CRACKING THE SCENE
CRACKING GAMES IS A DANGEROUS PASSION, BUT ONE THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. SCENE MEMBERS RECALL THEIR EXPERIENCES WORKING BEHIND THE CURTAINS IN THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES, RISKING JAIL TIME TO COMPETE AT WHO WAS THE FASTEST AT CRACKING
WORDS BY DAMIANO GERLI
Back in the Eighties, many would buy a new game after reading about it in mags like Crash or Zzap!64. But that was not all: perhaps you called your friend to swap floppies. Or you visited your favourite BBS to check what new games were available. It wasn’t all fun, though. Groups such as Razor 1911, Fairlight, Paradox and THG were infamous for cracking games on the C64, Amiga and PC, often on the very same day of release. They were working day and night, risking jail to crack games.
Except for later endeavours such as Twilight or Crazy Bytes, in the Eighties and early Nineties groups were working only for the thrill and fun of the challenge. The first cracked games began appearing in the early Eighties, often signed with the nickname of the ‘artist’. Soon, crackers began to work together in groups, since that made it easier to access original releases and find people who could get the job done as quickly as possible.
“Sometimes it was about the quality of a release, but most times it was all about being the first to release a cracked game,” remembers Pontus Berg, an early member of Fairlight. Pontus lived in a small city outside Lund, Sweden. In the early Eighties, it was not easy for him to access new releases of Commodore 64 games. “The first time I played a cracked game, I saw that it bore a signature and that made me want to join too,” Pontus says, mentioning a friend of a friend who already had his own cracking group that he soon joined. “I really wanted to see how the code of a game worked. I dedicated all my waking hours to it: reading books, looking at machine code monitors. It was my full-on passion.”
Pontus joined Fairlight in late-1988, mentioning it as a lucky break, as there wasn’t much competition on the scene. “I was still getting originals via post, sending them back after cracking. Before the BBS, we tried to crunch files as much as possible in order to fit the content of a disk on tape. But that changed with the arrival of the modem and the BBS, after that the scene grew pretty fast.” He comments how, in a way, the pyramid grew under his feet during his time at Fairlight.