

Those were the days!
NES and SNES games fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, and there were piratey disk drive peripherals that you could insert into the cartridge slots on those systems. The peripheral had a cartridge slot on top, so you inserted the cartridge, copied the game to floppy, or floppies, and gave those to your friends, as they gave you their copies. You could rent game cartridges from video stores.
PS1 games you just installed a modchip and then you could play CD-R copies of game disks
PS2 they had the flip top cases, and “magic disc” that was a special disk printed with the “official authentication code” but then ran a program to stop the drive, allowing you to lift up the lid, then press a button to load whatever game was on the CD-R/DVD-R copy.
For PC Games there was the mighty GameCopyWorld that allowed you to patch games to bypass CD/DVD disc checks. If you had the right tools, you could make your own virtual CD, bypassing the risk of viruses from rando downloading.
Even before that, people could write fully working games by hand, and shareware was fully functional before it all became crippleware or nagware.
These days, you can’t play tic-tac-toe without the game connecting to a server, and forcing you to log in after watching 30 minutes of ads, and that’s after you’ve paid your monthly subscription fee.




I used Alcohol 120%, which was based off DaemonTools. Eventually I learned how to make my own “mini disc images” to load on my virtual CD drive, because some little bit on the CD was all the games installed on hard drive were checking for, with regards to copy protection.