As a child in the 90ies I did not know you could buy games, the only way I knew was to copy it from a friend.

Later my cousin traveled to Poland where he bought pirated floppy disks, this is how I realized that you could somehow pay to get access to many new games.

For pc, very. I spent hours downloading rips of games off a BBS. One of the few games I bought was duke nukem 3d and that's just because I wanted the build level editor that I couldn't find a download of.

For consoles, less so. I had a pirated "100 in 1" nes cart of from China but all the games were crap. Cartridge copying wasn't a thing.

I vaguely remember a n64 device that could load cartridge images off a zip drive or something. Nobody had one though.

Piracy became bigger again when the ps1 mod chip came out and we had brand new cd burners. Dreamcast too.

quite common. i vividly remember friend doing careful calculations whether to buy double or quatro speed cd rom burner and whether he will be able to make up for that big price difference with a number of cds he can burn and distribute among his friends...

before that when it was floppy disks, it was even simpler, because any floppy mechanic was able to both read and write. some of them had some clever anti piracy features though, like asking you "what is the fifth word on page 27 of the manual?" 😆

that is for pc, i have no idea about consoles.

To give some perspective: BitTorrent was released in 2001. So in the 90s, you'd be looking at some precursor to that. And the first CD recorder to cost less than $1000 was sold in 1995. Before that, they'd cost something like a car.

We definitely shared and copied a lot of floppy disks back then. And music on tapes.

I remember the IRC channels where you would interact with channel bots to have them list what they had available. You'd make a selection, possibly end up in a queue, and then start downloading at 56k.

Honestly, none of it felt like or was treated as piracy. You were just sharing games (a physical thing you lent your friend). Even the game manual anti-piracy stuff was just treated like something you needed to work around. Your friends would just write down a few examples (like pg 43, line 26, word 12 = "punisher") and just retry until that question was asked.

There was a pirate scene even in the 80s, during the 8-bit computer era. Transferring games to floppy from a 300 baud modem.

Parents had a good friend of theirs that gave us a ton of games every time he visited. Most of them were game selection startup menus, because the uploaders wanted to use up all of the space on the floppy, so they crammed it up with 6-8 games each. You can still find these disk copies on certain C64/ATARI XL game torrents.

All the while SPA was still pushing anti-piracy commercials on PBS channels. "Don't copy that floppy" was always their silly tagline.

And yea, once Napster turned into a household name, piracy was mainstream.

Back in my days, all my PS1 and PS2 games are pirated. I never have Xbox, but I'm sure they're pirated as well. Basically all CD/DVD based ones are.

I don't think the ROM based cartridges are pirated tho, as they're mask ROM, for which you'd need a semiconductor facility to create.

Anyone remember trying to copy the spectrum games on tapes. Not sure if that counts as piracy.

As the consoles get locked down it is logic video game piracy might spike.

So many people have been happy to pay…pity that wasn’t enough for the corps.

It was reasonably common in the floppy disk era. Some games allowed you to play for a set amount of time, after which it asked you for something external to the game itself. Some examples I remember:
- Dune 2 asked for some units stats that could be found in the games manual
- Day of the Tentacle needed you to complete a battery blueprint sketch in game. The missing info could be found in the manual
- Monkey Island 2 asked for a voodoo recipe. To find the correct measurements, you had to spin two overlaid sheets to align something, which revealed a value.

All of the above could of course be copied and/or guessed, but it did at least introduce some bar of entry.

For my copy of "The incredible machine" I had a copy protection challenge page in the manual, the game gave you a challenge phrase and you had to enter the proper password. I think different game versions also existed for which you needed a different manual. Goal was to make it harder to just copy the floppy disks, you also had to remember to copy and print the paper, which was an additional hurdle.

Later, I also had lots of burned CDs from friends with games on them.

I'd say the piracy was mostly real life friends sharing their games with each other (which, since everyone knows different people, was quite a big network), which yes, still made it common and quite a problem for publishers.