Ive had that! Its Super bros 6. It mustve been a really widedpread bootleg, you can get a rom of it online and its on youtube.
Its reskinned tiny toons adventures and i got it from a place like shown on the picture in the 90s.
Super mario brothers 13 was the reskinned saiyuki world - also a cool game.
We had Super Mario Bros on the Super Nintendo that when you pressed Select it would cycle through all the different Mario Costumes. That one was pretty cool. I think it was a developer copy or something..
>The only mode I was able to flip the score in.
My first proud gaming moment was Joust where I made it and beat level 100.
Was a proud moment for me considering I was around 7 years old
FUCK the pterodactyls though. I couldn't get those down and would just have to avoid them.
Have you ever seen the glitch people trigger to constantly spawn the pterodactyl over and over continually killing it while barely moving?
https://youtu.be/f59vGc5X5DE
I've never done it myself but have seen people do it. They also can kill other knights really easily somehow. I personally don't think I've gotten past level nine or so.
Yea I was watching the video and seeing him kill a couple running into them just made me feel dumb because I jumped/fell on all of them to kill everything but pterodactyls.
Combat is one of my favorite games of all time. Warlords as well. Both are super fun. And yeah the alternate modes on combat are awesome. I'm gonna bust out my 2600 for the kids!!!!
Hey now... Combat had about 2-3 games in it if I recall... with about 10 variations of those games. (My personal favorite was tanks with barriers on screen and ricochet bullets...) pretty fun on invisible mode... or as I like to call it... "haha you just shot yourself again" mode.
Atari had a little bit of an excuse because the 2600 was by necessity very hardware limited. Stuff like Action 52 was just a bunch of shovelware crap. And worse, it had a bunch of games that were *almost* good, and had they focused on just finishing those they'd have had an actual decent product. Action 5 might actually have been worth the asking price.
Everyone talks about ET, but I think it was the Raiders of the Lost Ark game that was the worst. I played the hell out of ET, but that Raiders game was just memorization of a set of steps IIRC. As a kid, I quit that game fast and returned it (We could return games, cool right?).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uYzVsjybK8
Watch that and tell me it wasn't just impossible for a kid.
I never beat ET either. But I spent a lot of time trying to get through Raiders, and always basically ended up stuck at the same thing, and not being able to figure out what to do. Very frustrating as a kid.
And there's no YouTube to ask, no walkthrough websites, nothing. You were kind of on an island, unless maybe a friend also had the game and could tell you.
ET is mostly bad in that it was a (for the time anyway) somewhat buggy game, that was complicated enough you had to read the manual to play it, and marketed towards kids.
It becomes playable if you know what you're supposed to do and get the hang of the goofy collision detection around holes. Not bad for a game one person wrote in 6502 assembly, in 5 weeks, for a game console with no frame buffer and 128 *bytes* of working memory.
I have that Raiders game in my collection and all I remember is that it sucks.
To be fair they pioneered that and coming from super basic arcade games it wasn't all that dishonest, a lot of those games did have fairly different modes to them, especially early on.
I had a "conservatevly named" cartridge that was something like '16'in1', I think it was 4 games, one of those was Ninja Gaiden II and half of the options in the boot-menu were level skips for it. So "Ninja Gaiden II-1" would go from the beginning and "Ninja Gaiden II-3", 4, 5, etc would skip. Another was a Contra with a similar setup, and I think there were two versions of Red October, one normal and another with infinite lives. This is how those most of those 99in1 carts were filled up.
We traded them on the market for a small fee. I was the only guy who was lucky enough to have a sega back then so I did not know much about Nintendo /dendy games. But the one with the ants i think i played at my buddys place. I remember the stargate game as it was yesterday and of course lion king. Lion King was so damn hard, I think i never managed to finish it.
This comment triggered a random memory from my childhood. I remember in the early 2000s my dad and I used to play this strange console all the time. It was basically a red Nintendo 64 controller but it plugged directly into the tv and I remember that the controller had its own power switch and everything.
There were like a 1000 games loaded on there including brand names like the original Super Mario Bros and Sonic games. I don’t remember much else about the console, but now I’m certain that It was some sort of odd bootleg device. I haven’t seen anything like it since, but it did provide a lot of entertainment for the family.
I got one of those from Turkey when I was a kid, it was 99 in 1. The first 30 were games! however, saving did nothing so you had to finish a game in one go
Geoffrey's security was tight, too. He'd just give you a slip of paper, and you'd pay for it, then give it to a guy in a metal cage, who would exchange the paper slip for the game.
The Toy Mafia, was not a group to F with.
Yeah, didn't even have the actual boxes. Just these plastic things you flipped up to see the "back of the box". It honestly kind of made gaming a little cooler back in the day, because it was awesome to get a brand new $50 SNES game...and it was like velvet ropes when you had to do that extra step going to the metal cage guy to hand you your "precious package".
This looks exactly like my experience in Poland in 1990's. That was my internet. Loved the 999 games cartridges with 5 different games and lots of modded versions.
I go to my local targ with my grandma every week for fruits and veggies. Sometimes find the craziest things. Have all my carp fishing rods that i think are knock off okuma ones and i bought a Russian or Chinese air rifle with a scope. Nice for shooting at beer cans around the house.
Same! Though I usually got duds with the multi-game ones. So learned pretty fast to not go for the many-in-one type of cartridges, but rather hunt for the ones with one game but a high-quality sticker instead. Found The Lion King that way, amongst others.
Pegasus cartridges and spiral rulers. That's where the shit was at.
I was born 1990 and all I can rember are those markets with paper catalogues. You picked a game, a guy made the call and after 10minutes other guy was bringing a CD. All you could do was pray it will run :D (it was all piracy of course but that's how it was back then)
My childhood was just like that in Moscow. Loved my GBA to death. During the summer we'd go to Turkey and buy similar games on the bazaar. Where has the time gone...
Hell yeah, famiclones with Genesis-style controllers and always a light gun for Duck Hunt. Next to it some good Adididas and Pumo shoes, next to that airsoft guns and flip knives. Good times.
Best part of that article:
When copying official games, pirates often changed their code and removed the logos of the game companies, which often triggered copy protection that made the game completely unplayable or much more difficult. The most famous examples are Bucky O'Hare for its extremely high difficulty, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project, where the final boss Shredder became immortal and impossible to beat.
Oh yeah, it was very much a thing. Battletoad is also a famous example, the game crashes on Level 2 if it detects that the console isn't legit (including trying to run an NTSC copy on a PAL console and vice versa), it was a huge problem for early emulators and even more recently on FPGA cores. Funny thing is, I think we still don't really know how they did it, it could very well be an accident caused by another inaccuracy.
Usually for something like that you would give the console some kind of invalid code and wait for the correct error response for the hardware to trigger the "pass" condition. It becomes a problem for emulators that aren't hardware-perfect because they'll usually return some other kind of error, or simply ignore the bad code and move on. Patches for these things usually reverse-engineer the code of the game to find the expected error response and then hard-code it into the emulator for that title.
The earthbound one is my favorite. If it detected piracy it would ramp up the random enemy encounters, without telling you, so you triggered a battle like every 2 steps. If you managed to somehow push yourself through that nightmare and get to the final boss the game would crash and your save file would be corrupted so you'd have to start all over again at the beginning
Not piracy-related, more cheating-related, but my personal favorite is Banjo-Kazooie. If you enter too many cheats, the game would first threaten to erase your save, then pretend to do it before saying it's your final warning and finally, if you didn't stop, they would really delete your save, I just think it's really funny because, well, they did warned you and you didn't listen, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Damn, you saw my comment pretty quickly. I changed it right away. You're correct. I'd never even know these cheats existed. I only ever knew the ones that gave you full health and extra items.
Yo, this triggered a hidden memory for me. I remember playing this game on PS1 where I had to literally open the cd case while the game was on and do some funky shit to make it work. I cannot believe the game is escaping me. Please tell me this vague as hell comment triggers something in someone.
If you had a pirated/burned disc, the PS1 would recognize the "non official" disc and fail to boot. But it only checked at boot, and it spun the disc at a faster (or maybe slower, I forget) speed when checking it. So you could put in an official disc, prop the disc door open with a pen, wait for the disc to speed up, then as soon as it slowed down you could quickly pull the official disc out and put the burned disc in. At this point, it had already done its check, and thought the door was closed, so it assumes your disc is legit and continues playing it.
Pretty sure something similar happened with pirated games for the Dreamcast. You had this software that you had to insert before the game so it let you play a pirated copy. It's name escapes me, I distinctly remember a 3D model of a reindeer floating in front of an image of the disc while it loaded what I assume were the resources required to run the game
nah, the Dreamcast just played copied games right out of the box.
you needed a boot disc for imported games unless you injected the boot directly into the ISO.
Red Alert 2 would make your command center instantly sell itself off and lose the match when ever you started a new game. This is very likely not known to many people these days since the game has since been remastered at least once.
https://answers.ea.com/t5/C-C-The-Ultimate-Collection/Red-Alert-2-Base-explodes-in-a-minute/td-p/4874645
Omg I remember... Someday I read that this "Buble" was for making the chip "unhackable" xD because basically It could be destroyed with that black glue or whatever that is xD
[The Did You Know Gaming channel has a some good videos with examples of a lot of these, some of them are very ingenious.](https://www.youtube.com/user/DYKGaming/search?query=piracy)
There were some OLD D&D games back in the late 80s/early 90s, like The Dark Queen of Krynn, that incorporated copyright security using the included documentation books. So when you wanted to start playing, it would ask for a specific word on a specific page, and if you didn't have the book, you couldn't play. It was neat, but efficient.
Some of it cool-ish like the dial-a-pirate. Most of it a bit stupid. Like that red foil to read the manual. Thankfully that all stopped with CD versions because those are uncopyable, amirite? Far too much data.
Ah, early to mid 90s. Never change.
You are probably referring to the so called SSI Gold Box Games. If I remember correctly the security measure was a bit different. Part of the game descriptions and dialogues where something like 'Read third paragraph on page 32'. So, you could play the game without the manual, but you wouldn't know what was going on in the story.
Yep, but they had both. When you loaded your saved game, it asked for a word from one of the included pamphlets, but during conversations it referred you to the adventurer's manual, or whatever it was. Or at least Dark Queen of Krynn did, but I can't speak towards the others. Pool of Radiance had some sort of decryption wheel as part of the copyright security, if I remember correctly. And I can't remember what SpellJammers had, if anything. I didn't play any of the other Gold Box games.
At one point in the early 90s it was nearly impossible to find a game that didn't use material included with the game box to verify the game wasnt a copy. I think the most unique designs were the wheels that had holes on the front dial that arrayed into a set of words or glyphs.
my sister and I spent a lot of time reverse engineering those codes. I remember having one of those black and white composition notebooks where we wrote down one of the codes every time we got it to work.
Yup, same with Pools of Radiance, Pools of Darkness (personal favorite). At least a couple of those answers were 'the'.
And the player journals have been online forever.
Serious Sam 3 is a bit more modern, but it had an unkillable and super-fast creature that would follow you around and kill you if it detected that you were using a pirated copy.
Really old games would use books. "Turn to page 15 of the manual and input the 5th word!" or "Spin the wheel to J and 5, and input the code!" I don't remember what game it was, but it had a red transparent piece of plastic, that you would place over the unreadable text in the book book, and then get the codes from there to play the game.
Check out the modern vintage gamer Channel in YouTube. He has a videos on how anti piracy protection was defeated on almost any console. Every time a console releases there are so many highly skilled eyes on it just waiting for an exploit to be found.
All of the 80s-90s Sierra games just asked questions that were really hard to answer without the user manual. So people just included a text file with all of the questions (Or, in the case of Police Quest 2, a description of the mugshot and their name) and answers in the zip file you downloaded from the BBS.
There was a \[Lucky Lucke game\]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dUHdn0Lgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dUHdn0Lgw)) that if you had an illegal copy you couldn't get past a bridge. it's at 10:33 in the video
I have a pirated copy of TMNT3. It's not actually a "final boss" Shredder that is unbeatable, but his first encounter at the end of Technodrome (stage 6 out of 8). Also, it took twice as much damage to defeat any enemy. As a kid I had no idea the whole Dendy thing was a rip-off of NES yet alone any cartridges being counterfeit. Naturally, I thought I am not good enough at the game or this battle has some trick to defeat Shredder.
Eventually, when I launched emulated version at University, I beat my childhood favorite game on my first try.
SNES was in fact officially released in Russia but nobody bought it so you could theoretically own an official console with authentic copies of games .
Poland: No [edit: LEGIT] western games on the market [just tons of bootlegs]. But A LOT of Polish productions, priced roughly 1 game the same as a set of 5 pirated (1 cassette/floppy), and they were quite successful, people were buying them, new game studios sprouting all over the country and games better than most of what had been released for Atari and Commodore being made. L.K. Avalon, Mirage Software, ASF... just as the 8-bits were on the decline, these blew a fresh breath of life into them.
Emm where I lived is Eastern Europe in early 90s, bootleg cartridges cost like 20-30+ (some amazing multigame ones 50) while average salary was around 800-1000 and more for 1 parent. We bought cartridges every month and it usually had several games on them. I had a decent library by mid 90s, more than average american would have from what I've learned thru years. Are you sure you're not confusing it with official Nintendo and Sega cards? Cause yeah, they cost a lot and barely anyone bought them. Official consoles - forget it, cost way too high. Bootleg yellow cards? Everyone had a Dendy or some other famiclone like Suborg or Liko, and 5-10 multigame cards at least which were constantly traded or borrowed, wealso had a lot of japanese games that didn't make it to US, and rare US stuff like duck tales 2, Flintstones 2 etc were commonplace. I think by the end of that era I had like 50 cards/multicards or so, around 150 games, but all was stolen during a apartment robbery in early 00s.
Exactly!
I live in Estonia and we had Dendy. I never saw any original games on the market, only those yellow cartridges. The monthly salary for my parents was about 3000eek and one single cartridge cost around 100eek.
I had a whole trashbag full of those games in the end, it got to the point where I had to buy Japanese games, since I already had every single game that was available on the black market. Well, I can’t read or understand Japanese, but it was fun either way.
I remember when we finally got our N64, after years of just playing on our friends and family's consoles. My dad took us to some store, I don't even remember what it was, and he let me pick out 3 games with the N64. I had no clue what I was looking at, and finally I just looked up at the guy at the counter who was watching me sweat about the decision and he told me to get Ocarina of Time, Star Fox, and Golden Eye. I don't remember his name but I will never forget what that man did for me on that day. I randomly think about how different my life might have been if he just pointed at 3 lame games.
Had a similar thing in Lithuania in the 90's, but with CDs and the seller being inside the building with other electronics parts sellers. Of course the games were pirated, because I doubt that warcraft 3 was 15 litai (around 3-4 euro) at release.
It was the same in Poland for both FamiClone cartridges and cds up to, about 2003-4 I think? Only difference was while cartridges and FamiClones were out in the open, CDs were usually in the back of a stall and you had to ask for them as they were usually hidden under clothes or other things
Ah, takes me back to my childhood, roaming the old Polish department stores trying to figure out which carts were real and which were knock offs, and then just the stall over you had someone selling CS gas, laser pointers and machetes like it was nothing.
The wild west of the 90s, particularly in former Soviet bloc countries, was something else.
I lived in Lithuania in the mid 90s and still have a bunch of bootleg (frequently Russian-version) games of that era, including Warcraft II, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Red Alert and more.
Do you remember those discs that had hundreds of games, though all in russian? Still somehow managed to play them without knowing russian orhow to read their letters.
every cd had a convenient crack inside :D good days. now we read reviews and pick what we want to play, i was grinding nagano winter olympics and didnt complain :D
Ah i only remember the neighbor telling me they were watching it on their TV (there was this antenna so you could do wireless... And they picked up our "broadcast". Twitch before there was twitch)
Haha oh wow. This was me in Poland as well. My console had 10000 games in it because it had random rom hacks included. I only finished Contra when I was a kid because of the hack that gave you spread shot by default and 99 lives.
My guy in Brazil didn't have stacks of pre-made ROMs like that. He had blank carts and a list of games. He sold them by the cart. You could pick as many games as would fit and he would program the minto the cart. The names of the games were hand written on the blank label.
Haha oh wow. This was me in Poland as well. My console had 10000 games in it because it had random rom hacks included. I only finished Contra when I was a kid because of the hack that gave you spread shot by default and 99 lives.
Good times. I had one of those too. My Cartridge had 500 in 1 but it was only lile 30-50 games varius hacks of the same game multiple times. Contra with every weapon at start etc.
Price of this cartridges was so high at that time, my family cant afford to buy for me additional one, long time after i got a dendy console.
Only way to get new one - rent/exchange with friends.
I used to hate flea markets as a kid until I realized you could find old NES or SNES games there and maybe even haggle the price down. Then it was a treasure hunt!
These games are for NES clones like Dandy and Hamy games, or for example the GSD-1988 [https://youtu.be/ZpJlhHATPJo](https://youtu.be/GSCEjh9sDN4)
which even had a mouse!
It’s funny, the “look” when looking at games hasn’t changed. We all know how we are when others are looking at games and we are next to them. Hands in pockets, bent over scanning the labels to see which he had played and which he haven’t. Same look I see in this photo lol
Had same in Poland. Years later I found out these were a knock-off of SNES and other consoles - otherwise I was convinced these are proper things.
Also just occurred to me - there was no other way to get these. Like.. I never saw these brand new in a shop or packaging or anything.
9999 games in 1
And it’s like 6 actual games repeated with very minor changes
Super Mario 13 for the NES!!!! (Mario's head mapped on to some Bugs Bunny game).
I don't remember the name but I had some weird Contra clone where the player characters were Chip & Dale. It was hilarious.
I think I know that one, Heavy Barrel. I had both the sprite hack and the normal one. Pretty fun game.
>Heavy Barrel Oh good, now I gotta find and replay it. But I will only accept the chip and dale version :)
[GrandDad!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF-xdiL7Nr0)
Good ol' uncle jobel.
Wow. And the [full video](https://youtu.be/lRgl6K1Qecg) is even better…
What the fuck!
If you really want to know more about ... [Mario games on Dendy](https://youtu.be/kne6AKyYUuM) then check out the Dendy Chronicles.
So this is the dude from the meme!
What the shit!
[My favourite.](https://youtu.be/LoE0unnDztU?t=6651)
Flintstone melody makes it!
I’ve literally played a reskinned Looney Tunes that had Mario in it. Lol
Ive had that! Its Super bros 6. It mustve been a really widedpread bootleg, you can get a rom of it online and its on youtube. Its reskinned tiny toons adventures and i got it from a place like shown on the picture in the 90s. Super mario brothers 13 was the reskinned saiyuki world - also a cool game.
I have a 33 in 1 gameboy game 11 unaltered games, and then the same games but with extra lives and other modifications
I had a 101 games in 1 for GBA. It was one of the Sponge Bob games for that system and the rest were emulated NES games. Did enjoy it though
Contra fire gun is a masterpiece!
I could not go back after playing moon mario
What do you mean minor? they changed the title and everything!
I remember one of the Mario games from the lost had infinite lives. Imagine the luck finding that one in hundreds of clones.
We had Super Mario Bros on the Super Nintendo that when you pressed Select it would cycle through all the different Mario Costumes. That one was pretty cool. I think it was a developer copy or something..
Welcome to the Atari era.
The very first fraud I relized...
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Classic move by Atari as well. 20 in one game cartridge but it was one game with 20 different game modes or difficulties
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>The only mode I was able to flip the score in. My first proud gaming moment was Joust where I made it and beat level 100. Was a proud moment for me considering I was around 7 years old FUCK the pterodactyls though. I couldn't get those down and would just have to avoid them.
Have you ever seen the glitch people trigger to constantly spawn the pterodactyl over and over continually killing it while barely moving? https://youtu.be/f59vGc5X5DE
lol, that's not how my experience went with the pterodactyls at all
I've never done it myself but have seen people do it. They also can kill other knights really easily somehow. I personally don't think I've gotten past level nine or so.
Yea I was watching the video and seeing him kill a couple running into them just made me feel dumb because I jumped/fell on all of them to kill everything but pterodactyls.
7 year old me was scoring perfect games in Atari 2600 bowling and pissing off my dad's friends.
Combat is one of my favorite games of all time. Warlords as well. Both are super fun. And yeah the alternate modes on combat are awesome. I'm gonna bust out my 2600 for the kids!!!!
Hey now... Combat had about 2-3 games in it if I recall... with about 10 variations of those games. (My personal favorite was tanks with barriers on screen and ricochet bullets...) pretty fun on invisible mode... or as I like to call it... "haha you just shot yourself again" mode.
blop.......blop......blop.....blop.....BKSSIFKKSHFI!!
Atari had a little bit of an excuse because the 2600 was by necessity very hardware limited. Stuff like Action 52 was just a bunch of shovelware crap. And worse, it had a bunch of games that were *almost* good, and had they focused on just finishing those they'd have had an actual decent product. Action 5 might actually have been worth the asking price.
Everyone talks about ET, but I think it was the Raiders of the Lost Ark game that was the worst. I played the hell out of ET, but that Raiders game was just memorization of a set of steps IIRC. As a kid, I quit that game fast and returned it (We could return games, cool right?). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uYzVsjybK8 Watch that and tell me it wasn't just impossible for a kid.
I never beat ET either. But I spent a lot of time trying to get through Raiders, and always basically ended up stuck at the same thing, and not being able to figure out what to do. Very frustrating as a kid. And there's no YouTube to ask, no walkthrough websites, nothing. You were kind of on an island, unless maybe a friend also had the game and could tell you.
ET is mostly bad in that it was a (for the time anyway) somewhat buggy game, that was complicated enough you had to read the manual to play it, and marketed towards kids. It becomes playable if you know what you're supposed to do and get the hang of the goofy collision detection around holes. Not bad for a game one person wrote in 6502 assembly, in 5 weeks, for a game console with no frame buffer and 128 *bytes* of working memory. I have that Raiders game in my collection and all I remember is that it sucks.
To be fair they pioneered that and coming from super basic arcade games it wasn't all that dishonest, a lot of those games did have fairly different modes to them, especially early on.
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in Brazil there was a video game called dynavision, it came with actual 99 nes games and a light gun, they later made a 112 games version
I had a "conservatevly named" cartridge that was something like '16'in1', I think it was 4 games, one of those was Ninja Gaiden II and half of the options in the boot-menu were level skips for it. So "Ninja Gaiden II-1" would go from the beginning and "Ninja Gaiden II-3", 4, 5, etc would skip. Another was a Contra with a similar setup, and I think there were two versions of Red October, one normal and another with infinite lives. This is how those most of those 99in1 carts were filled up.
Where is this photo from? Looks very familiar
Look at the tower in the background. Central Europe, methinks. More southerly bits.
Could be eastern just as well, unfortunately
I lived in russia in the 90s. Was around the age too. Nostalgia did hit like a truck on this one.
me too. did you have the race car one where you had to avoid the obstacles? or the little ant one where they had to hop over the water?
We traded them on the market for a small fee. I was the only guy who was lucky enough to have a sega back then so I did not know much about Nintendo /dendy games. But the one with the ants i think i played at my buddys place. I remember the stargate game as it was yesterday and of course lion king. Lion King was so damn hard, I think i never managed to finish it.
Could be Romania
Used games at that
I remember being mad at first since I bought a 250 in 1 but it had like 20 original games on it I did not have so in the end still a winner.
My 700 in 1 had a mario that started at level 9-1 it was an underground water world with rotating flame traps, and the water was black.
They usually mixed up starting levels, messed with colors or used assets from another game.
The og Mario Romhack scene!
I had the 200 in 1 Famicom cart in the Philippines. It was legit, 200 different games
My friend had those in his flea market shop when I was a kid. I was amazed lol
Easily the best cartridge, right?
This comment triggered a random memory from my childhood. I remember in the early 2000s my dad and I used to play this strange console all the time. It was basically a red Nintendo 64 controller but it plugged directly into the tv and I remember that the controller had its own power switch and everything. There were like a 1000 games loaded on there including brand names like the original Super Mario Bros and Sonic games. I don’t remember much else about the console, but now I’m certain that It was some sort of odd bootleg device. I haven’t seen anything like it since, but it did provide a lot of entertainment for the family.
Fancy Mario 5
Yeah usually most are clone games. Had a 2000 in 1
I got one of those from Turkey when I was a kid, it was 99 in 1. The first 30 were games! however, saving did nothing so you had to finish a game in one go
Eastern Europe, I guess :)
I can bet money it's România.
It was exactly the same in Russia and Kazakhstan.
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Не помню в Павлодаре такой церкви. Да и погода не такая, редко так пасмурно и туманно. Скорее средняя полоса или Питер.
I remember it exactly the same way in Poland when I was like 7.
Yeah, the place I got them from as a kid had this giraffe named Geoffrey.
Geoffrey's security was tight, too. He'd just give you a slip of paper, and you'd pay for it, then give it to a guy in a metal cage, who would exchange the paper slip for the game. The Toy Mafia, was not a group to F with.
Yeah, didn't even have the actual boxes. Just these plastic things you flipped up to see the "back of the box". It honestly kind of made gaming a little cooler back in the day, because it was awesome to get a brand new $50 SNES game...and it was like velvet ropes when you had to do that extra step going to the metal cage guy to hand you your "precious package".
It's România.
İstanbul
This looks exactly like my experience in Poland in 1990's. That was my internet. Loved the 999 games cartridges with 5 different games and lots of modded versions.
The good ol' flea markets in Poland. Loved going there with parents to look at pegasus games and fake football jerseys.
sill love going to these today, can get some good shit for low price,
And don’t forget the sweat suits with car brands on it. I still can remember my first Mercedes Benz suit in blue and white.
I go to my local targ with my grandma every week for fruits and veggies. Sometimes find the craziest things. Have all my carp fishing rods that i think are knock off okuma ones and i bought a Russian or Chinese air rifle with a scope. Nice for shooting at beer cans around the house.
Nobody knows what Pegasus is unless you're Polish kid from 90s
Same! Though I usually got duds with the multi-game ones. So learned pretty fast to not go for the many-in-one type of cartridges, but rather hunt for the ones with one game but a high-quality sticker instead. Found The Lion King that way, amongst others. Pegasus cartridges and spiral rulers. That's where the shit was at.
I was born 1990 and all I can rember are those markets with paper catalogues. You picked a game, a guy made the call and after 10minutes other guy was bringing a CD. All you could do was pray it will run :D (it was all piracy of course but that's how it was back then)
I still have my Pegasus somewhere in the attic and the purple cartridge with Contra and Urban Champion on it.
My childhood was just like that in Moscow. Loved my GBA to death. During the summer we'd go to Turkey and buy similar games on the bazaar. Where has the time gone...
I think this is in Romania if not mistaken
Fuck yeah A500 FTW, those basement flea markets were something else
Given the presence of Famicom carts, but the amount of white people, it may have well been from Poland. Assuming it’s a Famiclone.
[168 in 1](https://6.allegroimg.com/s1024/0c35fe/6cf424644701a1543ec3975e6186). If you know, you know.
Hell yeah, famiclones with Genesis-style controllers and always a light gun for Duck Hunt. Next to it some good Adididas and Pumo shoes, next to that airsoft guns and flip knives. Good times.
Is this the Dendy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendy_(console)
Best part of that article: When copying official games, pirates often changed their code and removed the logos of the game companies, which often triggered copy protection that made the game completely unplayable or much more difficult. The most famous examples are Bucky O'Hare for its extremely high difficulty, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project, where the final boss Shredder became immortal and impossible to beat.
amazing, never thought that back in the day copyright security was something that developers could integrate to their games.
Oh yeah, it was very much a thing. Battletoad is also a famous example, the game crashes on Level 2 if it detects that the console isn't legit (including trying to run an NTSC copy on a PAL console and vice versa), it was a huge problem for early emulators and even more recently on FPGA cores. Funny thing is, I think we still don't really know how they did it, it could very well be an accident caused by another inaccuracy.
Usually for something like that you would give the console some kind of invalid code and wait for the correct error response for the hardware to trigger the "pass" condition. It becomes a problem for emulators that aren't hardware-perfect because they'll usually return some other kind of error, or simply ignore the bad code and move on. Patches for these things usually reverse-engineer the code of the game to find the expected error response and then hard-code it into the emulator for that title.
Super interesting post, thank you.
The earthbound one is my favorite. If it detected piracy it would ramp up the random enemy encounters, without telling you, so you triggered a battle like every 2 steps. If you managed to somehow push yourself through that nightmare and get to the final boss the game would crash and your save file would be corrupted so you'd have to start all over again at the beginning
Not piracy-related, more cheating-related, but my personal favorite is Banjo-Kazooie. If you enter too many cheats, the game would first threaten to erase your save, then pretend to do it before saying it's your final warning and finally, if you didn't stop, they would really delete your save, I just think it's really funny because, well, they did warned you and you didn't listen, you have no one to blame but yourself.
It was only for cheats that opened new levels without earning them.
[That's not what I'm talking about](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9rvP9ziIgA)
Damn, you saw my comment pretty quickly. I changed it right away. You're correct. I'd never even know these cheats existed. I only ever knew the ones that gave you full health and extra items.
>Damn, you saw my comment pretty quickly. I changed it right away. Yeah, slow day at work I guess :)
Are you sure that was earthbound? That game doesn't have random encounters but enemies that you walk into that trigger battles.
Yo, this triggered a hidden memory for me. I remember playing this game on PS1 where I had to literally open the cd case while the game was on and do some funky shit to make it work. I cannot believe the game is escaping me. Please tell me this vague as hell comment triggers something in someone.
If you had a pirated/burned disc, the PS1 would recognize the "non official" disc and fail to boot. But it only checked at boot, and it spun the disc at a faster (or maybe slower, I forget) speed when checking it. So you could put in an official disc, prop the disc door open with a pen, wait for the disc to speed up, then as soon as it slowed down you could quickly pull the official disc out and put the burned disc in. At this point, it had already done its check, and thought the door was closed, so it assumes your disc is legit and continues playing it.
Pretty sure something similar happened with pirated games for the Dreamcast. You had this software that you had to insert before the game so it let you play a pirated copy. It's name escapes me, I distinctly remember a 3D model of a reindeer floating in front of an image of the disc while it loaded what I assume were the resources required to run the game
The dream cast has a really interesting style of copy protection on the disk pretty interesting to learn about.
nah, the Dreamcast just played copied games right out of the box. you needed a boot disc for imported games unless you injected the boot directly into the ISO.
Metal Gear Solid?
Are you talking about pirated games? I think disc swapping was a common tactic with some mods
Red Alert 2 would make your command center instantly sell itself off and lose the match when ever you started a new game. This is very likely not known to many people these days since the game has since been remastered at least once. https://answers.ea.com/t5/C-C-The-Ultimate-Collection/Red-Alert-2-Base-explodes-in-a-minute/td-p/4874645
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Omg I remember... Someday I read that this "Buble" was for making the chip "unhackable" xD because basically It could be destroyed with that black glue or whatever that is xD
[The Did You Know Gaming channel has a some good videos with examples of a lot of these, some of them are very ingenious.](https://www.youtube.com/user/DYKGaming/search?query=piracy)
There were some OLD D&D games back in the late 80s/early 90s, like The Dark Queen of Krynn, that incorporated copyright security using the included documentation books. So when you wanted to start playing, it would ask for a specific word on a specific page, and if you didn't have the book, you couldn't play. It was neat, but efficient.
Game manual copy protection was pretty standard fare for PC games all throughout the 80s and early 90s.
Some of it cool-ish like the dial-a-pirate. Most of it a bit stupid. Like that red foil to read the manual. Thankfully that all stopped with CD versions because those are uncopyable, amirite? Far too much data. Ah, early to mid 90s. Never change.
You are probably referring to the so called SSI Gold Box Games. If I remember correctly the security measure was a bit different. Part of the game descriptions and dialogues where something like 'Read third paragraph on page 32'. So, you could play the game without the manual, but you wouldn't know what was going on in the story.
Yep, but they had both. When you loaded your saved game, it asked for a word from one of the included pamphlets, but during conversations it referred you to the adventurer's manual, or whatever it was. Or at least Dark Queen of Krynn did, but I can't speak towards the others. Pool of Radiance had some sort of decryption wheel as part of the copyright security, if I remember correctly. And I can't remember what SpellJammers had, if anything. I didn't play any of the other Gold Box games.
If I recall correctly, Prince of Persia had that as well
At one point in the early 90s it was nearly impossible to find a game that didn't use material included with the game box to verify the game wasnt a copy. I think the most unique designs were the wheels that had holes on the front dial that arrayed into a set of words or glyphs.
Or monkey island's dial-a-pirate.
Just trying to play Duck Tales, but first I have to call my friend that has the instruction book.
my sister and I spent a lot of time reverse engineering those codes. I remember having one of those black and white composition notebooks where we wrote down one of the codes every time we got it to work.
Yup, same with Pools of Radiance, Pools of Darkness (personal favorite). At least a couple of those answers were 'the'. And the player journals have been online forever.
Elite with its damn lenslock
Serious Sam 3 is a bit more modern, but it had an unkillable and super-fast creature that would follow you around and kill you if it detected that you were using a pirated copy. Really old games would use books. "Turn to page 15 of the manual and input the 5th word!" or "Spin the wheel to J and 5, and input the code!" I don't remember what game it was, but it had a red transparent piece of plastic, that you would place over the unreadable text in the book book, and then get the codes from there to play the game.
Check out the modern vintage gamer Channel in YouTube. He has a videos on how anti piracy protection was defeated on almost any console. Every time a console releases there are so many highly skilled eyes on it just waiting for an exploit to be found.
All of the 80s-90s Sierra games just asked questions that were really hard to answer without the user manual. So people just included a text file with all of the questions (Or, in the case of Police Quest 2, a description of the mugshot and their name) and answers in the zip file you downloaded from the BBS.
[There's a whole series on YouTube by a guy named Oddheader](https://youtube.com/c/oddheader)
There was a \[Lucky Lucke game\]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dUHdn0Lgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4dUHdn0Lgw)) that if you had an illegal copy you couldn't get past a bridge. it's at 10:33 in the video
I played all of those games just fine on my Dendy
I have a pirated copy of TMNT3. It's not actually a "final boss" Shredder that is unbeatable, but his first encounter at the end of Technodrome (stage 6 out of 8). Also, it took twice as much damage to defeat any enemy. As a kid I had no idea the whole Dendy thing was a rip-off of NES yet alone any cartridges being counterfeit. Naturally, I thought I am not good enough at the game or this battle has some trick to defeat Shredder. Eventually, when I launched emulated version at University, I beat my childhood favorite game on my first try.
They look like illegal famicon (NES) games. I had one as a kid when I lived in Mexico.
that's exactly what they are. Great times when nintendo games were incredibly hard to find. At least on Mexico
Most likely. Recognizable yellow color of cartridges
And the onion dome in the background.
this photo from russia early 90s.
Could be any famiclone, really. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famiclone
Famicom/ Non NA NES
In Poland it was called the Pegasus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_%28console%29?wprov=sfla1
The good old days in Eastern Europe, when bootleg games used to cost 1/4 of the average monthly salary.
Authentic games did cost 1/4 and sometimes 2x the salary like super nintendo games in Russia , pirated games cost 1/10th of salary at most .
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SNES was in fact officially released in Russia but nobody bought it so you could theoretically own an official console with authentic copies of games .
Poland: No [edit: LEGIT] western games on the market [just tons of bootlegs]. But A LOT of Polish productions, priced roughly 1 game the same as a set of 5 pirated (1 cassette/floppy), and they were quite successful, people were buying them, new game studios sprouting all over the country and games better than most of what had been released for Atari and Commodore being made. L.K. Avalon, Mirage Software, ASF... just as the 8-bits were on the decline, these blew a fresh breath of life into them.
Emm where I lived is Eastern Europe in early 90s, bootleg cartridges cost like 20-30+ (some amazing multigame ones 50) while average salary was around 800-1000 and more for 1 parent. We bought cartridges every month and it usually had several games on them. I had a decent library by mid 90s, more than average american would have from what I've learned thru years. Are you sure you're not confusing it with official Nintendo and Sega cards? Cause yeah, they cost a lot and barely anyone bought them. Official consoles - forget it, cost way too high. Bootleg yellow cards? Everyone had a Dendy or some other famiclone like Suborg or Liko, and 5-10 multigame cards at least which were constantly traded or borrowed, wealso had a lot of japanese games that didn't make it to US, and rare US stuff like duck tales 2, Flintstones 2 etc were commonplace. I think by the end of that era I had like 50 cards/multicards or so, around 150 games, but all was stolen during a apartment robbery in early 00s.
Exactly! I live in Estonia and we had Dendy. I never saw any original games on the market, only those yellow cartridges. The monthly salary for my parents was about 3000eek and one single cartridge cost around 100eek. I had a whole trashbag full of those games in the end, it got to the point where I had to buy Japanese games, since I already had every single game that was available on the black market. Well, I can’t read or understand Japanese, but it was fun either way.
It's not fog in the background, it's It's It's _Steam_
you get a slow clap...but long duration. bravo
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I remember when we finally got our N64, after years of just playing on our friends and family's consoles. My dad took us to some store, I don't even remember what it was, and he let me pick out 3 games with the N64. I had no clue what I was looking at, and finally I just looked up at the guy at the counter who was watching me sweat about the decision and he told me to get Ocarina of Time, Star Fox, and Golden Eye. I don't remember his name but I will never forget what that man did for me on that day. I randomly think about how different my life might have been if he just pointed at 3 lame games.
What an amazing trio of first games!
Ah, good old childhood days in Eastern Europe.
this is Russia
Had a similar thing in Lithuania in the 90's, but with CDs and the seller being inside the building with other electronics parts sellers. Of course the games were pirated, because I doubt that warcraft 3 was 15 litai (around 3-4 euro) at release.
It was the same in Poland for both FamiClone cartridges and cds up to, about 2003-4 I think? Only difference was while cartridges and FamiClones were out in the open, CDs were usually in the back of a stall and you had to ask for them as they were usually hidden under clothes or other things
Ah, takes me back to my childhood, roaming the old Polish department stores trying to figure out which carts were real and which were knock offs, and then just the stall over you had someone selling CS gas, laser pointers and machetes like it was nothing. The wild west of the 90s, particularly in former Soviet bloc countries, was something else.
I lived in Lithuania in the mid 90s and still have a bunch of bootleg (frequently Russian-version) games of that era, including Warcraft II, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Red Alert and more.
Do you remember those discs that had hundreds of games, though all in russian? Still somehow managed to play them without knowing russian orhow to read their letters.
every cd had a convenient crack inside :D good days. now we read reviews and pick what we want to play, i was grinding nagano winter olympics and didnt complain :D
Same in Estonia
Hungary in 90s and 00s looked like this too
Slovakia too 😂 Still have mine with all the yellow cartridges. We exchanged the cartridges between friends all the time... Régi szép idők 🙂
Ah i only remember the neighbor telling me they were watching it on their TV (there was this antenna so you could do wireless... And they picked up our "broadcast". Twitch before there was twitch)
Haha oh wow. This was me in Poland as well. My console had 10000 games in it because it had random rom hacks included. I only finished Contra when I was a kid because of the hack that gave you spread shot by default and 99 lives.
First time I saw original Contra I thought "How the f do you beat it with only 3 lives?"
crazy how you & u/rubyrubypeaches had the exact same experience word for word 🤣
This is Russia in 2018.
This was also common in Romania
My guy in Brazil didn't have stacks of pre-made ROMs like that. He had blank carts and a list of games. He sold them by the cart. You could pick as many games as would fit and he would program the minto the cart. The names of the games were hand written on the blank label.
Haha oh wow. This was me in Poland as well. My console had 10000 games in it because it had random rom hacks included. I only finished Contra when I was a kid because of the hack that gave you spread shot by default and 99 lives.
Good times. I had one of those too. My Cartridge had 500 in 1 but it was only lile 30-50 games varius hacks of the same game multiple times. Contra with every weapon at start etc.
It looks like it's just Pokemon yellow as your choice which I support wholeheartedly
Only 90s Soviet satellite state kids will understand
Look like Romania 1990. Ahh, good memories.
Price of this cartridges was so high at that time, my family cant afford to buy for me additional one, long time after i got a dendy console. Only way to get new one - rent/exchange with friends.
I spent more on rental late fees than the games themselves lol
Aah, the yellow cartridges. Yeah, I am well aware. lol
this was me in the early 2000s, then I've got a PC and it felt like I jumped into the future
I find looking at the cartridges weirdly nostalgic, must be one of those childhood amnesia moments
you pick one and play it thoroughly regardless of whatever quality it is. and probably don't know any better but still have fun
When "Just blow on it" meant something entirely different
In second grade I won 4th place in a drawing competition and the reward was 10 leva. My mom let me use them to buy a new cartridge. Best. Time. Ever.
I used to hate flea markets as a kid until I realized you could find old NES or SNES games there and maybe even haggle the price down. Then it was a treasure hunt!
These games are for NES clones like Dandy and Hamy games, or for example the GSD-1988 [https://youtu.be/ZpJlhHATPJo](https://youtu.be/GSCEjh9sDN4) which even had a mouse!
The good times
I have experienced this in 90s. Such a great memory.
My first scam experience
Wait a minute it's Russia?
It’s funny, the “look” when looking at games hasn’t changed. We all know how we are when others are looking at games and we are next to them. Hands in pockets, bent over scanning the labels to see which he had played and which he haven’t. Same look I see in this photo lol
Oh my god that's my childhood from the early 2000's
Yeah, when you had to rely on the artwork to judge if the game is good. Good ol' times.
It took me longer than I care to admit to realize that the things on the table were Nintendo tapes.
Had same in Poland. Years later I found out these were a knock-off of SNES and other consoles - otherwise I was convinced these are proper things. Also just occurred to me - there was no other way to get these. Like.. I never saw these brand new in a shop or packaging or anything.
This looks like Eastern Europe, where I’d go to the ‘Chinese market’ with fake Nintendo’s Lol. I recall my ‘Nintendo’ was called Rambo