avast!

Friendships betrayed, ripped bodices, redemption and misery. You’ll find it all here this week as we stand by to repel boarders. Yes, it’s the piracy issue.

Leading the charge of the right brigade is Yak, here to explain why your greed means that his sheep go hungry. You cruel bastard. Cubit, meanwhile, reluctantly dons his black hat and explains how he single-handedly saved the videogame industry through piracy.

Fuseball applies his considerable mathematical talents as he quantifies exactly why MAME, quite possibly the single largest act of videogame piracy in history, is a work of staggering genius.

Elsewhere TMUK and Ahchay offer two very different tales of profit through playground piracy while PaulEMoz waxes lyrical about some little yellow and black tape boxes. Meanwhile Cippy remembers how Pole Position helped to stop his cheating ways.

Okay, I lied about the bodices, but if Keira Knightley’s agent is reading then we can probably shoehorn one in somewhere…

behind!

Get your Orignial Gaiming Spearit here, just as good as the real thing…

Piracy is evil, says Yak

No it’s not – it will save us all says Cubit

Betrayed by Manic Miner - it's Ahchay!

Run to the hills, TMUK gets Doomed

Pole reversal - Cippy takes the lead

PaulEMoz gets nostalgic over Boots C15 tapes

REVISITED: MameMeister recalls his local Mr Big

Fuseball does the MAME maths

Penzance, yesterday (pirates not pictured).

Thanks this week to everyone who helped us (with PC parts) to get back up and running. Thanks too to the nice game-publisher PR lady who invited The Original Rodent to one of them there insider-bashes. We're sorry that we said 'no thanks' even though we'd have loved to have played your saucy secret game - think is, we're outsiders and fucking proud of it. But cheers for thinking of us. You can come to our next party - we play games at those too, some of them yours!

Next week: For the love of vectors…

The original rodent, April 30th 2004

top ten…

PIRATED GAMES , by RODENTIA

10. Advance Wars 2 (GBA) - Chinese factories went into pirate cart overload, flooding eBay with conterfeit copies. P'raps Ninty could have considered a budget release for what amounted to nothing more than an update?
9. Half Life 2 (PC) – Four million downloads and, incredibly, no-one has seen it.
8. Galaxian ( Arcade) – Massively ripped off throughout the eighties, and eventually home to all sorts of other bootleg shenanigans. We’ve seen pretty much every early eighties arcade game running on Galaxian hardware.
7. Great Giana Sisters (C64) – mainly because it was pulled from shelves just before release. Fanboy trivia heaven.
6. Leisure Suit Larry (PC) – special virusware edition.
5. Street Fighter II ( Arcade) – That SFII machine you remember so fondly from Uni days? Bootleg.
4. Rescue On Fractalus (Atari 800) – no-one bought software for the Atari did they?
3. Rez (Dreamcast) – everyone has played it. Only koworld actually bought a copy.
2. Zork (PC) – impossible to find in the UK, but it fitted on a single floppy. A pirate's wet dream.
1. Doom (PC) – Nobody bought this until the Ultimate Doom re-re-release prompted a flurry of guilty purchases.

selected previous issues :

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