Home › Forums › Amiga › Scene › Foxy! (aka Dominator) of The Company, Dragons, FLT, SR and so on › Reply To: Foxy! (aka Dominator) of The Company, Dragons, FLT, SR and so on
@annatar: you have to put this in the proper context. I am sure you have read some of the other posts on the forum and by now you have somewhat of an understanding how things worked ‘back then’. As long as cracks were being spread by mail, nobody really cared as distribution was key in order to get your crack out and about “fast & wide”. So, sure it happened that the same game got released by 3 different groups sometimes even days apart but nobody cared. The masses were getting their free games and every single group thought they were the best anyway.
In come the BBS’s and the concentration of the so-called top boards. A file-listing on a bbs was ruthless: it clearly showed who was first and so it was very confrontational for a group to lose out on just a few minutes / hours after you put in all of the effort / money / etc… People would tend to download the first version and spread that + the sysops hated to see their expensive hard drives filled up with 3 versions of the same game and hence NUKING was invented. So, this intensified the competition among groups and when they had squeezed out every ounce of inefficiency of the “releasing-process” (a the way from obtaining the original to the actual uploading to the WHQ), people started taking risks (i.e. releasing without testing) and that degenerated even further to blatant “cheating” (release non-working now and fix later / upload disk 2 out of 2 to all boards whilst cracker is still cracking main disk / etc / etc ). In the modern day scene, this still applies. Releases will be nuked for “dupe” or not following the rules and then the competitor finds some bs-reason to release a “proper”.
Your statement where you say you wouldn’t care about what other thought and still put out your release the way you wanted it –> would not have made sense in the reality that the 90’s scene was. Your time/effort/work would simply get nuked and denied existence on all the boards that mattered. Given boards were the main point of origin for the rest of the scene (mail-traders / the fat guy on the corner selling games / etc…), nobody would have known about your “great work” and all would have been in vain. The only way around it could be like some of the “micro-scenes” did: crack their own originals and spread it within their country (Turkey and certain Latin-American countries come to mind) or start a “boutique” BBS where people following your “philosophy” can get your releases but believe-you-me: it would have had very few users in those days.
A good way to illustrate that, are “foreign language” releases. All the time, they were treated as “second class” but why really? The originals were as expensive to buy? The protection as hard to crack? Some languages had HUGE target audiences (French / German) but still 90% of the boards did not accept other languages but English and the scene generally frowned upon groups releasing other languages resulting in budget labels (E.g.: Diamonds & Rust -> Fairlight) or fake groups altogether.
Bottom-line: that was the scene evolved to ; for better or for worse. Clearly in this case for worse.