It struck me as I read through the discussion that I no longer bother pirating... well, anything really, but in particular, I no longer bother pirating ROMs, and I really had to think about it to realize when that transition occurred and what prompted the decision. And this is saying something, because let me tell you, I basically spent decades pirating everything. I was the very definition of a digital hoarder. BBSing on the HST in the '90s, Napster and Limewire and Morpheus at the turn, Bittorrent thereafter, and no CTO box ever seemed to have storage options enough.
Thinking back, it was easy to remember when I stopped pirating other things. Law school in 2004 was the end of computer software piracy for me. My entire future depended on me being able to use tools like Microsoft Office with no compromises and no excuses. I was still a PC fellow at the time so there were only a handful of apps I needed, but they were expensive and crucial. I made a decision that I had enjoyed my fun as a computer hobbyist, downloading "LeEt WaReZ" when there was nothing at stake, but my professional career demanded legitimacy, and if I was going to make a living using these tools, I owed their creators, fair and square.
Music and movies lasted slightly longer. Bottom line, I wanted to listen to all the music a few times, and I only wanted to pay for "keepers" among my favorite bands or movies, in the form of my CD and DVD collection. This is a quibble. It wasn't right. In 2008, when Alexandra was born, I decided I wanted to be setting the right example for the kids. By this time I was also a student of Objectivism and I believe in the value of compensating people for the enjoyment they provide me. It didn't hurt that technology was offering a hassle-free content library that worked seamlessly across an ecosystem; 2007 had marked my migration from Windows to OS X, and I celebrated by spending absurd amounts in iTunes. I own proper copies of most of what I consume, I subscribe to services that provide the rest, and if you see a song in my library that I haven't bought one way or the other, odds are it's simply not available at any price, and I stand willing to purchase it if that should change.
My console ROM collecting went on somewhat longer. There haven't been above-board options for most such consumption, as a lot of it is rare or in some cases fully unobtainable legitimately. But ultimately, I turned away from that as well, around the beginning of this decade, and now I remember how that went down.
Essentially, it became pointless to pirate ROMs when the ultimate payoff, entertainment through gameplay, became more readily attainable legitimately than illicitly.
ROM piracy wasn't always emulation, of course. Back in the 1990s, when the Super Nintendo reigned supreme, those who knew where to ask were able to get devices called console copiers. The Super Wild Card and Super UFO were the most popular models at the time. They sat in the cartridge port of a SNES and allowed games to be played from ROM images saved to 1.44MB floppy disks. If you borrowed or rented a game, you could copy the ROM from the cartridge to disk right there on the spot. The largest carts back then took up two or three disks. Later versions had ZIP disk support and ultimately just USB connections so you could leave everything on your PC's hard drive. Years later it got even easier: flash memory cards were big enough to hold everything, and the console copier was superseded by the "flash cart," playing ROMs on the original hardware via a passthrough cartridge as though the original media was being used.
If the above sounds suspiciously like the emulation you already know about, that's not an accident. Emulation grew out of what had begun as simple storage spoofing. Computers at the time couldn't effectively emulate consoles, because you needed a computer of far greater power to run a virtual machine as a subprocess and produce a decent result. But by the end of the decade, reasonably functional software like NESticle and SNES9x and MAME existed that allowed the games to be run on a computer directly. Typically you'd be stuck using keyboard controls or the subpar PC joysticks of the time, but the bottom line was that you could play games without paying for them. Lots of games.
Like typical ROM collectors, at one point I had enough video games stored and ready for play via emulation that I could spend multiple lifetimes doing it and still not reach the end. It was an orgy of plenty that could scarcely have been approximated in human history. The internet is endless content, of course, but this was endless gated content, endless admission to an endless festival. It was easy to see why so many people, including me, found software piracy so appealing. And within a few years, computers could emulate much newer systems with ease.
So I basically had free entertainment forever.
And then, somehow, just like I do with all kinds of things, I let it turn into work.
I don't mean DSG; the store has nothing to do with emulation and won't even carry products that are tailored toward it. I mean that in order to maintain these vast, always-ready catalogs of video games for every system and every variant and every piece of hardware on which they might run, and dodging The Man the entire time doing it, I was using up inordinate amounts of time and attention collecting new release ROM dumps, installing new versions of emulator executables, testing and making sure things still worked, updating and testing firewall software, torrent software, Tor, and everything else, and on and on.
So before long, I realized I was spending more time and effort preparing to play video games for all eternity than I would actually spend just paying for games I wanted to play, and then playing them. Then, later, I could pay for the next game I wanted to play, and so on, lather rinse repeat. And by doing this I could let it be the publisher's problem about making it work properly on my hardware or it needed a new patch or whatever. And that I could do this for the rest of my natural life here on this earth and still not come close to running out of ready and available content. They'll keep making more. And I could do it in the light of day without having to hide behind a grip of IP proxies before navigating over to The Pirate Bay.
And what's more, used retro video games are amazingly affordable. I can pick up systems from the 32-bit era and play some of the best titles around for a pittance. It's such a friendly consumer landscape that I literally make part of my living providing it. I bought a used PS2 just so I could revisit titles like Vandal Hearts and Gran Turismo 4 and Katamari Damashii. I finally had a Sega Master System come in and I'm going to re-enable the hidden FM sound channel and fire up some Phantasy Star for old time's sake. I'm going to savor it.
So at the core of my realization was that: beyond being morally right, consuming video games via legitimate means instead of through ROM piracy was actually the superior experience. So much so that I quickly found my cache of available legitimate content outpacing my ability to consume it, which had been the original attraction of ROMs and emulation.
The above theory is proving out: Right this moment I have more things sitting on my Xbox Live account that I have not played, or haven't touched for more than a few starting levels, than I have games I've played exhaustively, by a ratio of many times over. My Gamerscore has a pile of points from the likes of the Rock Band series and Ori and the Blind Forest, and then a whole bunch of 50/1400 and 0/750 scores from the scads of games I swore I'd get back to when I got around to it. This includes a bunch of retro games that I bought for the convenience of having them on my X-Bone (or the Xbox 360 before it) despite being perfectly capable of playing them in an emulator for the past ten to fifteen years or longer. Same with the Nintendo Virtual Console. I think I've actually purchased Super Metroid and Super Mario 64 at least a dozen times across different media and systems, including Japanese originals, preferred for speed running. We own around 50 physical games at any one time across the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS in disc or card form, and I barely play a fraction of them. (The kids do somewhat better.)
The irony has to be making Nintendo and Microsoft smile. Before, I played games without paying for them. Now I pay for games and I barely (or never) end up playing them.
Oh, and I can't really speed run anymore. In the classic Twilight Zone episode referenced by the article title, Henry Bemis has a post-apocalypse library all to himself, but breaks his glasses and can no longer read. Much the same way, I now have legit access to all the games I care to play, but I am getting older and my nerves are shot. I can't perform the cleanest and most precise moves necessary. I know what to do and when to do it, I can master the run routing, but my hands refuse to obey my brain's commands in real time, so getting onto today's leaderboards is an unrealistic expectation. I enjoy watching the speed runs now, enjoying the achievements of those who are pushing the envelope and playing mistake-free football and entertaining me while they do it. YouTube is changing passive viewing entertainment and this is just one minuscule facet of it.
I still have some flash carts that get used to test hardware more than anything else. My kids mostly want to play Minecraft and that's cloudware like everything else on the leading edge. Ah, the kids. That's the other piece of this equation. My family. My wife who I never have enough free time to spend with, and my kids who I never have the energy to keep up with.
I think about all the time I spent making sure I had the latest bullsh*t JRPG ROMs translation-patched, which I'll grant was back when I was a single idler, and I resent that I don't have that time back now to spend sitting on a tropical beach with Stephanie, listening to the surf and drinking sweet beverages and enjoying the bliss. I think about all the money I spent on adapters and drives and storage and specs and so on to keep this digital library that nobody cared whether I was keeping, and I resent that I don't have that time now to spend hiking through beautiful mountain wilderness with Greg, Evey, and Allie. And it's not just the notion of vast, exotic vacations, either. I'd be delighted just to be able to spend the time teaching my kids to play musical instruments, or watching mystery shows with Steph, or taking the entire crew for a great dinner out, or what have you. It's not too late, but so much time has already elapsed.
And now as my collection of purchased iTunes Media has grown truly massive and the XBL and VC purchased game collections are sufficient to meet the greater share of the our family consumption, let alone the physical media we still own, I find myself in this gradual toboggan ride down where I get onto my computer, poke through the old directories, find a bunch of MKV files of movies I just don't care if I ever find time to watch, and I delete them unseen. Or a bunch of downloaded ISOs for one system or another that I'm just never going to bother trying to burn and modchip and screw with, so let's get those gigabytes back. Or I'll raid the bookshelf for games with a layer of dust on them and just trade them in to the store for resale. I'll probably upset a lot of people from my old #ytsejam days by admitting that I deleted most of the bootleg concert recordings I had collected. I just don't listen to them, and I got tired of curating the library around them. I'm still holding onto my collection of rare music videos and concert videos, since even with the reality of modern YouTube, a lot of it is still not circulating publicly, and if I tried to upload it to YouTube it would get me shut down on copyright strikes. I'll surely find some way to bequeath and offload it all to "the world" eventually and then I can watch on demand the same as everyone else. And sure enough, the amount of time I spend having anything to do with emulation is now essentially zero.
I will never stop loving video games, of course. Unlike tabletop, which I take no joy in right now because of burnout from work, I still find myself able to steal a spare hour and savor Ori or Street Fighter or Metroid or Castlevania. But mostly? I find that there aren't enough hours in the day, or days in the week, or years left in my life, to endlessly tinker with the mechanisms of hoarding illicit content, never mind its appeal to the autism endorphins. Life is just so much better than that. I can have all the fun for a fraction of the effort if I'm willing to fork over some dollars of money to parties that, bottom line, are entitled to that compensation in the first place. It makes piracy as such seem even pettier in hindsight, a pursuit undertaken by the oblivious and entitled gamer/viewer/listener. The Spanish Proverb proves true again: "Take what you want, and pay for it."
I wish I had achieved that epiphany back when I had the time, youth, and health to spare.
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