This series is dedicated to my friend ‘The Pieman’ who hosted ‘THE P.I.T.S’ BBS in New York City and sadly passed away in 2016. I know his son ‘Blake’ will be reading this sequence of stories with anticipation.
We will never forget you man, you were one of a kind.
Also I would like to say a big thank you to Fabulous Furlough, ex-leader of ‘The Humble Guys’ who helps me fill in the gaps of what happened almost 30 years ago, The Slavelord who has given me a plethora of memories from the early days and to Suicidal Tendencies (@trolleydave) who remembers more about the UK scene than me.
The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) is a continuation of my previous series, The Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops.
I was once known as 'Bryn Rogers', a member of THG (The Humble Guys).
Other Articles in this Series:
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part One
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Two
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Three
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Four
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Five
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Six
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Seven
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eight
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Nine
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Ten
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eleven
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twelve
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Thirteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Fourteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Fifteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Sixteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Seventeen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Eighteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Nineteen
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty One
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty-Two
Software Piracy Chronicles of Slobberchops (The THG Years) – Part Twenty Three
Some of these old warez memorabilia sites are full of shit. I mean it’s great that all the history is on the internet (that didn’t exist then), but they could try and get the facts right.
The Demon’s Forge was closed but The Humble Guys were still open for business..., barely.
The America contingent had almost all moved on to other things in life and so THG Europe (more UK), appeared to be the last bastion.
I have been trying to source some of the NFO releases that I managed to pick up from my supplier, the bloke in Burnley, Lancashire who was the assistant manager of an unnamed computer store.
Source
…’Mr Bond was not 007 with a license to kill, more a license to lend me warez but he did look a little like a stereotypical Bond’…
Mr Bond (my supplier) was great. He called me when the new stuff arrived and I would pick it up on the promise it was returned in a couple of days.
European releases tended to be more of the arcade type of games, unlike the American counterparts of RPG’s and sprawling adventures. I preferred the latter types but would take what I could get.
One such game was 'JimPower: The Lost Dimension'. As far as I remember it was supplied on a single 1.44Mb floppy disk, and on firing it up realised there was some protection lurking in there.
By the fall of 1993, I was unemployed after telling my previous company that I was not willing to move into their sales department, as I would then be working in close proximity to my ex-psychopathic girlfriend.
Their response was predictably non-sympathetic and so I told them to fuck off and stormed out after four years.
Hindsight tells me it was a bad idea, having a mortgage to pay for a house I paid far too much for and an equally psychotic neighbour who tried to demolish my front door screaming, ‘'...COME OUT YER SOFT BASTARD'...’ when I reported him for having a dog that constantly barked all day.
Source
Fortunately, the door held or I would not be now telling you this woeful tale.
At least I had the freedom of getting the warez quickly and not tied down to non-office hours. Priorities had to come into play, but at a consequence.
JROK was working during the day; Fabulous Furlough (@fabulousfurlough) was asleep snoring due to the time zone differences which left me jumping about like a mad bastard with a non-releasable copy of JimPower.
I called up Slurpy Man (@steddyman) at work and asked if he could leech the uncracked JimPower from The Demon’s Forge and get it cracked pronto (this was the same place that I previously worked).
His reward was membership of THG. I don't think he was particularly bothered.
My memory may be failing me but I think that was how it was done. This time he managed to get it cracked. The .NFO says INT13. I’m sure Slurpy Man (@steddyman) will remember it.
A not so good release was WizKid which I have to say I fucked up royally. In 1993 there were no virtual machines and one could get the sense of security that a game was working when it was in fact, still protected.
I do remember the uproar on uploading a protected WizKid to Unlawful Entry (The TDT World HQ) with plenty of scorn from that group. It was nothing new, just look at the NFO files from the era.
Once it would have made THG look bad but was barely anyone bothered by then, it was water off a ducks back.
JROK fixed it and added some similar disrespect to whoever provided the protection for WizKid. A one byte crack fixed it.
By the time JROK had got out of bed to crack this (he was hard to contact at times), TDT had their working and cracked version all over the scene.
Well, we all make fuckups sometimes.
To be continued...
All images have been cited and are under the category 'Labelled for Reuse' or are in the public domain.
Small Pirate Icon Source
.NFO files courtesy of the .NFO libraries at https://defacto2.net
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.