We’d never had consoles in my family. They didn’t make much sense when we had a computer - which could do applications (and I suppose also run pirated games, which was almost unheard of for consoles).
Then the playstation came along. Not only was it vastly more powerful than any computer I could hope to own, within a relatively short space of time it could be chipped. I remember early on there was some complex process involving the inner ink-filled part of a plastic Biro, which had to be braced to trick the box into thinking the CD drive was closed. The PS would be booted off a genuine disc and then hot-swapped for a pirate. I can’t remember the exact process because reliable chips came along that just bypassed the entire process perfectly and reliably.
I feel like this is the point where piracy became mainstream, and modding became commercially viable. Chipping Playstations wasn’t illegal (and still isn’t), so people were advertising completely openly. You’d drop your PS off to a guy, he’d chip it and you’d collect it. To this day I don’t know what was involved but I’d guess it was soldering a few wires onto the appropriate points on the motherboard. There was always a fear that a PS could be destroyed in the process but it was a gamble that all my poorer friends were willing to make. An investment of £50 in chipping brought the cost of games down from £40 to £5, or even lower in bulk.
At the same time, pirates were seeing the cost of blank CDs drop to 10p each, CD burners plummeted in price (but not enough for consumer use, and even then copying a PS game wasn’t completely simple), and finally there was a mass-market product that could be reliably copied and which had serious value. Before this the most profitable things to be pirated were VHS videos, which were about £14 and the copies were renowned for being shit. Or music CDs, which were about £12 for an album - but no-one wanted to pay £5 for a CD when you could tape someone else’s or off the radio. But Playstation games were about £30-45 in the shops if I recall correctly. I think towards about 1999 we were buying 4 games for £10.
The creation of a market in Playstation games also made it easier to find PC CDs. More people had computers, and it wasn’t any more effort to stuff a few Blobbies into a holdall full of games.
We had about 30 or 40 Playstation games, including Tomb Raider and GTA which I’ve bought (and hardly played) on almost every platform I’ve owned since I’ve had money. Games may have been heavily pirated at the time. but a fan is a fan, and people like me now have sufficient income to buy sequels and remakes that pay off that original gold GTA disk many times over.
This was when piracy became a criminal enterprise, rather than something enthusiasts were doing for a bit of cash. Initially CDs were openly sold and displayed at all markets and car boot sales around Manchester. Eventually the police and trading standards rounded up a few people and the council-run markets banned any sort of pirated (or ‘backup’) CDs. The odd rogue would have a bag full of CDs for regulars in the back of his car, but the bulk of the trade moved to privately-owned markets, and the streets around bigger markets and car boot sales.
On the streets, teams would set up pasting-tables and display their wares, restocking from a hold-all bag. The more organised employed a look-out with a walky-talky at the top of the road. One car boot sale had a perfect location on an industrial estate with only one point of entry that was easily observed. Occasionally there would be a scramble and everyone would be legging it in every direction - I only saw this twice. Some weekends it’d be a ghost-town because everyone had been rounded up (or thought a rounding up was imminent).
Meanwhile, one market in Manchester deserves special mention for just not giving a fuck. Grey Mare Lane Market which was still running until a couple of years ago, was a shanty town of hand-built stalls, made from rotten plywood and various tarpaulins, seemingly held upright by rusty barbed wire and the occasional nail. The ground was largely mud, interspersed with some concrete slabs. I loved it then, and I love it now. Every Saturday, and on two or three days in the week, it’d be open for second-hand electricals, fresh fruit and veg, knock-off clothing, fake perfume and aftershave, various bits of furniture, and Manchester’s widest range of pirate CDs. The closest building to the market was Grey Mare Lane Police Station, one of the biggest police stations in the city. I think the reason pirate CDs seemed to survive was that there was so much other illegal stuff going on to buffer them.
By the time the police had arrested all the guys selling smuggled cigarettes out of bags, the vans were full and everyone else had disappeared over the back wall.
