Arrr!!!  Piracy!  From emulation to cold hard torrenting,
It’s always been a touchy subject within the video game industry.
Though, as illegal as piracy is, there have
been several occurrences throughout history,
where it’s ironically helped people.
So, this episode, I take a look at these cases
of constructive copying,
these positions of productive plundering,
and these bouts of beneficial bootlegging, as I say…
But, Hello You!
I’m Guru Larry and I welcome you to Fact
Hunt:
5 Times Piracy HELPED the video game industry.
But, before we start, don’t forget to click
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Fact Hunt episodes!
And away we go!!!
Street Fighter II is without doubt THE most
influential fighting game of all time.
You couldn’t step into an arcade in the
early ‘90s without your lugholes being swarmed
by a million hadokens from their numerous
machines.
And even to this day, you’re guaranteed
to find at least one in a dark corner
of these truant infested, sticky carpeted sweat holes.
However, with 1992 emanating fierce competition
with brawlers such as Midway’s Mortal Kombat on the horizon,
Capcom tried to keep interest
in Street Fighter up
by releasing a Champion Edition of the game.
However, with the exception of playable bosses
and the ability to have Mirror Matches,
it was essentially the exact same game.
Capcom had sadly ingrained into themselves
the mentality of “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it"
and were adamant about not changing… Well,  Anything in their beloved beat em' up.
And that’s where the pirates sailed ashore...
Seeing there was still high demand for the game, and hardcore fans wanting a new challenge,
Chinese bootleggers,
Hung Hsi thought why not make some money out of this popular fighter,
and at the same time appeal to the hardcore
frustrated with the lack of changes?  And thus
Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition was born,
named by fans after the bizarre colours displayed
on the title screen's logo.
Rainbow Edition was not only faster than
the original, something fans had been demanding
from Capcom for years, but also gave you the
ability to pull off moves mid-air,
and even change characters mid-match.
Rainbow Edition also balanced a lot of over-powered
moves
that plagued previous iterations of Street Fighter II.
Granted, most of the counter-balances were
ridiculous, but surprisingly Rainbow Edition
was the first ever fighting game to actually
be balanced.
So with fans loving the new features to this
unofficial bootleg,
Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition was a smash hit!
Of course, Capcom were fuming that a bootleg
of the game was outselling their own official version,
more so, players were preferring
it to THEIR release.
So, Capcom quickly put out a third edition
of Street Fighter II which featured faster gameplay,
more balanced characters, and even
lifted a lot of the new aerial special moves
from the Rainbow Edition, releasing the game that
December as Street Fighter II: Turbo Hyper Fighting.
Despite being rushed out the door in less
than six months, Turbo Hyper Fighting had
far better balancing than later releases of
the game,
In fact, some of the imbalances crept back in to Hyper Fighting’s follow up.
Capcom would go on to make a billion more
updates to Street Fighter II,
Including Super Street Fighter II, which was ultimately a
response to curb the huge chunk of sales
Mortal Kombat had taken from them.
Super Street Fighter II was also the first
game to feature Capcom’s infamous “suicide battery",
a sneaky way to assure no one
made bootleg “Rainbow Editions” of this iteration.
There’s even rumours the over the top action
of Rainbow Edition was the main inspiration
for Capcom’s later Marvel Vs. Capcom series.
But Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition gave
the world the notion that fighting games
need to be balanced over time, and while this is
commonplace today with regular update patches,
the concept of putting up with unbalanced
fighting games was finally put to rest,
and all thanks to annoying Capcom with a ridiculous
bootleg copy.
Wonderboy in Monster Land was a major shift
in the franchise, No longer was he a half-naked
cave man, lobbing hatchets at oversized snails
and doing "Doki Doki Panics" with Adventure Island,
this new title made him the diaper
fetish star of an action platform RPG,
quite a novel genre for the arcade and ultimately
spawning an entire new franchise…
...Which also got Doki Doki Panicked.
Now, hang on Larry, the franchise is called
the "Monster World" series.
Not Monster Land…
What’s all going on there me-laddo?
Well, the game is officially titled both Super
Wonder Boy and Super Wonder Boy: Monster World
in Japan, and that’s really where the IP
should have remained…
But the thing is Wonderboy in Monster Land
WAS released arcades outside of Japan…
Just never officially.
If you’ve ever seen it in an arcade in your
neck of the woods, it was 100% a bootleg copy,
the pirates did everything, from translating
the game into English (albeit rather badly),
to giving the game it’s slightly mistranslated
new name.
However, the bootleg version had become SO
well-known in arcades, that when Sega came
to release the Master System port in the US
and Europe, they kept the pirate version’s
name as it was so well recognised with gamers,
and have continued to use it, even to this day,
as evident with the recent Nintendo Switch
release.
So pirates’ inadvertently promoted and made
popular a game Sega had no intention of releasing
in the West originally.
As an interesting side note, the bootleg arcade
version was SO popular, Activision’s UK
division picked up the rights to make ports
for British home computers.
However, they had to license theirs off Sega
of Japan, so called their version a mixture
of both titles, “Super Wonder Boy in Monster
Land”.
(Activision even included the poor English
grammar for added authenticity) Sega Japan
must have been completely baffled why a British
publisher would want to port a Japanese only RPG.
Also, Sega named the fourth game in the series,
Wonder Boy in Monster World in the West,
making the whole ordeal even MORE confusing.
As bad as piracy is, going full force against
it with DRM (Digital Rights Managment) can be just as bad, and ultimately
only hurts honest gamers, such as the case with
our next title: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
When Ubisoft released an update for the game,
they sneakily added a piece of no-CD anti-piracy
software, which constantly checks that the
disc is still in the CD drive while playing.
No disc, no play.
Sounds simple enough right?
Well, of course not, it wouldn’t be on this
bloomin’ list if it was.
You see, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was released
at a time when digital downloads were just
becoming a thing, and with Ubisoft toying
with the idea of distributing their titles
through IGN’s pre-Steam, Direct-2-Drive
service, they thought they were onto a gold mine!
However, Ubisoft are as neurotic as they are
incompetent, as they patched both the digital
AND physical editions with the exact same
No-CD update, which, while begrudgingly fine
for people who owned the disc version, No one
who bought a digital copy could play the begger anymore.
Even worse, was that the DRM patch was SO good,
Ubisoft couldn’t un-patch it for the digital
owners, no matter what they did to fix the
issue, they’d only make matters worse, to
the point the anti-piracy code embedded itself
into Windows own software, so even a complete
delete and reinstall of the entire game wouldn’t
resolve the problem.
So, as a final resort, Ubisoft went onto crack
site, Game Copy World, stole their crack,
which let you play the game without a disc,
and released THAT as an official patch to the game!
They never even bothered removing the crackers
credits in the patch.
So, In other words, Ubisoft gave you the ability
to pirate the game, by giving you a patch
that stopped them, from stopping you, from
pirating the game.
Talk about irony!
As with Ubisoft two years prior, assuming
that the PC gaming market would forever be
disc based is a little naïve in hindsight,
especially after the meteoric rise of Steam
completely destroyed that notion.
Such is the case with our next game, Max Payne 2.
In 2010, Rockstar Games discovered Steam could
be a quick and easy way to squeeze some extra
pennies out of their older titles, so the
house that built GTA immediately slapped a
pile of their back catalogue onto Valve’s
booming platform.
However, the problem with Max Payne 2 was
Rockstar originally assuming it would only
ever exist as a disc based title, as evident
by them heavily encrypted the game with No-CD
anti-piracy measure, So putting a title where
you needed a CD to play on a digital distribution
service would have been impossible.
But what to do?
Rockstar didn’t want a gaping “angry widowed
cop”-shaped hole in their back catalogue,
but at the same time, they couldn’t be aused
to pay someone to go back to an eight-year-old
game and remove the offending anti-piracy
measures.
So, in their infinite wisdom, they simply
ripped their own game from a piracy site that
had a No-CD crack added, and released THAT
as the official release.
Yup, Rockstar made an illegal pirated copy,
the official game!
Unfortunately, in Rockstar’s utter laziness,
they hadn’t bothered deleting the cracking
team, Myth’s credits from the games code,
and were immediately called out on their rather
embarrassing bout of apathy.
However, if you’re thinking this story ends
with Rockstar saving face and finally paying
someone to remove the anti-piracy measures
in an update, you’ll be surely mistaken.
Nope, Rockstar just dug into their archives
for an unfinished copy of the game, and replaced
the offending cracked version with that one.
So, no more crack team credits in code hardly
anyone saw or even knew existed,
in favour of a buggy, incomplete game instead.
Wow, you really know how to spoil us Rockstar!!!
Now, this is such a big story, that I’m
surprised I’ve never mentioned it before
in a Fact Hunt (though I do mention it in
the Fact Hunt Book) (Link in the description ^_-)
but, Ms. Pac-Man is the first ever female protagonist in video gaming,
and she owes her entire existence down to
a group of MIT dropouts trying to profit off
her husband.
If you’ve never heard the story before,
the officially unofficial follow up started
out as an enhancement mod to the original
Pac-Man arcade game, by the name of Crazy Otto,
created to entice arcade owners of a
cheap way to refresh Pac-Man, without having
to buy a whole new board, as the game had
started to lost traction by then.
However, while making Crazy Otto, the developer,
General Computer Corporation were sued by
Atari for making illegal mods of THEIR arcade
games, however, Atari realizing they didn’t
have a leg to stand on and dropping the case,
gave General Computers the confidence to approach
Pac-Man’s US distributor, Midway and tell
them, “Atari dropped their lawsuit against us,
so we’re going to release a kit for
your game, Pac-Man”.
But, in a bizarre case of irony, Midway couldn’t
have been happier, as they were desperate to
capitalize on Pac-Man’s huge success with
a sequel, but with Pac-Man’s original creators,
Namco dragging their heels on the notion,
they offered to buy Crazy Otto off General Computers outright.
Midway then simply changed Otto to a female
Pac-Person, as they noticed a huge amount
of players were actually girls, and release
it on the market as Ms. Pac-Man, calling her
"Ms." Not for any sort of progressive feminist
points, but simply because it was easier to
roll of the tongue than Miss or Mrs.
Now, if you’re thinking “Actually Larry,
it can’t be a pirated game as Crazy Otto
was never officially released”, And you’d
be "technically" correct, However, while Namco
WERE aware of Ms. Pac-Man’s development,
and Midway had forwarded character designs
to Pac-Man’s creator, Masaya Nakamura for approval,
Namco themselves never officially
gave permission to Midway to create or release
the game, and more so turned a blind eye to
the project, rather than biting the hand that
feeds them by taking their highly profitable US
distributor to court.
This does explain why Namco have been so reluctant
to publish Ms. Pac-Man in Japan.
In fact, they’ve only just obtained the
rights to Ms. Pac-Man in 2010, when Midway
declared bankruptcy, and even now they only
own 50% of those rights, with the other half
in legal limbo between General Computers,
and AtGames trying to poach the rights off
them in a huge litagatious mess.
But, that’s for a future episode.
So, Ms. Pac-Man is an unofficial mod, turned
into a legally dubious sequel, which ultimately
gave way for the first ever female video game
character.
Gaming can get quite complicated sometimes,
can’t it?
Subtitles provided by: Larry Bundy Jr.  (Give me a shout if anyone ever reads these subtitles ^_^)
