For a few years in the early 1990s, owners of copied Amiga games kept seeing the same name on the screen before the game began. Skid Row was a cracking group: its members removed the copy protection from new games, put their own intro in front, and sent the result round the bulletin boards, racing other groups to be first. A British reader who wrote to Amiga Format in 1994 was “more and more disgusted at pirates such as Skid Row”. In the scene the group was ranked first; in October 1992 a German magazine’s scene reporter wrote that once it had broken up, the Amiga no longer had an undisputed number one.
Fast facts
- Formed: summer 1990.
- Base: its founders and suppliers were in Germany, with crackers elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.
- Platform: Commodore Amiga.
- Known for: fast cracks of major releases, crack intros, and a fixed version of Spaceballs’ demo State of the Art.
- Rivals: Crystal, Quartex and others.
Formation
Two accounts of the start survive, both from scene sources. The database Demozoo says Skid Row was formed in the summer of 1990 by a member called Metallica from the remains of two groups that had just folded, Paranoimia and Supreme, and lists its first release, an intro for a crack of Street Rod, on 13 July 1990. Subzero, who supplied the group with original disks, told the website Codetapper that he started Skid Row with The Hellion and Metallica after his previous group, Vision Factory, closed. Most of them, he said, lived “just a few kilometers” apart, and the group’s crackers at the beginning were FFC and Eurosoft, with Blackhawk in Denmark. Paranoimia had been one of the “big three” Amiga groups in April 1990, according to Amiga Joker’s scene column, alongside Vision Factory and Quartex.
Racing for the release
Speed was everything. In Subzero’s account, two partners of his collected new games from German distributors as soon as they arrived and took them straight to FFC, who cracked them while Subzero wrote the text for the intro. “If there was more than one game released per day, we warped the other one to our other crackers,” he said, meaning sent a disk image to them by modem, and “if a major title had heavier protection, Eurosoft took care of it.” The group also had a cracker in the United States for American releases.
The main rival was Crystal, whose supplier, 2tuff, lived a few miles from a British distributor. Each side remembered winning. 2tuff told Codetapper that “Skid Row tried to compete with us, but was easily destroyed”. Subzero’s reply was that 2tuff “got beaten by us many many times, a few times he was faster”.
Intros on other people’s games
A Skid Row crack usually opened with an intro. The one on the group’s crack of Lemmings was written by Dan of the demo group Anarchy, who, as his former group-mate Mark Hellewell recalled, signed it “Dan of Anarchy” on screen throughout and set it to 4-Mat’s tune “LFF”. Dan worked at Core Design at the time, and the intro “caused a stir” there. Demozoo dates the Lemmings release to February 1991.
Game programmers knew whose names would end up on their work. The developers of Abandoned Places left a message in their game’s files: “Cracked by Quartex or Cracked by Scoopex or Cracked by Skid Row or Cracked by <here is your name>!” Some cracked copies advertised more than the group. In March 1994 Amiga Format printed screens from “a Skid Row pirate version of Robocod”, sent in by a reader, and noted that the crack went on to give phone numbers for pirate bulletin boards in Britain, Europe and the United States.
Top of the charts, and the split
Scene groups ranked each other in charts. In June 1992 Amiga Joker’s scene reporter, Dr. Freak, found Skid Row “once again” in first place, ahead of Crystal, Venture, Shut Berlin, TRSI, Alpha Flight and Quartex. By October he was reporting the group’s break-up: there was no longer an undisputed number one, and leading groups such as Nemesis, Crack Inc. and TRSI were recruiting partly from former Skid Row members. Subzero was one of those who left in 1992. He founded Crack Inc. with an intro coder called Brainwalker and later joined former Crystal members in a group called Ministry.
Releases under the name did not stop at once. Demozoo lists a Skid Row intro from mid-October 1992, for the pinball sequel it catalogues as Pinball Dreams II, with a member list of more than eighty names, and productions credited to the group into the late 1990s.
Fixing State of the Art
Skid Row also took an interest in demos. Spaceballs’ State of the Art won The Party in December 1992 but crashed on many Amigas, because it used fixed memory addresses. Jimmy Maher’s history of the Amiga records that members of Skid Row fixed it to run on other machines and added their own verdict to the title screen: “How could this demo win????? Lame programming and useless trackloader.” The fixed version travelled. In June 1993 the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review described a “Spaceballs/Skid Row coproduction” of the demo, noting that “according to their text, it was Skid Row who got rid of all the clumsy bits”.
The name on the PC
A PC cracking group has used the name since. Demozoo lists releases under it from 1991 to 2024, and notes that although it claims to stem from the Amiga group, it has been “widely criticized for having an in-name only connection”.
Sources
- Amiga Joker (Germany), April 1990: Dr. Freak’s scene column, Vision Factory, Paranoimia and Quartex as the “big three”.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), June 1992: Dr. Freak’s scene column, Skid Row top of the charts.
- Amiga Joker (Germany), October 1992: Dr. Freak’s scene column, the break-up of Skid Row.
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review vol. 10 no. 6, June 1993: public-domain column, the Spaceballs/Skid Row version of State of the Art.
- Amiga Format issue 57, March 1994: readers’ letters on piracy, and screens from Skid Row’s crack of Robocod.
- Mark Hellewell, “Anarchy and the Demoscene”, in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), p. 80: Dan of Anarchy’s intro for Skid Row’s Lemmings.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), p. 190: Skid Row’s fix of State of the Art.
- Codetapper, “An interview with Subzero of Skid Row” (web, secondary): formation, suppliers, crackers, the rivalry with Crystal, Crack Inc. and Ministry. http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/subzero-of-skid-row/
- Codetapper, “An interview with 2tuff of Crystal” (web, secondary): http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/2tuff-of-crystal/
- Codetapper, “Hidden messages in Amiga games” (web, secondary): the message in Abandoned Places.
- Demozoo, group entry for Skid Row (web, secondary): formation, first release, Lemmings and later releases, the October 1992 member list. https://demozoo.org/groups/8/
- Demozoo, group entry for the PC group Skid Row (web, secondary): https://demozoo.org/groups/14943/