Fuck Jewtendo. Charging full price for NES/SNES games from 30 years ago and requiring you to re-purchase them on every new console, pay-2-win bullshit and exclusive content locked behind Amiibos, overpriced peripherals with shittier quality than knockoffs I can get off Shein for 1/4 the price when they break (which they will), infinite shovelware of the worst kind (up to the point of having the actual brass balls to charge $20 for fucking Solitaire in the eShop in year of our Lord 2025), etc aren't printing them enough money?
Until relatively recently I was the type of sometimes-pirate that would purchase a game to use the online features on console if I liked it enough. My patience with Nintendo was wearing thin for a while but fucking with people who buy used Switch games, finding the coders writing open source Nintendo emulators (that don't even include any software or the firmware/prodkeys needed to work) and stapling their nutsacks to the wall when they never made a dime, and harassing people who make free fangames and mods (that are usually just downloaded as patches which themselves contain only original content) managed to thoroughly piss me off. Not only do I now refuse altogether to play any Nintendo games I can't pirate, but anytime I want to pirate any game period, I make a point of checking if the game has ever been ported to a Nintendo console, and if it has, I go out of my way to pirate that version specifically. And you bet your ass I seed my torrents. I'd argue I'm still being less of a petty bitch than Jewtendo spending millions to fuck with hobbyists. Get bent, you sleazy kikes.
Its 1000x easier today, you have entire subreddits (where zoomers live) telling you where to go. You also have repackers. Only thing confusing about piracy today is if you are a mobile fag and dealing with cracking APKs; I doubt most zoomers can install and patch revanced. They also don't have to look for no cd cracks.
It's more complicated, but not exactly more difficult. All the retard-friendly guides that do most of the work for you are great, and the sheer variety of obtainable content is far beyond what 90s or even early 00s me could've imagined.
However...
I didn't have to worry about fumbling around Russian language websites, exhaustively testing for malware (cracks/keygens consistently throwing false positives makes this especially annoying), fiddling around with advanced graphics settings for game emulators using trial and error to see if I can stop crashes or make it not perform like shit, running into dozens of dead ends after shit has been nuked off every DDL site, guessing which "download" button is real and which will shove a remote access trojan up your ass, trying to blindly perform whatever arcane voodoo ritual that sometimes gets 1fichier to fucking work, waiting forever for the 1 torrent seeder to log the fuck back in, etc back then, either. Far more straightforward to pop in a cassette tape and sit around waiting to press "record" when the right song came on the radio and (hoping the DJ didn't yell retard catchphrases over too much of the beginning), buy a second VCR to copy rented VHS tapes basically the same way, or smuggle a camcorder into a movie theater and sell copies made with your dual-VCR setup. The only obstacle was the splashscreen at the beginning where the FBI tells you not to.
I'm not quite enough of an old fuck to remember this, but apparently pirates used to copy vinyl records by pouring silicone over a real record and popping it out once dry to create a mold, then filling it with wax or resin. Once that dried, you'd pop it out, trim off the excess, stick on a homemade label, and you'd have a playable copy. Depending on how good you were at this, sound quality could range anywhere from pretty close to total dogshit. Apparently 8 track piracy was a huge problem because it wasn't that hard to do en masse and you could find them at just about any flea market, convenience store, or truck stop but I don't know anything else about it. I'd have to ask my dad.
Edit: Any good general-purpose paywall bypassing scripts for articles (not specifically academic ones, just stuff like news, recipes, tech, and whatever)? bypass-paywall-clean is kill. For a while it was still available off some .ru github alternative but I can't even find that anymore either.
