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The Scene Story Ever wanted
to know what life was like for a Commodore 64 cracker? Inside The Scene In the early 80ies, the Commodore 64 became the alternative to the technically inferiour video game consoles like the Atari 2600 VCS or the Colecovision. The games were more colorful, they featured great music and a more complex gameplay than ever before. Unfortunately, these games were pretty expensive, in fact, too expensive for the kids who loved to play them. As they were distributed on floppy disks or cassette tapes, they could have been copied quite easily, so the software companies included a copy protection in them. That was the time when some guys with programming skills started to remove this protection. They were called crackers. It seems like nobody knows today who exactly was the first person to crack a game - but names like Indy, ABC and Headbanger will be heard quite often. They just wrote a single line of text into the title screen, like "Cracked by ABC". A couple of months later, some crackers decided to join forces - the first cracking groups emerged. Early groups were e.g. DCS or Section 8. Suddenly, one of the groups decided that this little note in the screen wouldn't be enough to show the world who cracked the latest smash hit, so they put an animated screen containing a scroll text with greetings and notes in front of the games. This screen is called an intro. Once again, we can't be absolutely sure which group came up with the idea, propably The Bencor Brothers or E.C.A. More and more cracking groups came up in the years 1984 and 1985, many of them were absorbed into bigger groups, others just vanished away. These were called local lamers *g*. Some of the bigger groups started to work on a more professional level, they had coders and graphics artists who programmed the intros, suppliers to get the originals, swappers to spread the games and, finally, crackers who cracked them. Some of these groups existed for more than 10 years, and again others like Fairlight and Triad are still active today! Most of these cracking groups had P.O. Boxes, as sending pirated disks to their homes became too dangerous for them. Stamps were expensive, so they were "cheated" or "recycled", prepared with a special glue, which made it possible to clean them after they were cancelled, so they could be reused several times. Scene life wasn't that easy these days, the post office often found out and informed the police, so it was quite common that the cops already waited in the post office when the sceners wanted to collect their mail. Episodes, which are quite amusing today, happened back then: One guy pulled a gun when he saw the police officers, and Snacky/G*P was taken handcuffed through his hometown! I once had to run away (together with Mr.Lee) when we saw the cops waiting for us behind the counter... Many groups started to operate internationally. They swapped disks with other groups from all over the world, just to get more and more games. Even the single members of a group came from different countries. Examples for these "international" cracking groups are Ikari and Genesis*Project (Finally, I mentioned us!). The software companies became more and more concerned about the crackers and employed a lawyer, a.k.a. the pirate hunter a.k.a. the advocat from hell a.k.a. Guenni von Gravenreuth. He always claimed to be a nice guy, but he used (and still uses!) methods that could be described best as "barely legal". Anyway, he never caught too many of the big fish. He also seems to have a serious alcohol problem. Around 1987, the first modems came up. More and more bulletin boards (BBS') were launched, on which the games were swapped and discussions took place, similar to the Total 64 message board if you like. Some of these famous BBS' were The Forum, Warez Castle, Disk Shoppe or Terminal Obsession. Modems were slow these days, and the phone bills would have risen, if there hadn't been some dirty little tricks like Blue Boxing or Calling Card Abuse. Some cracking groups started to improve the games they cracked: they added little cheat menus, crunched the programs so they loaded faster and took less disk space or PAL/NTSC fixed them, so American games ran on European machines and vice versa. Smaller groups died. Many of the remaining big groups like Ikari, Hotline, Genesis*Project, Crazy or Censor started to co-operate with others to release even more titles. On the other hand, some groups were in war with others. Nowadays, most members of these groups just laugh about that! The major cracking groups started to meet at "secret" parties or meetings. The biggest of these meetings took place in the city of Venlo, Holland, every month. Other groups like Crest started to program demos to be displayed at the parties. These parties became bigger and bigger over the years, they were important events in every sceners life and a great chance to meet friends from the scene. Unfortunately, slowly but surely, the C64 cracking scene started to die as the Amiga and PC became more important as gaming platforms. Many C64 crews skipped the Amiga and started to crack on the PC in the early 90s, just to quit the PC scene some years later and come back to the real thing: The C64. |
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