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by mewse-hn12 hours ago |
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upvoteby ryanjshaw7 hours ago|
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Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.
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upvoteby virtue36 hours ago|
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it would have been like 520 hours to download 500mgb. Assuming it didn't break at some point.

That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites.

mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too.

And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...

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upvoteby Lorkki6 hours ago|
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If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.
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upvoteby hdgvhicv3 hours ago|
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I got 3kB/sec, or 6 minutes per meg in ‘96. 10 meg an hour wasn’t terrible even I. The U.K. where you paid a penny a minute.
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upvoteby justsomehnguy2 hours ago|
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That's why you had a download manager and left the machine running all night.
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upvoteby tetrisgm4 hours ago|
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Correct
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upvoteby haspok3 hours ago|
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Oh, but that's why you went to the computer lab of your uni - those machines were on a 10mbit LAN and had a decent connection to the internet!

Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.

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upvoteby _joel2 hours ago|
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Connecting to office LANs and going on the internet was a magical feeling back then. The speed coming from a 56k dialup was jarring. We'd have network games of Quake (rocket jumps included) and watch Real Player versions of grainy South Park early episodes at er, lunch. Good times.
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upvoteby vanviegen6 hours ago|
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According to the article: the game was 22MB and only the first 32kB of the .exe were encrypted.
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upvoteby sznio7 hours ago|
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>Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun.

compared to that a crack is just a single binary.

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upvoteby darkwater5 hours ago|
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Dial-up cost will be discovered later by upset parents, and you already have all your nice pirates games, which you would need to pay upfront with your own pocket money (if that existed).

But in any case physical copy + crack was the best solution at the time.

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