I grew up with a Commodore 64 as my best friend. The C64 offered a new world to escape to from the banality of 5th grade. This is a story I always tell and people respond with a blank stare eventually uttering, "What was the point? That's pretty stupid." So you just shouldn't bother reading this.
When I was ten I acquired a 300 baud modem. Services like Quantum Link (later to become AOL), which were primitive chatroom networks, soon lost appeal after I was repeatedly kicked off for excessive cursing. I started logging on to local BBSs (bulletin board systems) where a SysOp (one lonely guy) set up his computer to receive other users one at a time. The BBS’s featured message boards and download/upload areas. I was still involved in the real world of life, not totally ensconced in the world of computers, but I was looking for a way out, something new that would let me escape the constant ridicule of being fat and weird. Unfortunately these local BBSs were not the answer because they were usually run by old geezer hobbyists and most of the BBS members were from his close circle of friends. On the message boards they usually talked about RUSH.
I was always scouring the cheapo software bins where budget companies like Mastertronic would sell their games for $10 a piece. There was something enticing about these games in that they were obscure and were the effort of a couple people rather than a whole design team. Even if the game was absolute crap, it was a more personal and interesting experience than dropping $40 on a fancy multi-disc game from Electronic Arts. Like my record hoarding and MP3 collecting these days, it was like finding a treasure in a garbage dump.
Free cracked games were easy to come by with a modem. With a snail-slow 300 baud modem, it usually took about two hours to download 160 blocks…but the magical world that opened up by acquiring cracked games was more than worth it…and it wasn’t about the games.
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