A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)

Greetings from the USSR! In 1990, I was 15 years old and a high school student. Factory clones of the ZX Spectrum appeared in stores, and I often visited the stores, looking at the new computers on the shelves. I already had a programmable microcalculator. My mother worked as the head of the department of automated control of industrial production, she received her salary for a month and bought me a ZX Spectrum 48K computer with all the money, for this I am very grateful to my mother. I learned to program in BASIC and assembler. The computer came with a cassette with the games Zynaps, Exolon, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash, Is-Chess, Robin of the Wood. These games were English, exported through Poland. I knew three people in the whole school, owners of the ZX Spectrum, and it was a huge school, 11 thousand students studied there. We exchanged cassettes with games. Then I used the Copy-copy program, it was right on the tape included with my computer! To make a copy of a game, first the game was read from the tape recorder into the computer's memory for 5 minutes, then I put in a clean tape and recorded the game for 5 minutes, then I checked for another 5 minutes (Verify). Sometimes I came across games in Italian. Hello Italy! There were Polish magazines in Polish. In 2002, I started working in a gaming computer club. There were 12 computers connected by a local network. There were Counter Strike, Half-Life, Sims, GTA III, Warcraft and other games. Games and programs were sold in stores and kiosks. I still have a collection of disks. For example, this is a Windows XP Corporate disk, for which only a serial number was needed. I bought this disk in a store for 2 dollars. Now I use Debian 12. I cannot download a Windows disk image, since many sites are not available in Russia. I can only buy a laptop with Windows installed, but it is expensive.

This image shows how it was in Brazil around 2006:

the general manager of Worldwide Anti-Piracy at Microsoft, Keith Beeman, looking at the copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 sold on Sao Paulo streets for R$10 (something like 5 USD).

https://web.archive.org/web/20070119230014im_/http://g1.glob...

This is an interesting movie along those lines, although it's about pirating music rather than games. The protagonists live in Naples.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_by_Erry

I grew up in midwest small town USA, around 3500 people, in the 80s. I attended monthly C64 user group and it was pretty much nothing more than copying each others software.

I do recall getting a cassette with a ton of games at the newspaper kiosk, and realizing only decades later those were all pirated titles, and wondering how that had happened.

This article finally made it click!

I too remember those years very well (from '83 onwards, when I managed to get a Sinclair ZX Spectrum as a gift). Magazines were very common at newsstands, but even in regular specialized stores, most of the games were pirated. I still have the instruction manual in Italian (completely counterfeit) for the game ELITE on the ZX Spectrum. The same happened when I bought a Commodore 128 three years later, and again a couple of years after that when I got an Amiga 500. You only had to go to the shop where you bought the computer to purchase games or other software. I still remember Deluxe Paint and a C compiler—if I’m not mistaken, it was Lattice C.

And shall we talk about the common practice of pirating DOS or Windows? Starting from Windows 95 onwards... Truly a different world. The illegality in that field was scandalous for entire decades... (and even now, in many professional offices, it's still common practice to use cracked copies of Adobe Acrobat...).

In more recent times, conspir4cy, or cpy, has been an Italian group cracking denuvo drm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_warez_groups

They stopped being active a few years ago

I am Italian and I remember very well when, around the 90, I frequently go to the computer shop to buy copied games in 3.5 floppies with handwritten labels. They cost the equivalent of 2.5€ and frequently this was the best way to get a virus.

Interesting that it was quasi legal in Italy.

I remember being in Mexico City in the early 2000s and seeing dvds of software being sold. What was remarkable to me was some wasn’t games but professional applications like autocad and maya..

Stuart Ashen (Ashens) just did a video about the topic of 1980s game piracy in Italy, but his video was mostly about the cover art. Many of the pirate versions of games stole their cover art from a book or movie poster, and his video shows the real game, the bootleg game, and shows where the cover art was stolen from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_PIxYFmA-Q

Good all times. As usual great quality content from genesistemple

I don't see how copying numbers is a problem, just because someone lined up the numbers in a particular way.

Calling it piracy is completely ridiculous too: pirates were killing, pillaging and stealing.

The real problem are the anti piracy law and the governments enforcing the will of large corporations.

I am from Naples and I must admit I was quite shocked when in my mid teens I learned software would normally be bought in the "official" ways; and for what prices :D

It was all shareware and cracked disks until then (probably a bit past then to be frank)

Bulgaria (and the rest of the eastern block) were cloning all kinds of computers. My first one was Pravetz 8C, which was really Apple ][/e or /c

One of our most prestiguos software/hardware companies employed people solely to pirate and translate tech.

https://sandacite.bg/%D0%B1%D1%8A%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D1...

Has several examples of screenshots from Karateka, Moon Patrol, and others translated in bulgarian.

lol.

> Arcade games were not exempt from being copied either. There was a whole black market of people working with arcade boards bought at various European fairs which would then proceed to copy each chip on the board by hand, in order to create a sort of 1:1 copy, to be sold all over the territory in hundreds of specimens.

And not just arcade games. Full on arcade cabs were copied. Many people who played in Europe on arcade machines (I remember those at the bowling and tennis club) were actually playing on fully "pirated" cab and PCBs.

I have such a vintage, bootleg, cab from the mid eighties since about ten years now. It looks like a Taito cab (the one they used a lot, with nice curves on the left and right of the screen: one of the nicest cab IMO) but it's not a 100% identical copy and someone obviously converted it to the JAMMA standard at some point.

I've got both vintage PCBs, bootleg PCBs and a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter.

Some of the games are still very fun to play.