Pieces Of 8-Bit: A Glorious History Of Console Piracy

The next time you see some harmless-looking 50-year-old guy at the supermarket, just remember that once upon a time he could have been an old-school video game pirate. The early '80s saw the advent of the C64—and with it, the advent of portable media piracy. The C64’s thousands of games were stored on floppies and cassettes, which were easily hacked and copied. Imagine a bunch of weasely Mike-Damone-from-Fast-Times-At-Ridgemont-High types running around the halls at school, passing around “mixtapes” crammed with Bumper Jumper and Radar Rat Race. And yes, we just named those games from memory. We are OLD.

Some of the earliest forms of copyright protection were developed during the Amiga’s reign in the '80s and early '90s. Despite Amiga’s secret disk sectors on the games’ floppy disks, hackers still caught on and learned how to defeat the copy protection. By the way—sorry, nerd fun fact approaching—do you realize that those floppies only held 1.44 megabytes? That’s about 0.03 seconds of a torrented movie nowadays.

Most of us didn’t even know what piracy was when the NES came out; all we knew is that the cartridges were gray, plastic keys to happiness. They were revered. Especially the gold Zelda ones. We did as we were told by Nestor and joined the Nintendo Fan Club and bought the crappy Nintendo cereal. And there was always that one weird kid down the block who had a Genesis—you know, Olaf who ate blood pudding for breakfast. What we didn’t realize, though, was that those NES/SNES/Genesis cartridges were piracy cockblockers. In the US, the system was pretty secure, but had we grown up in Russia or China/Taiwan, we’d probably have been little thieves because our parents would have been too poor to buy the consoles for us—and we would have had to work long and hard in order to unlock our bootleg goodies. Some pirate groups actually went so far as to build an entire NES console from scratch in order to bypass the copy protection. Overseas, fake SNES cartridges were more the norm than the exception.

When Sony brought the era of disc-based media, a cheer could be heard from that dark corner of the internet (probably in some virtual alley on an AOL server) where all the gaming pirates hung out and did nefarious crap on their PCs somewhere in Eastern Europe. There were a couple of methods; the earliest was using a physical spring rig to dupe the PSX hardware into playing “imports." After Sony remedied that problem, hackers figured out that they could either modchip the console or just use a Pro Action Replay dongle that violates one of the PSX’s I/O ports. [Ed.—I have no idea what any of that meant.]

Oddly enough, Nintendo decided to opt out of system security measures with the Game Boy line. Was it reverse psychological trolling? Baiting? Whatever the case might have been, as soon as the Game Boy Advance arrived it became clear that open-legged firmware was a great idea...just like the Hindenberg. Cue the GBA multicart crammed with bootleg ROMs that started popping up everywhere. 80 in 1? What does GBA stand for, Gang Bang Analogy? #awwwwwwsnap #workingblue #hereallweek

Oh, Sega, at least make it a challenge. You didn’t even need to do any hardware mods for this one—all you needed was the Utopia boot disk and an Internet connection to download CD game images. Next!

OK, so here’s where things got a little more complicated. For both consoles, a modchip was a pretty much a necessity. Most of us weren’t willing to actually open up the box and solder points onto a board, since that required both effort and know-how. So instead, you paid modders to do our dirty work, just like Chicago politicians. People could burn games for the PS2, but the real fun was on the Xbox since it was more HDD-based; modders dumped tons of games into the box, and they implemented a custom UI for navigation.


That's one thing you've gotta say about piracy: it does bring groups together. Based on our totally scientific game-forum-lurking, Sony fanboys are more left-leaning weeaboos, while Xbots seem to be right-wing pro-American jingoists. But both factions can agree on one thing: piracy = free games. Everyone’s a cheapskate, and both sides have t3h pirateZ. Solidarity!

If anything, the DS’ success shows that rampant piracy doesn’t necessarily kill a console (a theory often spouted by Dreamcast fans when their “PS2 killed DC” argument gets shot down). The now-infamous R4 card was a cartridge that you inserted into the DS; within it was a MicroSD card that contained pirated DS ROMs, and the number of games one could carry was only limited by the size of the card itself. Of course, Nintendo has been attempting to get the card completely banned from all retailers, but that’s going about as well as Prohibition. There are just too many small, shady retailers out there, and too many cards running around like cockroaches.

While PSP piracy doesn’t require any hardware mods, it still isn’t overly accessible due to the technical knowledge involved. Custom firmwares started sprouting early in the PSP’s lifecycle—especially once the Lumines exploit became known—and from there it’s been a tennis match between a semi-retarded Goliath and a crafty little ferret (we’ll let you guess which one is Sony and which one is The Hacker). Sony updates the firmware; Dark Alex (now retired) comes out with a new CFW. Back and forth, back and forth. Still, anyone attempting to hack their PSP—oh, not you, of course—needs to know which model/firmware they're messing with, and CFW installation methods can get complicated depending on the hardware set-up.

And now here we are. While modchips aren’t necessary for the 360, you still have to take the machine apart and flash the drive with a SATA of your own. Further compounding the problem with pirating this generation’s consoles is that online play has become much more prominent; indeed the mighty banhammer has fallen hard upon many a hacked Xbox 360. Soon Sony will find a way to ban PSN users, despite the fact that rootkeyed PS3s are tough to nail (since it’s a low-level code sign check). This is a battle that’s going to continue until long after we have to install firmware updates into our brains for our subcutaneously implanted PlayStation 17s. Might as well get used to it!