Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

it would have been like 520 hours to download 500mgb. Assuming it didn't break at some point.

That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites.

mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too.

And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...

If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.

Correct

I got 3kB/sec, or 6 minutes per meg in ‘96. 10 meg an hour wasn’t terrible even I. The U.K. where you paid a penny a minute.

That's why you had a download manager and left the machine running all night.

The common pirated version of Quake was a 20MB pre-release leak that had oodles and oodles of minor differences to the final version. All of the actual levels themselves are playable and completable. The funniest differences are a mean trap that was removed from the final E1M1, and E2M6 still begins with the eponymous oubliette, banished from official releases until 2021 (!).

People were still replacing their 14.4k modems with 28.8s in 1996. I remember seeing the Quake 15 x 1.44 zips on local BBSes, which would've taken at least 3.5 hours over a perfect 14.4 connection so definitely a daunting phone line tie-up for the average kid (I had the CD.)

According to the article: the game was 22MB and only the first 32kB of the .exe were encrypted.

Oh, but that's why you went to the computer lab of your uni - those machines were on a 10mbit LAN and had a decent connection to the internet!

Although you still wouldn't download a CD, simply because... you wouldn't have been able to take it home with you! Hard drives were in many cases smaller than a single CD. Anything more than a few 10s of MBs would have been considered excessive.

Connecting to office LANs and going on the internet was a magical feeling back then. The speed coming from a 56k dialup was jarring. We'd have network games of Quake (rocket jumps included) and watch Real Player versions of grainy South Park early episodes at er, lunch. Good times.

More than the raw speed was the fact that the error checking, buffering, and compression on dialup added anywhere from 150-400ms to your ping RTT. You could disable a lot of it, but results could be mixed depending on the quality of your lines.

>Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun.

compared to that a crack is just a single binary.

Dial-up cost will be discovered later by upset parents, and you already have all your nice pirates games, which you would need to pay upfront with your own pocket money (if that existed).

But in any case physical copy + crack was the best solution at the time.