VIDEO GAMES AS WAREZ

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In the world of the computer underground, warez is a slang term for any software illegally traded online. While some people who trade warez, known as warez traders, specialize in collecting popular applications like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, most warez traders focus on video games. (See Chapter 12 for more on how people download warez from the Internet.)

Newsgroups offer a rich source of video-game warez, because they give warez traders the chance to offer a popular program on a specific date. Warez traders always strive to offer warez the same day or a few days before the official release date of a popular program, and newsgroups give such traders a forum to date-stamp and post their files for everyone to verify. To find Windows games, visit alt.binaries.cd.image.games and alt.binaries.games. To find Macintosh games, visit alt.mac.games. For ROM images of games for the Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox, visit alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox and alt.binaries. cd.image.playstation2.

While newsgroups are great for finding the latest video games, constantly searching different newsgroups to find a particular game can be tedious. As an alternative, many people also use file sharing networks to track down video games, particularly older, but still popular, games that are less likely to appear in newsgroups simply because they’ve been around for so many years. Poke around a file sharing network for specific game titles, such as Sim City or Zoo Tycoon, and you’ll see that the latest video games aren’t at all hard to find (see Figure 13-1).

Figure 13-1: Many file sharing networks offer complete video games for downloading.

To find a website that offers video games, visit your favorite search engine and search for warez games and visit one of the many sites that pop up, such as the warez files site shown in Figure 13-2.

Figure 13-2: Video games are one of the most popular types of pirated programs you can find offered on warez websites.

One site, GameCopyWorld (http://www.gamecopyworld.com), lists servers around the world that provide cracks that allow you to install and play a duplicate of a copy-protected game CD. They provide the “crack” that normally allows a user to play a copied game CD (thereby avoiding the copy protection involved in ISO copies of games). These cracks normally are an executable file that replaces the one that is installed (the modification usually removes the copy-protection check so that the program will not detect a copied CD).

Besides stealing commercial video games, pirates have found another way to steal games: steal the source code. The source code contains the actual instructions that tell a computer what to do. Getting access to a video game’s source code is like getting the recipe to McDonald’s special sauce—once you know how something works, you can duplicate it and sell it yourself, albeit not legally.

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