Yes — like a lot of kids growing up in the 90s, I had a life in the warez scene before growing out of it.

Here's the short version.

Back then, cracked games weren't a click away — you needed the right contacts. There was no internet yet, and even once it arrived in French homes, connections were too slow to download anything useful; DSL came much later. And anyway cracked games were existing long before the arrival of Internet... We would simply get together with "friends" to copy whatever there was to copy... We were kids, teenagers; we simply didn't know about the legal consequences.

At some point, my older brother (8 years my senior) bought a CD burner — a real luxury item in the 90s. Through one of the best-connected suppliers in France at the time, we started copying a lot of games — this even predates the CD burner, back when we were still on an Amiga 500.

I was still in school, my brother was at university or already working. Between the games and a pile of other expensive software — encyclopedias, utilities, you name it — we started burning CDs for people in the neighborhood. Word got around fast, and yes, we made some money out of it.

Looking back, that part wasn't okay — we were reselling other people's work for profit, plain and simple. We were young, it felt harmless at the time, and it very much wasn't. I'm not proud of that part, and I don't say this to romanticize it. It's just what happened.

It ran its course for a couple of years, then stopped — the market got more crowded, and one particular encounter (unrelated to any legal trouble, just an unpleasant person I chose to stop dealing with) made me lose interest in keeping it going. I gave away what I had left to a friend who was thrilled to receive it, and moved on to build an actual career instead. In hindsight, perhaps I should be grateful to that "unpleasant person" because that’s how my career in IT began 😏

These days, none of this "hustle" is even relevant anymore — anyone with a decent fiber connection can find whatever they're looking for in minutes, for free, with no local network needed. There's no money left to be made in it, which probably says everything about how much the world has changed since.

One semantic point I'll still defend: I think the word "pirating" gets thrown around loosely today. For me, "to pirate" a game means cracking it — doing the actual reverse-engineering work. Using a crack someone else made isn't piracy, it's just... downloading. I never did the cracking myself; at most I repackaged what crackers had already done. Small distinction, but it matters to me.

I said soon... not today.