In June 1988 Commodore User sent Mike Pattenden to look at software piracy, and he found something more organised than kids copying tapes for their friends. “Once a month, maybe more, gangs of hackers meet up at a preset venue armed with blank disks which they use to copy every new release available on the circuit.” At the most recent one, in Venlo in the Netherlands, you could have picked up Street Sports Soccer, Aaargh! and Super Hang On: “pretty impressive when the first two are as yet unreleased and Super Hang On has been shelved.”
These were the cracking groups, or crews. They removed the copy protection from commercial games, put their own name on the result and passed it round a network that crossed Europe and reached the United States. What they did was illegal. It was also competitive, technically demanding and, for its members, social, and the title screens and demos they made along the way became the start of the demoscene.
Before the groups
In 1984 the problem the British software industry talked about was simpler copying. Acorn User’s October 1984 report on piracy described two kinds of pirate: “commercial counterfeiters who make copies by the thousand and pass them off as the real thing; and home users who make just a few copies to sell or swap.” Nick Alexander, chairman of the Guild of Software Houses, claimed that “for every legitimate tape sold, 10 or 12 copies are made”; another publisher put it nearer six. One user group organiser admitted that many groups existed “solely to copy and swap games”.
The industry’s answer was a trade body. The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) was set up in July 1984 to lobby for the Copyright Act 1956 to name computer software as protected. FAST drafted the amending bill, which Nicholas Lyell MP introduced in the Commons that July, and the change became law in 1985.
How the network worked
By 1988 Commodore User could print a map of the European scene. “Germany has nearly 50 gangs, whilst I tracked down a dozen in this country,” Pattenden wrote. The main motive was the race: “It’s a test of contacts, technical skill, and speed… it’s a race to see who can hack through the protection first and put it out on the network. It’s all about kudos.” Psygnosis’s Obliterator, he reported, “was cracked within hours of its release, despite some of the toughest protection available on its loader.”
A crack was more than a copy. Games were “cracked, given new loading screens, boasting the name of the crew, and frequently compacted so they load quicker.” Those screens are the crack intros. Groups also added trainers, options for infinite lives and the like, and Amiga Computing noted in 1989 that “mega-trained” versions circulated alongside the originals.
The groups had rules. “It is a fact that most hackers don’t sell the games they crack,” Commodore User reported, and “there’s a code of honour among crackers. You don’t cooperate with the industry or provide information about fellow hackers.” A former cracker who answered Amiga Computing’s questions in 1994 said the same: “Most of the people I dealt with never sold games either. It was seen as pretty lame.” What they traded was reputation and more software. “Most of the games never get played,” he said, “they’re just collateral for swapping with other pirates.”
The scene had its own press. Commodore User named photocopied fanzines, “Delirious” and “It’s Illegal (But Who Cares?)”, the second published by the group Triad, which the magazine described as German. Its April 1988 issue carried “news, interviews with hackers, a report on the Venlo copy party, a review of Rolling Thunder, a debate on the relative merits of 64 and Amiga, classified ads, news of the latest cracked games and charts.” See Illegal.
Where the games came from
Many cracked games reached the groups before the shops. Commodore User listed the sources: European retailers, because games were released on the Continent about two weeks before Britain; American hackers who downloaded US software “way before its release”; shop staff; and programmers, some “used unwittingly to provide their own games and those of their colleagues.”
By the 1990s much of the swapping had moved from the post to modems. In August 1994 Amiga Computing followed a writer who talked his way onto a pirate bulletin board. Cracked games displayed “which group cracked it” and the numbers of their boards. Access worked on a ratio: “the more data you uploaded to a bulletin board, the more you could claim back”. Once his name was known, “cracking groups from America and Sweden began to call in the early hours of the morning, offering deals for game exchanges”, and in all of it “money was never mentioned”.
From cracks to demos
The same people wrote demos, and the magazines noticed. In June 1987 ZZAP!64‘s Compunet column recommended a C64 version of Neil Armstrong’s 1969 photograph of an astronaut on the Moon, “complete with stirring Rob Hubbard tune”, by “Dirty Den of the Eastenders Cracking Group”. Commodore User conceded in 1988 that the crews’ abilities were “not in doubt — one look at many of the demos they specialise in, with their slick visual effects and sampled sound is enough to prove that.” FAST’s chief agreed: “There’s a lot of talent out there, if only they could channel their energies legitimately.”
Not everyone was impressed. Amiga Computing’s December 1989 cover story dismissed the typical cracker demo as “pretty coloured screen — look, he can use the copper — pretty scrolly picture”, but found one thing to praise. A German programmer’s music editor, Soundtracker, had fallen into the hands of “some German crackers who managed to get their hands on the source”, and they kept improving it until it was “the most popular Amiga program you can’t buy”. The demoscene entry follows what the demo makers did next.
The industry’s response
Publishers tried protection, packaging and the law. Lenslok put a plastic lens in the box. Psygnosis and Rainbird printed passwords in novellas; “the hackers just photocopy them,” wrote Pattenden. Publishers also blamed back-up cartridges. John Twiddy, who had written games and the software for the Expert cartridge, rejected a cracker’s charge of hypocrisy but agreed on the basic problem: “You can spend months developing protection for a game and someone will come along and crack it in a day.” In 1988 the Copyright, Designs and Patents Bill, then before Parliament, carried an amendment to make it illegal to sell copying devices. See copy protection.
The costs were disputed. Psygnosis said Obliterator had cost £250,000 to make, and “upper estimates” in 1988 put piracy’s cost to publishers at up to half their sales. The crackers answered that games were overpriced at £20 to £25. Interviewed in It’s Illegal, a member of the British group Fusion gave his reason as “to give people who can’t afford to buy a game the chance to have it.”
Some crackers crossed over. Commodore User reported that Christian Weber of the SCA (Swiss Crackers Association), “the man responsible for the infamous Virus”, had been hired by the Swiss company Linel, and that his first work would include a copy protection system: “tantamount to treachery in the eyes of many of the crews.”
Raids
Enforcement varied by country. In 1988 Commodore User reported that police in the Netherlands and Germany had raided PO boxes and “made numerous arrests”, while Britain was “fairly relaxed”. In the 1990s the European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) ran its own Crime Unit. Amiga Shopper reported in February 1995 that it had raided the Birmingham-based Krypt bulletin board, where “users uploaded games and in return received other pirated games”; more than £3,000 of equipment was confiscated and the operator fined £500. ELSPA’s chief investigator, John Loader, claimed that piracy cost the leisure software industry £778.5 million in the UK alone. Other ELSPA raids in the same period targeted people selling copies, such as stalls at a Leeds car boot sale where more than 7,000 disks were seized.
Sources
- Geoff Nairn, piracy news feature, Acorn User issue 27, October 1984: kinds of pirate, the Guild of Software Houses’ estimate, user groups that swap games.
- “Copyright”, Commodore Computing International vol. 3 no. 6, December 1984: FAST’s bill, introduced by Nicholas Lyell MP as a Ten Minute Rule Bill.
- ACE issue 29, February 1990, industry timeline (“FAST Talking”): FAST set up in July 1984 and its aim achieved in 1985.
- ZZAP!64 issue 26, June 1987, Compunet column: the Eastenders Cracking Group’s Moon picture.
- Mike Pattenden, “Piracy: hacking at the industry’s roots”, Commodore User, June 1988, pp. 93–95: copy parties and Venlo, gang numbers, the race and Obliterator, crew loading screens, not selling, the code of honour, fanzines and Triad, sources of pre-release games, Christian Weber, FAST, raids in the Netherlands and Germany, novellas and cartridges, John Twiddy, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Bill.
- Peter Rivetts, “No harm done”, Amiga Computing, December 1989, pp. 70–72: cracking and counterfeiting, trained and crunched games, cracker demos, Soundtracker.
- “Software pirates”, Amiga Computing issue 76, August 1994, pp. 44–46: bulletin boards, upload ratios, cracking groups from America and Sweden, and a former cracker’s answers.
- Amiga Shopper issue 45, January 1995, news: ELSPA’s raid at Killingbeck, Leeds.
- Amiga Shopper issue 46, February 1995, news, “Bulletin board raid”: ELSPA’s Crime Unit and Krypt BBS.