“This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”

A fascinating 11-minute video by Modern Vintage Gamer about the PC videogame piracy in the 1990s:

This is a “no honor among thieves” story about a few groups racing to pirate and release one of the most important videogames in history: 1996’s Quake.

There is a lot of interesting vernacular here: leetspeak, nfo files, cracktros, ASCII art, BBSes, IRC, a bunch of slang, and even specific font styles. At the same time there is also some unexpected bureaucracy – apparently videogame pirates had sort of a governing body, which perhaps was also somewhat corrupt?

#games #piracy #youtube