling TikTok and YouTube creator I follow10, act accordingly.
[21]
See: https://www.youtube.com/@Voultar
Voultar is probably the best solderer on YouTube and some of the projects he undertakes are breath-taking in their technical complexity. He’ll happily set about soldering an old PS2 Messiah chip with 20 wires going all over the place and make it look like it was always meant to be on the motherboard. Or remove 200-pin surface-mounted NAND chips from a PS3 as if he’s whipping out a NES cart. His best content, however, is deep in the archive but features replacing and repairing awful work by bad modders. His commentary may grate thanks to the sheer brashness and unapologetic nature of Voultar’s personality, but you can’t fault the technique and depth of knowledge. I will always remember his exaltation upon opening a PC Engine to find it plastered with black epoxy resin to hide appalling wire-work: SON OF A BITCH!
https://www.tosecdev.org/ . It really is an astonishing project. Just look at the content listing for what was added in the latest (July 2023) release.
Honestly, if you haven’t seen this you really should. It raises an interesting point on the legality of sampling from an illegal source that illegally sampled the original to make sure your sampling of the same original is legal. Or, in short, media rights ownership is generally horrific.
As emulation took off in the late 90s, I was getting a lot of C64 disk images from Remember, a group set up in 1997 specifically to preserve C64 games. The .d64s used the latest compression techniques and came with the games, documentation and optional trainers, setting a sold standard for pirated-preservation content. https://csdb.dk/group/?id=248
There is a lost history about the graphic design of Warez sites, which often flexed the same kind of Demoscene talent that would go into flashy productions. I remember seeing some gorgeous bespoke logotypes and pixel fonts, all for the purpose of allowing people to steal stuff.
GCW still exists, and looks the same!
https://gamecopyworld.com/games/gcw_index.shtml
Watch out for virtual stripper adverts, but hey - I love a bit of seediness with my piracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Scott
Jason does not fuck about.
I mean, I don’t want to be harsh but the Evercade just looks like a horrible object. I’d never buy in for that aspect alone.
The shit you can get now is mind-blowing. The HDMI upgrades to non-HD hardware are amazing, but the real value lies in those drive replacements. The quandary however is, should you circumvent the platform-holder’s wishes with the expensive drive replacement or a knock-off copy of the expensive drive replacement? How grubby a pirate are you, really?
I’m not going to link to ProHo, but that should be enough to google and research this enigmatic charlatan/right-wing anarchist militiaman. He is confrontationally baffling, calmly agitating, and yet carries some charisma that makes him really watchable. What he really represents is a masterclass in exploiting the video-serving algorithm, deliberately making provocative statements, or simply having bare feet, because it will drive comments and therefore the raw engagement that vertical video thirsts for. Recently made a statement attacking the American self-image in an astonishing anti-patriot move, and has taken to wearing a red hankie in full knowledge of the urban-myth homosexual coding it supposedly represents, directly flying in the face of contemporary Manosphere hetero-traditionalism. Like I say, terribly compelling. Act Accordingly is a killer catchphrase, though.