Fulvio’s Web Cafe

Before starting with my post, I am gonna make a statement, bold as it may be: everyone’s a Pirate.
Yes, you too. I’m saying this for the simple fact that every single person I have met in my life has pirated something, at some point. Heck, even my 55 years old mum got a Renato Zero CD-R. I believe it lies in the roots of the human nature to copy and share information.
This said, I realized today something worrying … does it ever happen to you to hear that old uncle of yours saying: “Heh … at my times, we didnt have this … and we lived well without it.” to which you immediately reply in your head: “Because you don’t know what you’re missing, probably.”
Well, my cousin is going to have his Playstation Portable firmware hacked next week in order to be able to run games downloaded off the Internet.
And i was the one saying: “Heh, at my times we didnt have the internet to copy games.”
Crap, Im getting old.
I still remember it like it was yesterday.
18 years ago, when I had my first pirated game in my hand, there was no internet. I was 12.
It was all based on social skills, it was a matter of who you knew that made you important in the community.
It was actually quite cool, like a real life role playing game.
You met people, you gained reputation with them. They allowed you to copy games from them (after a money contribution of course), and you become more and more important in the community like that.
The more games you had and people you knew, the more important you became.
I remember the head of the pirate community of my area, his name was Diego.
I was introduced to him by my friend Massimiliano, at first we were meeting him together, but after I started to know him well I was meeting him alone as well.
Diego had the luck to have a dad that was a videogame maniac, so he was able to get his hands on every game before everyone else, and he was also a little older than us, I believe he was 14 or 15, which also helped to give him an authoritative status.
He was copying games for a money contribution which we fixed at 1000 lire per disk, media provided by us.
After that, the network of people / friends I was making was growing exponentially, and I got to a point where I was receiving calls from total strangers asking me if I had this or that game.
I remember, I reached the top when I managed to get to know Gino, a professional pirate (he was doing it for a living) that was also the person Diego’s dad was getting all his games from. When a couple of years later I managed to get a game before Diego, and copy it to him, jeez did it feel good. All this might sound scary and crazy now, but at the time it was totally natural.
WE were the internet. The social community we created was the network that made us share stuff, in our case videogames.