I have been part of the Warez community when i was a teenager / young adult. I was even at that time what we could call a Repacker / Reseller with a few hacking abilities. You see when i was younger, cracked games were not that easy to find unless you knew the right people that is. There was no Internet, and even when Internet arrived in our homes for the first time, the connections were quite bad as the DSL connections arrived much later!

That's why at some point in time, my grand brother (yes i have a brother who is 8 years older than me) bought a CD-Burner. And back in the 90's it was like a rarity as it was quite expensive ! And as we knew one of the best cracked games suppliers for France (if not the best...), we were copying a LOT of video games ! And that was even long before the CD-Burner, like even when were using an Amiga 500 before the modern era of PC Computers.

Well... At this time i was still at school, my brother at the university or even working. And so as we had all the Video Games on the market but also many other programs, like encyclopedias and all sorts of softwares, which were also expensive at that time... We began to burn cds for people in our neighborhood. And of course the message that we could provide all sorts of softwares for pc users began to spread, and we began to make some money (a lot!) out of it 😇

I spoke of Repacking / Little Hacking above because i was reselling "compilations of cracked video games" on CDs, so i could put only 640MB of them. Some games were small, but others were bigger because of the videos ingame. And so i had to find a solution with an Hexadecimal software, in order to redirect all of the "video calls" in the game to the very same video. That means opening the main .exe file and redirecting all of the video files to the same one.

Thanks to this little business, i managed to make some money out of it while i was only a student. But one day it had to stop, first because in the late 90s, we were not alone anymore in the market... Even if we had diversified our business with Playstation games 😅 So our customers were now negociating... But also because one day i sold one of my CDs to a former friend, whose girlfriend was the daughter of a Director in Cyber Criminality 😐

The guy contacted me... tried to intimidate me and i refused his deal. The very next day i called a friend and told him i was going to give him all the games i had... And that's what i did. The guy received like a hundred CDs of cracked video games for free. And as he was an avid video game player, trust me it was the best day of his life 😆 And since this day... i stopped selling games and found a real life job 😌

Anyway these days... You don't need "real life connections" anymore... We all can get the latest cracked video games in minutes, as long as we have a good internet connection like optic fiber. So there is no money to be made anymore out of it. It's free sharing for all around the world, whatever your financial resources 🙃

I'd just like to point "out" that for me... The term "pirating games" is a little misused these days... People are saying they are "pirating" games when all they do is to use the "crack" made by someone else (usually a group of the cracking scene). I might be a little old school, but for me "To Pirate a game" is literally "To Crack it", otherwise you're just using a crack to play to a video game for free, but you're not pirating anything 😏

I mean when i download a cracked video game, i will never say that i "pirated this game" out of respect for the real people in the dark who obviously done all of the job. I just "downloaded" it, installed it, and eventually copied the crack over when it wasn't already done by the crackers / repacker. So Download was all i did ☺️

There is also a big Hypocrisy from many in the cracking / warez scene... The fact that if we crack games it's because we want to test the game before trying it... Trust me when i tell you the person who does that is only part of the 1% MINORITY of players, who are really going to support the developers in the end. As the VAST MAJORITY of players who are downloading cracked games don't give a fuck about it... Do you really think when i was making illegal money out of it that i cared at some point for the developers ? No... of course not! If we use cracked games, that's because WE KNOW THE LAW IS WEAK.

We know we can do it and nothing will happen to us... So that's why we do it.

The day we'll be able to throw a brick on a store to break the window open, steal something and nothing will ever happen to us... That day we'll go steal whatever we fancy as well 😈 But right now this is more risky than downloading a game, so we don't do it yet... LAW is what is keeping Humans at bay from turning Evil.

I said soon... not today.