It's not like the rips of old, that shit could be genuinely impressive sometimes. There would be addons but they had strict guidelines as well.
I don't remember the final filesize but fortunately I have the NFO. The rip of Rune was 59x2.88MB in size, so 170MB. Released 8 days before the official release. They got the size down from a full CD by optimizing the textures(maybe audio as well), they looked identical, with the added benefit of a smaller install footprint and the game actually ran faster which lowered the system requirements.
One other superior crack/rip was the release of SiN. The release version had a bug where even if it was fully installed from the CD it would still read level data from the CD and making level transitions horrible.
This was in 1998 and patches weren't forced down your steam pipe like now, you had to seek them out on their support page. I bought the game at release and pirated it early(I often did that), never knew there was any problems with it at the time. No problem with the pirated versions.
The RTM/gold versions of Master of Orion 3 and Arcanum both released months in advance and both studios swore up and down that they were betas and everything that was shit and broken would be fixed for release. Nah, never happened, the released version were identical on a byte-by-byte level.
Best pirate experience was playing Black&White early and after a long session one of the villagers got possessed by a dev(that game had so much weird Molyneux-style unused online functionality) then came up to me, introduced himself and asked me how I could possibly play the game this early if I had actually bought it. I told him the truth, I had it on pre-order and had been hyped since they started their dev-diary in PC-Gamer and I didn't want to wait 5 days more. He said something like "alright, I hope that's true" and disappeared. There was a couple of more chit-chat lines in between, if it was a bot it was a very good one.
I was actually going to cancel my preorder, didn't like the game very much, but he guilted me into keeping it.