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Paradox

From Amiga cracktros to PlayStation cracks

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A Danish and French cracking group formed in late 1989 to crack Amiga games. It stopped in 1991, was restarted in 1993, and moved on to the Super Nintendo, the PC and above all the PlayStation, where its crack of Spyro: Year of the Dragon in 2000 answered Insomniac's anti-piracy code. It was still releasing work in the late 2000s.

In October 2001 Gavin Dodd of Insomniac Games explained to other developers how his studio had held off the pirates. Spyro 2 had been cracked “in a little over a week”. For Spyro: Year of the Dragon Insomniac added “crack protection” on top of the usual copy protection, and Dodd reported that “it took over two months for the working patch to appear, after numerous false starts on the part of the pirates”. He named no group. The scene database Demozoo lists Paradox’s cracks of the game: a first crack on 7 November 2000, a “Perfect Crack” of the American version on 25 November, and a multi-language “Perfect Crack” on 1 January 2001. By then Paradox had been cracking games for eleven years, starting on the Amiga, and it went on into the late 2000s.

Cracking a game and giving it away was illegal in most countries. Paradox belonged to the warez scene, the network of groups that raced to release commercial software with its protection removed, and each release carried the group’s name in a crack intro.

Fast facts

  • Formed: late 1989, from the Danish group Trilogy and the French group M.A.D., according to later accounts.
  • Active: 1989 to 1991 on the Amiga; restarted in 1993 and active into the late 2000s.
  • Platforms: Amiga, then the Super Nintendo, Mega Drive and PC, and from the late 1990s the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2.
  • Known for: Amiga crack intros; hundreds of PlayStation cracks, with intros that let players switch between PAL and NTSC.

The Amiga years

The fullest public account of the group’s origins, its Wikipedia article, says Paradox was formed in late 1989 by members of the Danish group Trilogy and the French group M.A.D., and began by cracking Amiga software. Demozoo lists about 140 Amiga productions dated 1990: cracktros for games, intros, and numbered “Paradox Compilation” disks. The group also worked with others: Demozoo credits the Amiga disk magazine News On Tour 7, released in May 1990, to Paradox and Red Sector Inc.

Then the releases stop. According to the same account, the original group shut down in 1991 when its most active members joined Quartex, and Demozoo has almost nothing from Paradox dated 1991 or 1992.

Reborn in 1993

The second Paradox began in 1993 under a French organiser, with former Quartex members, and its productions from that year include Amiga, PC and Super Nintendo cracktros. Its leader set out his ambitions in an interview for the disk magazine Datazine in June 1994. Asked about the group’s future, he answered: “The World Domination on all formats!” The only rival he took seriously was Fairlight, “coz they are the only groups who don’t depends on 1 supplier-1 cracker, like lot of groups”. Paradox was also seen at the German parties: Amiga Joker’s report on the Radwar party in Heinsberg in January 1994 listed it among the groups there, with Fairlight, TRSI, Scoopex, Razor 1911 and others.

PlayStation and after

From the late 1990s most of the group’s releases were for consoles. Demozoo lists about 160 Paradox productions for the PlayStation dated 1999 and more than 300 dated 2000: cracks, trainers and the selector screens that let a game from one region run on a television from another. They included Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy IX and the Spyro games. The group moved on to the PlayStation 2, with about 80 productions dated 2002 and nearly as many in 2003, and to the PlayStation Portable by 2006.

It was still making news in the late 2000s. In December 2006 the scene news site AboutTheScene reported Paradox’s release of Red Steel as the first warez release of a Wii game. In March 2007 AfterDawn reported that the “well known warez group PARADOX” had released tools that made a copy of Windows Vista behave as though a PC maker had already activated it.

Sources

See also

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