Piracy - Were you responsible?

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by amiga_Forever

I'd be smart enough not to admitt it on a forum

Denial. You're guilty.

[StarEye]

Fairlight made me do it.

Bad bad Galahad!

[ennio]

Back then I was too young and naive to feel morally compelled to buy games. That is until my Amiga contact got a PC.

[mombasajoe]

I really wonder why it is called "piracy".

[Merlin]

I had some copied games and apps, but I didn't do piracy, as I get seasick....

[Tiago]

Back in the days, there were no law about copywrite here in Portugal.
I used to go to my local store and ask for a copy of an Amiga game. It was legal because there was no law... I used to buy Amiga games (1 floppy) for about 2 euros back in 1990/1991

[carls]

I almost never bought games. Back in my 500+ days I owned two originals: DPaint IV which I bought together with the computer, and Zool. In fact I don't think I would've bought an Amiga if it wasn't for the booming piracy. Without "free" games it never would have gotten as big as it was.

After a couple of years I got more and more into the productivity side of computing and actually got most of my software legally from cover disks: PPaint, Amos Pro, ImageFX, Pagestream, and many more.

[brett71]

Back when I was active in the Amiga scene from 1986 or so to the mid-90's, I probably pirated 60% or so of my software, mainly because friends around me either had Amigas with pirated stuff or ran BBS's and got the stuff uploaded to them.

The main category of stuff that I ALWAYS bought, though, were any games by Psygnosis. I was a huge fan of their work, and bought just about everything they made up until about 1992 or 1993, whenever they started doing shit movie-tie-in games.

I remember going to the shop where my parents bought me my original A500 and going through their little collection of games and copying just about everything they had, with the full knowledge of the shop owners. This had the side effect of introducing me to the first Strip Poker game on the Amiga, too....I was never the same after that. hehehehe

[fishyfish]

For the 1st few years I had an amiga the only original software I had is what came with my amiga. As I got older and my income grew I started to buy software for 2 reasons:

1). Hackers/crackers as often as not would screw up the software with thier lacklusture "skills"
2). I found that I can appreciate a game more, and give it more of a chance when you've shelled out your hard earned money. I also like to have the boxes/manuals/etc. much more than just "soulless" data on a disc (same reason I enjoy my dvd/bluray/games collection more than copies,.... no pride in a collection of data on a harddrive).

I think magazine cover discs and the pd scene played some part in changing my attitude towards theft (piracy) too. I could still have lots of fun without the need to steal from developers.

[Pyromania]

If I liked it or needed it I bought it.

[Big-Byte]

In the beginning it used to take me a while just to save up to buy 10 blank disks. Then my mate got a job at john menzines and from then on he used to get loads of free coverdiscs from the magazines before they were sent back if not sold. Used to spend hours peeling off the labels and putting proper disc labels on them.

I did buy a few orignal games but not many (Menace was the first game I bought). These days I buy all my games but mostly secondhand xbox/ps3 or if oc then (rarely) through steam

Quick heads up for PC owners that https://www.humblebundle.com/
are doing a stonking bundle atm.. 8 games (Crysis 2, Battlefield 2, Sims 3 etc..) for $5 donation

[theugly]

Games I liked I eventually bought. But not many stores had C64/Amiga games. I loved box sets like Last Ninja, Hired Guns, Barbarian II and such.

[Axxy]

Back in the day, everything was copied or cracked, from the 8bit machines through the 16bit machines and even the early days of the PC. That's not to say I didn't buy originals. But I knew loads of people trading stuff on the Amiga and we all used to visit each other to copy the latest things between us. Good ol' X-copy...

I used to buy PD stuff from a company down here and also get blank disks in bulk from him too. I seem to remember him saying he got all his blank disks off whoever had them from all the disks that were confiscated from various people, no idea if that was true though.

[fatboy]

Never knew where to get 'pirated' Amiga software anyway. I was in my early twenties when I got my A1200 (1992) and gone had the days of swapping ZX Spectrum copied tapes in the playground!

I was working so just bought games from a local independent shop called Wizbit Games in Tunbridge Wells (long since gone). It wasn't until some years later when I went with a friend to buy a second hand A500 and the guy had 100's of copied games!!! Just wasn't in the right (wrong) circle!

Today all I'll say is my REAL A1200 has 2000+ WHD games on it's CF HD...and I'll say no more on the matter....apart from the 60,000+ classic Retro Games that may or not be sitting on my external HD

[xArtx]

For me it's still the same, buy it if it's available, and steal it if it isn't.

[hansel75]

I would say that on the C64 i bought about 20% of my games and copied the rest of friends.
I had contacts around australia that would receive pirated games from the UK before they came out in the shops here, then they would post them to me on tapes
I had about 300 c64 floppy disks worth of pirated games, and probably about 30-40 tapes worth of them to!

And on the amiga i probably only bought around 5% of the games as i got into the amiga scene at a later stage, and games had started to become harder to find in shops.
The rest were pirated from mates as i knew about 5 people with amigas back then with big game collections!

In a strange twist i actually bought a bulk lot of pirated games of someone who was getting out of the amiga scene. It was in a big wooden crate and contained around 1200+ pirated floppy disk games, i got it cheap and was in heaven!
In total i would of had around 1500 pirated amiga floppies in my collection!

[mrbob2]

Back in the day, the Amiga invented the term "games list"

Everyone at my school had games lists, where you swapped with your friends.

They made a list of what they wanted and gave you a pile of blank disks, you did the same.

How many people these days have ps3 games lists?

I know 99% of stuff is downloaded from the net, but because of online gaming, online checks, firmware updates and the fact a blu ray is 30gb, piracy is not worth it.

Plus i dont buy that many games now, i get GTA, gran turismo, fifa and call of duty.

On the other hand, i have a jailbroken iphone with over 1000 apps/games. Thats my gaming arena now.

[lesta_smsc]

It seems that after watching my brother play Assassin's Creed collection - the game is well worth the money spent to buy it. The amount of gaming hours and the detail placed into the game makes such games worthwhile buying. It's not like other games where you complete it within a free hours with a nice dent to the bank balance!

[Zak]

I liked to use pirated versions as safety copy where possible, I tend to destroy disks clumsily, just destroyed my Kick Off 2 disk recently. There where also additional features like Mega Trainer. I also liked to see whether I would really like the game, I always hated when I bought a game because of a bad magazine article and then the game was really crap. I didn´t have so many games, but all the classics!

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by mrbob2

Back in the day, the Amiga invented the term "games list"

Everyone at my school had games lists, where you swapped with your friends.

They made a list of what they wanted and gave you a pile of blank disks, you did the same.

How many people these days have ps3 games lists?

I know 99% of stuff is downloaded from the net, but because of online gaming, online checks, firmware updates and the fact a blu ray is 30gb, piracy is not worth it.

Plus i dont buy that many games now, i get GTA, gran turismo, fifa and call of duty.

On the other hand, i have a jailbroken iphone with over 1000 apps/games. Thats my gaming arena now.

360 and Wii have game lists