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Retronauts Episode 195: Piracy (Patreon)

Published:
2019-01-14 15:00:00
Edited:
2019-01-21 04:23:27
Imported:
2021-08

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Content

This week's episode is a patron request that comes courtesy of Bobby Najari, and it's a pretty darned good topic: A loose and approximate history of software piracy. We discuss our own experiences with the grey market, the history of digital theft, the tricky preventative measures developers have employed to prevent it, and attempt to weigh the moral and ethical ramifications of piracy against the fact that much of game history would be lost forever if not for the fact that those games were copied by people working outside the bounds of the law.

Music this week is... from games about pirates. And thanks again to Bobby Najiri for the request! — Jeremy

Description: Chris Kohler joins Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey to tackle the topic of piracy. It's not the same thing as emulation! But it's closely related? And it's bad! But it's important, good, and essential to game preservation!? There's a lot to unpack this week!

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Comments

Anonymous

Just listened to the emulation episode from like ten years ago last night, so excited to see your different opinions

Aaron

Already past the 25-minute mark, and I can recall two cases where there has been litigation threatened against some people for possessing prototypes/unreleased media, prior to their own releases I should say. If the story is true, in the early-2000s someone on the ASSEMblerGames forums bragged about having owned a prototype ROM of the N64 version of Resident Evil Zero (with both photos and the intention to publicly release it, supposedly) before being threatened by Capcom. This might have been before Zero’s 2002 release on GCN, actually. The details on this are a little muddy, since the subject isn’t a pretty one and obviously doesn’t get talked about often outside of closed doors (but it does get brought up occasionally). Another is a much more recent example of a friend of mine who was basically sued by Capcom and later prosecuted and is serving a two-year suspended sentence for, IIRC, having hacked into Dead Rising 4 before release, and simply because he logged into company servers, DL’d an early build of the game, and was super dumb enough to post screenshots online (4Chan, I believe), with as much air as he wanted. Now granted these were examples done by idiots that got themselves in that situation in the first place, but the point here is that action has been taken by companies before on those situations regarding unreleased material online.

Aleisha

I was an arcade kid from Space Invaders on, and I remember seeing Crazy Kong for the first time and sussing out that it was a bootleg. It was at one of the sketchier arcades that popped up in my town in the early 80's, certainly not a fancier mall arcade.

Anonymous

In 1997, I was 15 years old, and I clearly remember finding NESticle. The ability to create a save-point changed my world. This was the only way I was ever able to completely finish Ninja Gaiden. I didn't even have a PC controller back then, so I am sure I set up some weird keyboard button mapping. I even saved .wav files of my favorite 8-bit music, like Wizards and Warriors! I care about Wizards and Warriors!

Ryan Langley

Arcade wise I definitely remember a sit-down Crazy Taxi machine at my local arcade that was CLEARLY a Dreamcast hooked up in some elaborate way.

Anonymous
>>18899768

The only difference I can think of here is that both of the above examples were of games still intended to be released. A similar situation happened when a guy hacked Valve's servers and leaked Half-Life 2 online before launch. I don't know of any company that has gone after somebody for sharing a prototype that had already been canceled and was no longer meant for release. Speaking of Capcom, pretty sure they don't care about all the copies of Resident Evil 1.5 floating around online or the efforts to rebuild that version of the game into a playable, complete build.

Brian Silvers

I've called the Feds and they're on their way.

Anonymous

1. Great episode. I can't wait until it goes public, so I can share it with my family. We've been playing games since the early 80s, but were too isolated from any of the right communities to know about things like ROM dumpers and bootlegs. 2. Thank you for mentioning that the early Retronauts episodes are available at archive.org! As soon as I found out, I got the torrent, and the files are trickling in as I type. I've never listened to these episodes, and there are lots of great topics that I'm looking forward to hearing about.