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@foxy….
my plan was, getting you outta yer grave…which has worked fine, see you are here again lol
anyhow , now go and write more stuff from the glory old times… 😉 i fukkin’ cant remember that much anymore, geeeeezus, getting old 😉
tell them people how you have smuggled the originals to jurgen from paris to cologne via Deutsche Bahn, ya know the supply-by-train-thingy 😉
that was epic! hehe…# Loki :Dafuer gibts mind. 3 Wochen Buechereiverbot
Was fuer ein Verbot ist das? Ich kenne es nicht…
Heya Subzero.
Never used car to bring originals to anyone.
Once used a UPS like mail for the 3D game called HUNTER. Couldn’t pack it for some reasons and it was far above our Parisian cracker’s skills.
Ralf wasted the protection it in a matter of hours.See ya
anyways. i’m gonna write "my" story. but in german, Annatar can consider himself as translating slave then! 😉 as iam too lazy, to write all of them in english. he will get the german version from me… if there are still people who are interested into this, on the other hand, if you see BrainWalker somewhere, kick his butt, sent him over to this place, he can write also nearly the same. and i would also see HIS answer to a couple of bollox foxy wrote, i.e. stealing releases, and wot not else… lol.. his lemmings… remember OutRun Foxy ? … remember Winter Games (epyx), nor the very first barbarian, and the other psygnosis stuff, guess who released most of them ?. and besides, we have had more working and first releases than any others… ofcourse we fukked up alot, ofcourse we stole stuff, sold stuff, made business… but MY Supplied games, were 95% not paid, as i had the very BEST of CONNECTION for getting originals lol… still have, anyhow, gotta go, soon more, if Annatar gets ready, and if you peeps wanna read…. foxy has meanwhile probably shitness in his pants, as he saw Banditt/Skid Row is still watchin’ his behaviours… lol… greetings to all known, and unknown boneheads…
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! 🙂Subzero, don’t you worry one bit. You just write it up, and hell yeah, I’ll translate it.
Added 3 minutes later:
“some of you may remember it, I think it was called Sensible
Soccer”I got that thing in the original box sitting downstairs in the basement. Got it with the A1200 I bought from the UK. Never opened or bothered to look at it. I also have “Rise of the Robots” in the original box sitting next to me, I think we fired it up twice. Got some other originals too, I’m thinking of putting them up for sale on ebay.
To me, the cracked versions I grew up with are better than the originals themselves. Even if I had had the original back then, just like now, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Added 10 minutes later:
“#2992 WayneK:
So in the spirit of all these old ‘scene stories’, I thought I would contribute one from 1992.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!”That’s one thing I still don’t understand to this day: who gives a shit who’s first. The only things that should matter are
a) hey, look at this! These guys can really crack!
b) the crack is 100% or better than the original.
Everything else, who was first, this, that, and the other — whatever! I appreciate a crack for the cracking skill of the crack, for the slickness of the intro, for the good cracker or crackers and for the polish of the intro and the whole release, for the attention to detail of the whole group.
That’s what should really matter, and that’s what I admire when I look at the finished product and enjoy the game, and think of all the guys who had to all come and work together as a group to get it working and get it out there.
Added 5 minutes later:
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t have really cared what others thought: if so much time and energy was spent into cracking it, I would have released it. And if someone thinks less of me and my group for that, they can go “shove it where the Sun don’t shine”, as the saying goes.
@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.
Thank you for that explanation. It makes it easier to get into everyone’s heads back then; while I understand where they’re coming from, after many, many years of thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that I still don’t agree with their logic.
Had I had my own BBS and had the storage resources to run it, I would have collected every working crack from every group for completeness; then again, my way of thinking has always been 180 degrees opposite of “crowd think”, “accepted norm”, “general wisdom”, etcetera.
And if they nuked my releases… back then, I would have cared. Now, I think anyone who still knows how to crack anything is a very rare breed, and anyone who nukes their work is not very bright… tradition or no. Times have changed.
@annatar … iam sure you would change your mind, once you have an original (major title) and you know, you being the ONLY SUPPLIER in the world having it in his hands. This is EpicFeeling ,… 😉
ÂI love this thread! This is old school original supplier’s delight…
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@Foxy: Long time no see,.. here’s François – if you don’t remember me (don’t you, really?), you will in a few seconds. How are you? I’d be pleased to meet you soon and have some drinks at a bar or eat at a restaurant in Paris, if you’re still around. Also it’s a long time I haven’t seen Stéphane, and the last times we met we were more friends than foes (things had changed after you and I got busted at the end of 1991). I even bought his modem for a friend of mine back in the 90’s. Anyway don’t hesitate to mail me at myname_is_bond(at)yahoo.fr. I will leave at the end of the next week for a long trip in the Americas but I’ll be back at the end of January. Please let me know.
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In waiting I will be a little thought provoking, but you know me, no?
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So you remember when you first joined local groups – it’s Raid! – as a swapper and gfx artist when I was leader of the group? Sure, everybody -both you and I- have had to start low before climbing the steps to the top. The difference is that before this local group I already had close ties with Ackerlight (applied for membership right before they got busted) and CBC (had been a short-time member). I also think I’ve taught you 2-3 practical things about the scene, swapping, etc. so I’d be glad if you could be a little more grateful and a little less contemptuous.
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So you still don’t remember mmmh? Later Raid merged with Brainstormers and I took over leadership of BSM. With former Ackerlight members joining (C-Dryk, Pat and Broadcaster officially, Fred and Crocky unofficially) and also members of Bamiga Sector One, Freestyle UK, and others, Brainstormers released a music disk and several good intros. CPU and Amnesia, well, they weren’t better at all, and that Krapulax was sometimes a little strange. Clash wouldn’t contradict me about this.
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Also about protections, do you remember Dragon’s Lair? It had been a several months wait for both 8-disks versions by BS1 and by the Australian TIC. But didn’t I supply you with the rare 6-disks TSK Crew & Accumulators version? I think I was the only one in France who received it, directly from them. And they wanted me to join.
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And Dungeon Master? This one also was not MFM for sure. Thanks to my good privileged contacts I managed to get the Eagle Soft Inc. version which was 100% working (I finished the game!). It was years before anyone noticed that a 100% version just existed at all.
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Then, do you remember how you met “the lame French leader” of Angels when we came together (correct me if I’m confusing you with someone else) at his place as I (yes, I, not TGS who only had the modem, not the originals) was the true original supplier for Paranoimia, then Vision Factory? – and my god this Patrick (Spirit called him ‘Patdick’) was lame, in fact worse than that: a “dirty scum” would better describe him, along with his homeless “wife” or whatever she was, and her trisomic son Willy (not the same Willy as in Bomberman & Willy, thank god! Hi to both of you friends!). Remember their horrible dog was pissing all over the place and they didn’t wash the mess. A true sight of horror.
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FYI some years ago I discovered that ‘Patdick’ joined a religious sect, I found this somewhere on the Web. So him in a sect, and you boasting about how they wanted you to supply games for Paranoimia… that’s a strange world! At least I understood who he was before he created Angels, and I fled away. You say you didn’t like Paradox, but I think you’ve missed the point here. Olivier was the smart guy, and Patdick was the idiot. Guess who you have chosen? No, no, I don’t want to be rude… In fact you have chosen Duncan, that’s completely different.
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About your little anecdote: two years later in 1992 with Maximilian we defrauded Patdick of 15,000FF for virtual USR modems which he never received. Hahahaha!!! He didn’t know that I was the underlying sponsor of the deal, which made it even funnier. Vengeance is a dish best served cold. Yes, that scumbag didn’t pay me for the originals I had supplied to Paranoimia and Vision Factory, but he finally paid more than ten times the sum. Let’s call it ‘Inflation’!
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Now talking about Classic, do you remember how we moved together to go and get the original of James Pond Underwater Agent? – and yes Classic was quite lame at this time… Later they became better, as far as I know.
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Then for readers around, do you remember when I came to your place and leeched all the latest warez on Danse Macabre before I got my first USR 14,400 bds? Do you know what I did with the stuff? I just came to copy parties and to lamers’ places with all the latest 0-day wrz, showed them to everyone, and just said “watch as much as you can because now it’s game over, no one will copy…”. It was the fucking rule of the 15 days embargo! Remember this? We were called arrogant people by lamers and copy slaves but it was only a matter of ethics. All in all it was the same story as “a game worth playing is a game worth buying”.
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At last do you remember that you were greeted on top as Foxy/Sprint in the first demo ‘Overdose’ of my group Delight? I guess that after all these details you now have the full picture. Enough provoking.
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Now talking about Classic’s lazyness and horrible things that Skid Row did, I could bring my own stories on the table about Crystal’s lazyness (I was first on Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge II but spent one day talking to nearly everybody there and uploading the game to every board so they could find me a cracker – (hi Phil Douglas! what were you doing?) – I think you did a better job at The Company with this one!), Oracle’s cheapness (no cards, and no money to pay for the originals – hi The Panther, great Texan accent! Why not making money with all your oil?), and weird things that Quartex and Paradox (very well organized groups!) sometimes did to others, like Fairlight for instance. But squatting, attacking and hacking BBS’s to prevent competitors from uploading their originals was finally not so nasty after all (hi Olivier!)… and who cares?
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FFC and others who were blackmailing hackers with FBI threats is something I had never heard of. This is kind of terrifying. Usually I found the crackers to be some of the nicest people of all on the crack scene. In particular my friends Blackbird and Babydock of course, but also Sauron, SCSI, Phil Douglas, Nomad, Bob Duncan, TIC, The Surge, Bigfoot, Blackhawk… I’ve worked with all of them and they were all very cool guys. Blackhawk even accomodated me in his home the last time I went to The Party in Denmark. IBM, when recruited by Paradox, stayed at my place for a week or so and I toured him shopping and visiting landmarks in Paris. Also a very nice guy. I did the same with Nuisance (NYC-based sysop of Nirvana, Paradox WHQ) but he was sometimes complaining for very little things. In fact his parents were multi-millionaires so I can understand this.
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Now even worse than the story of FFC and his friends, I also welcomed Bionomix, this time an original supplier. Not all of them are bad – for instance you and I and Subzero here are original suppliers, but maybe we are some of the exceptions. So Bionomix came with a friend of him at my place for several days, and these assholes stole my credit card right before leaving to Barcelona. I immediately opposed the card and complained to the police. They effectively found the card in Barcelona. Thanks to my quick reaction, these pigs couldn’t use it at all. And Bionomix was immediately fired from the group after that.
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About the tools, at Quartex we had the TIC warper, the best ever of its kind. It was quite slow, not easy to use with its hermetic parameters and totally undocumented, but even the worst protections couldn’t resist. After that, it was just a matter of time with the modem..
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So yes it was far west, with everything we had to always invent and all what you said about the war between groups, etc. But there was also all the phreaking stuff, the social engineering techniques, the 2-months business cards which we were lucky to have, as privileged original suppliers at least as Quartex and Paradox members. And if we had to find other means to call for free, it was easy to scan PaBX by ourselves. Al last at Delight I had Shadowvex sysop of our WHQ The Fiend Club, 2nd WW H/P/A conference and better known as… guess who!
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In conclusion, no spitting in the soup – there was thrill, challenges, and a lot of friendship, and that’s why we loved the scene.
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Supplied over 70 games and preview games (of which more than 10 insides) for over 5 years … how many on your side?
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1989 – Anonymous supplier for WoW/Eurosoft-who handed the original to Aces (Les Portes du Temps) – but I was in war with Aces so it really pissed me off (remember the fucktro against Aces & Diabolics by DMX (Olivier – the same one!) / Phoenix? Hehe I was also behind this one – Stéphane was ok but Dr Soft was really upset and came to my home with Obi Wan/Quartex just to complain. Of course they stayed at the door :-p), Genesis/Alpha Flight (Savage – cracked/trained by FFC – the same one also!), Spreadpoint, Powerslaves…
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1989 – Header/Aliens (Mr Heli, Hillsfar)
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1990 – Advanced/Upsiders, in co-op with M.A.D. (Drakkhen)
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1990 – Eresy for TGS/Paranoimia then Vision Factory (Sherman M4, Hot Rod, Test Drive 2+Muscle Cars+other extension pack, etc.)
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1991 – Flex/Quartex (also as The Magic Trio+Kruel Krime UK, The Fabulous Five, Infernal Best, S.F.X. (Spirit & Flex), Alvin the Chipmunk, etc. for Toki, The Teller, The Blues Brothers, Geisha, Lords of Chaos, Midwinter 2, Booly, Burger Man, F-15 Strike Eagle 2, etc.), Oracle (never supplied anything: no arms no chocolate!), Crystal (Lotus Esprit Turbo GT 2, Baby Jo, … – also supplied the game to Model who was supposed to be the sole intendee, sorry for this Skywalker! and hi Bob Duncan!), Nemesis (founding member, just the day before I was busted – Fascination, which was finally released by Quartex – hey Olivier what have you done?).
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1991 onwards – Voyce/Delight (Genesia (pre-English version meant French to English translation done by ourselves in the binaries, not a lame preview!), Olympique de Marseille, Stardust Playable pv, Necronom pv, Bomb-X, etc.)
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1992-1993 – Paragon/Fusion (Super Ski 2 (as Chipster), Jim Power), Crack Inc. (Push Over), Skid Row (various games Q3Q4/1992 – see member lists), Interpol (nearly everything over the period, starting with Flashback), Paradox (nearly everything from Desert Strike to Arabian Nights (06/1993), notably everything supplied as Paradox France, as TGV, as TGV & TMW (myself and Willy), as TDT UK for Arabian Nights, etc.), TRSI & TDT PC (various games notably PC versions of the above, and Crazy Cars 3).
n00w: interesting stuff indeed 🙂 As I was reading your stuff, I was reminded of a story Nuisance told me, when Bionomix came to visit him in NY. He told Nuisance he had a valid drivers licence, and they ‘borrowed’ one of his fathers cars (a Jaguar or Rolls Royce, some luxury car) to go into New York City proper… so it became obvious quickly that Bionomix couldn’t drive for shit, and they were also pulled over by the police. Fortunately, the officer didn’t understand what the foreign driverslicence said and let them off with a warning to be more careful.
When they got back to Nuisance’s house, Bionomix told him he only had driven a tractor before, and this was a learners permit he had shown the cops… still, at least he didn’t steal any credit cards!
I’m sure our paths crossed anyway during the scene, since I was in a few of the groups you mentioned above. Nice to read all the scene memories anyway 🙂
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