The history of the warez compilations for PCs

Published in

· 27 Sep 2023

During the 80s and 90s, when the MS DOS operating system dominated the market, there was a huge computer piracy, with the exchange and sale of Floppy Disks, CD-ROMs and later DVD-ROMs containing games and programs. This practice was outright illegal but contributed to the spread of many titles.

Initially floppy disks were mainly used, later joined, around 1994 with the spread of CD-ROM drives, by CDs with collections designed to be however also poured onto floppies for sale. The contents of the CDs were typically made accessible thanks to a special menu (working in the MS-DOS environment) that allows one to easily access to a large number of stored titles, a possibility offered by the fact that the games and programs at that time took up very little space. Nevertheless, using the early compilations often required a long and cumbersome procedure to have the game installed on one's computer.

Beyond the usability aspects, the demand for these compilations was definitely high, mainly due to the fact that the games cost a lot. Initially illegal compilations were scarce and costly: in Italy prices reached 50,000 liras (25 euros) per CD or more. Moreover, their blind-purchase was accompanied by the risk that the titles in the collection were not of adequate quality or complete.

Despite these critical issues, the "market" quickly evolves from "collections" to the creation of true compilations, geared for direct use by the end user and containing all the games and programs released in a given period, typically on a monthly basis. Quickly the operating system of reference became Windows, as well as, within a few years, support change from CDs to DVDs.

The golden three-year period was certainly between 1994 and 1997: during this period compilations were the object of desire of many enthusiasts who thus can have access to a huge software stock at an affordable price. Availability, moreover, was also increased thanks to the rapid spread of CD-ROM burners on the PCs, and the decreasing cost of blank media, which allows anyone to make a copy of a compilation to a friend or, even, create their own.

The first released compilations was SWORD (OldSwod, January 1994)

OldSword

followed by RUNCD (February 1994), which remained the benchmark until 1996, when Twilight burst onto the scene.

RUNCD

To give an idea of the content of these compilations, in November 1995 RUNCD (2 CDs for the modest price of 100,000 lire/50 euros!) contained games and programs so numerous that they would have required 1451 floppies!

As time went on, and before the Windows-interface compilations came out, some compilations, such as the Legacy, began to show the games no longer divided by floppy but directly by name.

The Legacy

Incidentally, the Legacies themselves were "compilations in disguise": not only were the file names neatly renamed so that you could not tell what they were, but if you launched the only executable present, a dialog box would come up asking you to confirm that you were 18+ years old. Answering "yes" would display a gallery of adult images, while accessing the real content required typing in a password (which changed every month): in essence, a pirated compilation disguised as an adult CD.

In addition to compilations that featured the month's new releases, "best of" compilations burst onto the scene, collecting the best of a given pirate compilation series. Others include RUNCD bestof

RunCD bestof

the May 1995 Dutch Flyer (also called "120 games")

The Dutch Flyer

or Nathan

Nathan

With the spread of Windows 95, the structure of compilations changed radically, with a graphical menu for accessing content, and leading to the election of the new "queens" of piracy: the Twilight, which quickly overtake all previos compilations that had dominated in the MS-DOS era.

Twitight for Windows

For the record, it should be noted that Twilight was initially created for MS-DOS, but evolved rapidly after a few issues.

In the late 1990s, the increase in the size of games and programs began to challenge the compilation model: to fix the problem, titles (games in particular) began to be "ripped," that is, non-essential elements such as video and music (sometimes even speech) were removed. However, this does not allow one to fully enjoy the game (or take advantage of graphics libraries supporting photo editing programs, for example), especially since at the time many scenes were made from videos and the music defined the atmosphere of the game.

But not all titles could be "ripped," and their generous size automatically excluded them from compilations.

This phenomenon quickly became the standard for the most emblazoned titles, leading pirates to include in compilations only medium-low quality programs and games that take up little space, alongside a few more important titles. An initial answer to the problem was to have compilations on multiple CDs (up to 4-6), but also multiplying the average purchase expense, followed by the adoption of DVDs which made much more space available (a DVD is basically about 7 times as capacious as a CD). Even with the new availability of space, however, the practice of "ripping" and multi-support compilations was not discontinued; on the contrary, efforts were made to improve its effectiveness to make compilations as dense as possible, and the media of which each release consisted averaged 4.

Despite these shortcomings, pirated compilations for PCs remained popular for another five years (until 2003-2004) after which they were definitively abandoned, both because they were now considered no longer convenient from a quality point of view, but also (and perhaps above all) because of the spread of a faster and more accessible Internet (ADSL) that allowed a complete title to be easily downloaded from internet.

Games and programs in most compilations were in English language (sometimes Dutch, a country from where several successful compilations came), while the "local" ones were small in number and not always of comparable quality. Among the best known were Italight and Italwarez.

Italight

Below is a list of some pirate-compilations, which collectively have covered a very long period of time and have reached a huge number of people, contributing, albeit with all the relevant considerations, to computer literacy: