I grew up in inner-city Manchester in the UK. We were hard-up, but my mum was able to make our limited money stretch incredibly far. I’d guess in about 1990 my mum bought us an Atari ST. It had 512 kb of memory, and a windows-like user interface that I can still remember. It played games, and it could talk to you if you typed in text. The only games I can remember are Damocles and Mean Streets. And my mum loved a game called Little Computer People, which was a sort of cross between a tamagotchi and The Sims, where you looked after a little man in a house the size of your screen. Being 7 or 8, I’m not sure I fully grasped these games, but I did understand that we couldn’t possibly afford to buy them in shops.
This is where I first remember being aware of the term ‘pirate’. Every few months, my mum would buy a few games on 3.5” floppies by post from a guy called Cary who would send a printed stock list with each shipment. I presume she sent a cheque, or possibly by cash. I’m not sure where she found him but probably through an advert in the back of a computer magazine. We were the only people who had an Atari. A friend of the family had an Amiga - that was it.
Some of these games would have been cracked, and would open with a demo screen from some glamorous sounding band of pirates. I remember one called the Medway Brothers. I, too, had a brother so I probably felt some solidarity with them which is why it’s the only name I recall.
I have a vague memory of receiving photocopied sheets of words or codes to look up for piracy checks, though this might have been later on PC. One of these sheets was black with dark red printing to avoid being photocopied. Some games would say “Enter the 3rd word on the second line of page 9”, or would provide the number of a row and a column and you’d have to look up the required number on a grid.
This wasn’t a world of organised crime, it was some man copying floppy discs by hand from his back bedroom in Birmingham. I was too young to know much about the technicalities, but this taught me about concepts like cracks, piracy and a secretive organisation called FAST who might come and lock me and my whole family up at any moment.
