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Haha, that’s a risky move – baiting the company whose game you just released early! Also insulting them in the scroller “… it was the first Rainbow Arts game worth cracking”.
Interesting stuff n00w, but I have to disagree about Anthrox… both the leaders (Mungo & Hydro) were from the UK, and as I remember they existed at the same time as Power & Punishers (mainly US/Australian). I guess that people from Punishers (Ice, especially) joined later when ATX moved from mainly a UK demo group to a cracking/training-focused group – which was a good move since they stayed at the top of the World Charts as #1 trainermakers for many years (Ice did some very fast but not very good trainers, Skol made some fast+excellent trainers!).
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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Yeah thanks for writing that TCB, especially didn’t know too much about Prestige since by then I was getting out of the Amiga scene.
Your list of things required in a group was interesting, people from ‘outside the scene’ don’t realise just how complex + inter-connected all these things were!
eg: Orig supplier but no crackers? they will join a different group – of course vice versa, crackers with no originals aren’t much good either!
No way to call around for free? no group, you lose… etc, etc… almost every ‘job’ in a group relies on several others being in place, which is why there were so few ‘major’ groups (successful groups who steadily released games for long periods of time).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! 🙂So I have a question that I’m sure some of the guys here can answer:-
Who was HOAN?!
I was reading a scroller by PDX today where it says a lot of crap about ANGELS (around 1990-91 time I guess), but one of the main things it says is that it had been confirmed to them that ANGELS were buying a lot of their cracks from someone called "HOAN" (and that most of them didn’t work, hehe)…
I don’t recall anyone with this name from my time in the scene, so can any of you shed some light on who this person was?!
Lots of groups competed with Skid Row, mainly Crystal & Fairlight, during their ‘glory years’. But there were quite a few dud-releases, usually games that were rushed out because another group was known to have the original… they would release their version on the boards either knowing it didn’t work or simply upload disk 2 of 2 everywhere to buy them time to finish a working disk 1, and release a fix later if required – a scan of any old BBS file-listing from a major scene board of the era will show you this.
Having said that, there was a good 1-2 year spell when 75% of the major games were released first by Skid Row in a working state 🙂 A group that had the best suppliers in Europe (SSR) and a collection of very good/fast/sometimes-both crackers (Eurosoft, Blackhawk, FFC, Special Agent, others that I forget) was always going to be a force to reckon with!Why fly them home? We went to a nearby hotel and cracked/uploaded them from there
Ah the old PC Show days, good times indeed!Yeah, scandinavia sucked for suppliers
UK, Germany, France + USA were the main countries I guess (to get the originals)… then you just had to get them to the german crackers without running up a huge phonebill For some reason Germany seems to have the "early adopters" technical hardcore… On Amiga HQC and many others, on the Atari ST you had The Exceptions (TEX) … I wonder what it is about .de that causes this – are there just more strange/wierd people in Germany than anywhere else?
scenex:
i really respect the big coders and crackers from the early days.. i mean there was no internet to just download quickly a tutorial about whatever you like.
let’s say these days, you’d like to learn how safedisc/manualunpacking/keygenning/whatever works – no problem after 3 minutes searching you got at least 10 tuts explaining the topic. then you just need to afford the time and et voila you understand it and you’re able to use your knowledgePeople were always able to trade the information… whether by mail, meeting at computer clubs, BBS, phonecalls. It was the same on the amiga, for every 1 good cracker (nowadays, think of the guys who are writing the tutorials and making the safedisc/securom unwrappers etc.) there were 100 newbie-to-average crackers (these are the guys reading and following exactly the tutorials without really understanding). BUT – there’s nothing wrong with this… eventually the interested/capable ones will learn from the tutorials, and graduate to a higher level, perhaps faster than if they had only been stuck in their bedroom working on it alone for months… so I don’t really see the problem. One good example from the Amiga days for you… MOK. Mok is, as far as I know, widely regarded as one of the best crackers of his time on the Amiga (92/93 onwards?), but he started out as an interested but not very capable guy, until he finally persuaded Phil Douglas to teach him how to crack ‘properly’. The rest, as they say, is history
Anyway, just my take on it, please continue w/ your scene history Foxy