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What was the first game you ever PIRATED


Chris Strong

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Okay, everyone who lived through the era did it at least a little. What was the first game you ever lusted after so much you pirated it?

 

I'll start. I got a copy from a friend named Dan at Evergreen Junior High.

 

I had:

 

Rescue Mission (the original prototype sample of Rescue On Fractalus that leaked out of Atari)

Snookie (FunSoft)

Ballblaster (Prototype sample of Ballblazer)

 

And on the back, cartcopy, plus binary files or Atari Basketball and Space Invaders, as I recall. Oh, and the DUP package for "Alpha DOS". Woah.

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Boy, I wish I could remember. I got an 800 and a 410 in 1981 and only had Pac-Man (cart) and Canyon Climber (cassette) for a while. Eventually, met another guy in school who had an Atari and had a disk of pirated games. I don't know if I'd even heard of piracy before. A little while later I met another guy who had more stuff and it just grew from there. It's funny, but for a while games were a form of currency. If you had something someone needed, you could broker a trade.

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Boy, I wish I could remember. I got an 800 and a 410 in 1981 and only had Pac-Man (cart) and Canyon Climber (cassette) for a while. Eventually, met another guy in school who had an Atari and had a disk of pirated games. I don't know if I'd even heard of piracy before. A little while later I met another guy who had more stuff and it just grew from there. It's funny, but for a while games were a form of currency. If you had something someone needed, you could broker a trade.

 

Yes I remember the currency of pirated games.

 

I was in school in 1983 and remember very well the often vicious disputes that arose when such trades went bad. The Commodore 64 camp and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum camp were both full those cases.

 

I was the first kid in my year to own an Atari. And to try to convince others they wanted one too, I decided to just let anyone copy whatever they could. The Atari camp therefore had an open exchange policy. The result was about 12 additional Atari owners by the end of the year. A number that compared well with the C64 and Spectrum camps and we quickly dwarfed the Dragon 32 and BBC Micro camps.

 

Alot of people like to point to the piracy of the Atari platform and claim it was a reason the format never achieved better success. Maybe and maybe not. In my experience it helped the platform achieve some success.

 

Oh and to answer the original question: Gridrunner for the VIC-20. Sorry Jeff. Although I did go on to buy Matrix, Hellgate, Andes Attack, Traxx, Metagalactic Llamas and several other titles from Llamasoft.

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Spelling Bee... I wanted it to print out every time my son missed a word. That's the cool thing about BASIC games like that - easy to modify.

 

Of course, my son figured out a work-around and his scores 'improved' dramatically.

 

DiskWiz was the first program I ever cracked, as I remember. So I could load it off of a hard drive. Not much of a 'crack'... I think it just needed sector copy or something simple like that.

 

Bob

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, everyone who lived through the era did it at least a little. What was the first game you ever lusted after so much you pirated it?

 

I'll start. I got a copy from a friend named Dan at Evergreen Junior High.

 

I had:

 

Rescue Mission (the original prototype sample of Rescue On Fractalus that leaked out of Atari)

Snookie (FunSoft)

Ballblaster (Prototype sample of Ballblazer)

 

And on the back, cartcopy, plus binary files or Atari Basketball and Space Invaders, as I recall. Oh, and the DUP package for "Alpha DOS". Woah.

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I didn't own an 8-bit machine when I was a teenager but I had the Tandy color computer and I went to Radio Shack to buy a copy rescue on fractalus, copied it at home, returned it, and bought something else, can't remember what, it might have been a Sandiego game. Back then you could buy and return opened software for a full refund.

 

We had a Coco club where once a month everyone would get together and copy games. Used to download them from the coco bbs which was called "Route 66"

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Hmmmm. Interesting question. I pirated a lot of 8-bit games back in the day. I also bought 8-10 each year as well.

 

My best guess at answering the question as to the first one would be Caverns of Mars. If I recall, my friend (who talked me into buying an Atari 400 after he got his parents to buy him an 800) let me borrow his Caverns cassette and I used my stereo's dual dubbing tape deck to copy it.

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Okay, everyone who lived through the era did it at least a little. What was the first game you ever lusted after so much you pirated it?

 

I'll start. I got a copy from a friend named Dan at Evergreen Junior High.

 

I had:

 

Rescue Mission (the original prototype sample of Rescue On Fractalus that leaked out of Atari)

Snookie (FunSoft)

Ballblaster (Prototype sample of Ballblazer)

 

And on the back, cartcopy, plus binary files or Atari Basketball and Space Invaders, as I recall. Oh, and the DUP package for "Alpha DOS". Woah.

Jumpman, Still like it too!

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Rescue Mission (the original prototype sample of Rescue On Fractalus that leaked out of Atari)
Don't you mean "Behind Jaggi Lines"?

 

No. Behind Jaggi Lines was another release.

 

Rescue Mission Had no title screen. It just came up to the "launch your ship" portion, played the theme, and had "Rescue Mission" on the top. It cycled through "Rescue Mission", Copyright xxxxx LucasFilm Ltd, etc.

 

I have read online that "Behind Jaggi Lines" was the first release, but "Rescue Mission" was out where I lived at least a year before Jaggi came around. Perhaps two.

 

I need to compare the two and see I can figure out the difference. But I can guarantee there is a significant difference in the binary and the size. "Rescue Mission" was a pain because it would only load from one particular menu; not only was it the location that the code loaded, but something specific about the binary itself. I'll have to look into it someday.

 

Jaggi Lines was easy, you could even load that from DUP. That might be why it spread around more.

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I can't remember the first game I actually copied myself, but I can remember one of the first games that I was given copied onto a 'Dixons' tape.

 

I was around 8 and my nephew came to my house and gave me the tape, it had several copied games on it, I can't remember them all, but it had Boulderdash, and I think there was Spy Hunter too.

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The first game I ever pirated was something called Airstrike, it was a Scramble/Super Cobra type clone that a couple friends and I lusted after. We came up with 1/3 of the money each and bought the cassette we used two old type tape recorders and a rca cable to make 2 dupes. Then came the bitter battle over who got to keep the original... lol Not sure if that one counted since at least we did pay 1/3 the price. I dabbled with the Chip Archiver mod for the 810 and a local Atari users group that rented games, but when the other members (mostly old guys, mind you my friend and I were bratty little kids only 10 years old) found out we were copying their library and attempting to trick people out of their Compuserve accounts (another story) that little adventure was over...

 

I got a 835 modem for Christmas(which I promptly sold and used the money to buy the new 1030 modem which was the same but featured touch tone dialing) and after calling many local TRS-80 and Apple II BBS's and getting into the phreaking scene somewhat, I programmed a simple program in atari basic that would call the local MCI or SPRINT access # and keep trying incremental codes, when a code worked it would dial a the local Compuserve # and send a record to the printer. If you left your computer on all night you would end up with a print out of about 5 or 10 codes . This would let you call anywhere in t he US for free (at least for a month per code until the person got their bill). anyway that opened up the world of Atari bbs's and the first one I called was in Michigan which had pirated software available... I was so psyched to get a copy of S.A.M. and K-razy shootout (which was an expensive cart my friend had that I had tried many times to copy but could not)... it wasn't too long after that I had hundreds of games and ran a bbs myself for awhile. It was this easy access to pirated games that killed the 8bit commercial market early, but I didn't care next I moved on to the Amiga and helped to kill the North American software market for that platform too.

Edited by Warriorisabouttodie
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