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SonicIce

Don't own Doom legit? Buy for 99 cents.

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Maes said:

Yeah, when the Internet wasn't commonplace and BBSing with 14400 baud modems was hardcore stuff, there were a few dedicated software pirates around that actually sold software on a tot money per-disk basis (also on streamer tapes and optical discs upon request).

I don't know about the situation in other countries, but even up to the mid 90s it wasn't uncommon for "pirates" to openly advertise in the personals sections of computer magazines, usually with names such as "Tarkus software team" or "Software club" etc., offering "1000s of games and applications on disk, tape, CD, hard disk" at "unbeatable prices" for "Amiga, Mac and PC". Some even offered monthly subscriptions, with a new app/game being sent each month! Ah, those were the times...


Heh, the first id game I got full was Heretic. At this time I had no Internet, so instead I mail ordered floppies (later, CDs) from a small business that downloaded shareware, freeware and public domain stuff from the 'net and put it onto discs for sale (It was called "Public Domain Tools Club" and it disappeared shortly after people started getting Internet at home, killed by AOL and the likes). In one of them, there was a Heretic registered-to-commercial patch (3-episode to 5-episode) and I tried using it on my Heretic shareware game (1-episode), thinking it would at least update the exe... I had to rename the exe and wad to get it to accept to work, and then... Well, it turned out the patch utility didn't actually patch the files, but merely checked whether they existed and then overwrote them and so I got Shadow of the Serpent Riders...

I've kept a special fondness for Heretic (which I now legitimately own, don't worry) since.

To this day, I don't know whether it was a clumsily-done legit patch or a cleverly-disguised warez. I lost the CD, but from what I remember there was nothing shady-looking on it, no ".nfo" file with crappy ASCII art, poor grammar and an overabundance of exclamation marks accompanied it. There was sometimes this type of things amidst the rest of the volume.

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Well, I broke down and bought the id Super Pack, but now that I've started up Quake for the first time in years, it seems there's no music. Which makes sense because the music always played directly off the CD, right? I guess I can pop in my old Quake CD to fix that, but I wanted to check out the two mission packs too. Is there any way to have music in them without already owning a physical copy of the game?

EDIT: It's especially frustrating knowing the music in Scourge and Dissolution is written by Jeehun Hwang, who did some amazing work for Mechwarrior 2.

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Unfortunately, they did not bother with the CD soundtrack of the old games in the pack (Hexen is likewise affected).

It isn't very hard to find where to download said soundtracks with a simple Google search, but I can't vouch for the legitimacy of any of the sites I've found this way; I can't say I've seen any that seemed to offer these downloads with some sort of official permission.

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Creaphis said:

Wait, pirates that sell games actually exist? When I see a movie trailer's warning that "buying pirated X is stealing" I can't help but laugh. Who does that?

Any former Soviet country was good breeding grounds for pirates. I guess they were often part of some bigger group with head quarters in Russia. In early and mid 90's it was commonplace for Finnish tourists in Estonia to visit the black market to bring home cheap video tapes and CDs as souvenirs.

Oh and China, too. Or any poor country for that matter.

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I don't see what's so exceptional about the fact that software piracy existed back then and can still exist today. Perhaps it's the material aspect that sounds strange, considering how easily someone can download game X or application Y directly from the Web...yet this was just unthinkable 10-15 years go, especially without P2P networks.

Back then, only a dedicated software pirate would ever think of painstakingly download the equivalent of several diskettes or even CDs via a dialup connection (knowing where to find it too, as this thing was in general backed up by "warez doodz" in turn backed up by organized crime). Then he would turn a profit by selling "the stuff" nicely cracked and packaged to people oblivious of how it got there in the first place. And who do you think most of the cracker groups worked for back then (and still do)?

It was more or less the same as buying a DVD movie, audio CD or cassette from a street guy, unless you find that incredible, too.

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Well, games nowadays take up CDs or even DVDs, so it that respect it's not so different.

Maes said:
I don't see what's so exceptional about the fact that software piracy existed back then and can still exist today. Perhaps it's the material aspect that sounds strange, considering how easily someone can download game X or application Y directly from the Web...yet this was just unthinkable 10-15 years go, especially without P2P networks.

In non-1st-world countries even with broadband, many people don't spend enough time around their computers to want to download stuff or to learn where to do it, so they just buy it from a peddling pirate off the street, because it's like 10 times cheaper than the original stuff. If they even have a broadband connection, that is.

Till recently street pirates were pretty common over here, although the current metropolitan administration (lead by a rich businessman, incidentally) has started hunting them down so they've kind of disappeared. Online based CD & DVD pirates are still strong, though.

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Also, today it's much easier (especially for people in 1-st world countries) to access large, assorted software collections without having to get their hands "dirty" by meddling with pirates, and without even searching the Web. Mostly stuff one will never use, granted, but which is "cool to have around, just in the case you need it".

Being able to travel with a 500 GB HD to your place of work, favourite cyber-cafe or uni, where it's also easy to find "software oases" (and also music and movies and even e-books) is a typical example. For everything else, there's always the web and/or your friendly neighborhood pirate, depending on where you live.

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Maes said:

I don't see what's so exceptional about the fact that software piracy existed back then and can still exist today.


Well, that in itself isn't exceptional. What is exceptional is that some marketers or executives think that there are still enough Americans and Canadians engaging in this shadowy practice to affect their revenue.

I appreciate these accounts of the software situation in other times and places. They're very interesting, and worlds apart from my experience.

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Ryathaen said:

Well, I broke down and bought the id Super Pack, but now that I've started up Quake for the first time in years, it seems there's no music. Which makes sense because the music always played directly off the CD, right? I guess I can pop in my old Quake CD to fix that, but I wanted to check out the two mission packs too. Is there any way to have music in them without already owning a physical copy of the game?

EDIT: It's especially frustrating knowing the music in Scourge and Dissolution is written by Jeehun Hwang, who did some amazing work for Mechwarrior 2.


Ive got both WinQuake and Quake DS and it seems your right.

I just never thought there was music lol.

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