Pre-Internet piracy using Blockbuster Video and a Game Shark

This is something people don't often talk about because it involves something that if you are young enough perhaps you don't even know what it is. However, there was a time when Blockbuster Video was a major part of basically everyone's lives (if you lived in USA). There's a good story there as well about how Blockbuster, like many other arrogant massive companies that came before it failed to adapt to a rapidly changing market and paid a heavy price for it but I'll save that for another day. Instead, this is a story about doing something rather naughty and that is piracy.

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This is going to take us back to the mid 90's for this story back when the Playstation 1 was the hottest thing on the market and Xbox didn't even exist yet. The games had a black poly something or other on them that was meant to protect them from getting scratched and I guess that worked or something. It certainly looked cooler than a regular CD. For many, this game the impression that it was somehow different than a regular CD but it actually wasn't.

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Games were just as expensive then as they are now when you account for inflation and disk burning was only becoming a thing to most people. I didn't know many other people that had a CD burner but I had one and was getting pretty adept at using it. However, since a PS1 game was essentially the same thing as any audio CD you could copy it with no issue just like anything else.

The PS1 did have some method of confirming whether or not the game you were using was genuine, but this only occurred during the start up period and not when most games were loading or at any other point. This meant that copying a game wouldn't work because you couldn't open the unit while it was loading because it would reset. There were some modifications you could make to circumvent this but this would negate your warranty and also you could potentially destroy your console in the process.

Enter the Game Shark

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You could pick up a Game Shark or Game Genie or a number of other "game enhancers" that would plug into a port on the back of the ps1 that as far as I know wasn't used for anything else. This was meant to enable you to hack certain elements of games and input cheat codes to do things like give yourself ammo in Resident Evil or have unlimited lives in Crash Bandicoot or other such nonsense that completely ruins games.

But one other thing it did was it would pause the console after the initial spin up / loading screen so that the PS1 had already confirmed that the game in the console was genuine. Then you could swap out the real game for one of the ones you had burned.

There was only 1 game that I ever rented / burned that this method didn't work for and that was Dino Crisis. I have no idea what they did to make this happen but kudos to those guys I guess.

This was a very good thing and a very bad thing personally for me: It was good because now my PS1 library grew like crazy at almost not cost to me, it was bad because I now no longer felt obligated to "git gud" at any of my games because I had so many alternatives. Once a game became mildly frustrating I would just move on to another one. Then, by the time I finally returned to the game that was frustrating me in the first place, I probably had lost all ability at it and now had no reason to ever try to play it again.

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I know that piracy is not cool and it steals from developers and its continued usage discourages creators, especially smaller studios from making games / movies / etc but that is just how the world was / is. Thankfully, most intelligent companies decided to innovate and work around this instead of try to prevent it with litigation or copy protection. People are always going to find a way around that.

I rarely steal games anymore and there have been a few instances where I did download a pirate version of a game only to later purchase it anyway because it was good. Hollow Knight and the Tomb Raider games on PS4 are good examples of this. However, there was a time when I had hundreds of games in one of those folding CD display "books" and this was all made possible via Blockbuster and a Game Shark.

Did you do any of this? Or are you too young?