So in the spirit of all these old ‘scene stories’, I thought I would contribute one from 1992.
A few guys from various groups (QTX, Nemesis, blabla) decided to start a
new group, but despite getting a few originals none of them were deemed
worthy of a ‘launch title’ for our big scene entrance… this pissed a
few guys off, but things were looking good since we had an arrangement
with a game reviewer to receive a new football game which seemed pretty
good – some of you may remember it, I think it was called Sensible
Soccer 🙂
So, everything was arranged the night before the games release, the
reviewer would pickup the game and send it to our cracker in Belgium
first thing in the morning…
0900 hrs – game is picked up at Centresoft (Birmingham, UK) by
arrangement with Virgin Games (they would not make a ‘review copy’
available pre-release, so this was the quickest we could get hold of
it). On his way back to the car, the person picking up the game
recognises a certain wannabe-gangsta CSL member also making his way to
Centresoft…
0910 hrs – our guy arrives home and calls the cracker.
1100 hrs – our guy, after trying to contact the cracker (who was
supposed to be waiting for the game) for nearly 2 hours finally calls
some other people in the group to tell them that the cracker has gone
AWOL!
1130 hrs – one of the group leaders finally gets hold of the Belgian
cracker, who tells him that he went out to party the night before and is
dying from a hangover – they have a nice big argument and the cracker
tells him to go fuck himself. This leaves our new group with 0
crackers.
By this time I have called a friend from the PC scene, who tells me he
has a local friend who can crack Amiga stuff! Great news I think, except
they are in Canada and it’s currently the middle of the night where
they live… After some serious persuasion (perhaps involving bribery, I
can’t remember!) he calls his friend, wakes him up and tells him to get
ready for an original.
Just when I think things are getting on track – problem #3, the Canadian
crackers modem blew up during a storm the week before, and he only has
an ancient 2400baud modem instead of his HST.
OK – more persuasion and the cracker drives to my PC friends house while
we upload the warps of the original disks to him (this is about 4am for
these guys by now).
Hours pass, few calls back and forth to the new cracker and everything
is going well, he is paranoid about testing everything & making sure
savegames etc. all work perfectly in his cracked version (and to be
fair, we are all encouraging him since a new group doesn’t want to start
with a bad crack…).
Calls are placed all over the world, traders are ready for our first
release coming any minute – then disaster strikes… one of the traders
has just logged onto Danse Macabre and discovers Crack Inc have released
Sensible Soccer 30 seconds ago!
Lots of silly arguments between group members now occur, and the
Canadians (both my friend and the cracker) are rightly pissed off that
they wasted their night for nothing. Cracker decides to drive home and
get some sleep (45 minute journey). About 30mins later, we’ve
downloaded and tested the Crack Inc release to find that it isn’t
working properly – quick, call the Canadians again! After waking my
friend for the 2nd time that night, he tells me that the cracker took
his disks home with him, and didn’t leave any DMSed version of the crack
behind!
We eventually get hold of the Canadian cracker when he gets home, and he
agrees to upload his working version on his state of the art 2400 baud
modem – about 5 minutes from the end of disk 2 being finished, Crack Inc
release a fix for their version!
At this point we have people worldwide completely tired and pissed off,
and with all the infighting and whining the group implodes before we
ever released a single game! 🙂
I often wonder what would have happened if we had got the first
(working) version of that game released, but it just wasn’t to be!
Later I was in the same PC group as the guy who cracked it for Crack Inc
(FFC), he just laughed at me when I told him the story.
Anyway that was a long (+ rambling) post, but I just thought I’d share
it with you all since who knows how many stories like these there are
tucked away in various old Amiga sceners heads! 🙂