Piracy and games in Asia

e:\>_
Asian gaming histories e-zine | Issue 1 | Aug 2014
Piracy and games in Asia
edited by Krish Raghav
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CONTENTS
Editorial: Towards a working theory of piracy
and games in Asia Krish Raghav
04
Gaming with Chinese characteristics: Two views
from the Middle Kingdom
“ZnyRock” and Junliang Huang
(translated by Chanchan Wang, Ann Luo & Xiao Zhang)
06
Between the causeway: Piracy and games in 90s
Singapore
Aron Gan
12
There and back again: Discovering videogames
in Aurangabad, India
Kunal Joshi
17
A continent of gaming stories: despatches from
Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines
Quang Nguyen, Faizan Rafi Hashmi
and Maria Carmencita Morales
21
August 2014 | http://krishcat.com/edrive | Twitter: @krishraghav
cover photograph by Karthik Krishnaswamy (madraseye.tumblr.com)
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The e:\>_ Manifesto
Gaming histories from Asia are not
partial, provincial, belated or ‘emerging’
For over two decades, large parts of the Asian continent were outside the world’s formal
gaming markets. But that doesn’t mean games weren’t being played, or made, or modded.
‘Developing’ Asia had its own unique gaming vernacular - a grey market and games culture defined by a constant sense of improvisation, clever innovation, and bending games
software and hardware to one’s own will.
e:\>_ is about chronicling these experiences. We’re interested in the culture of playing
videogames in countries across Asia, and stories about relationships and communities that
spring up around them. Insightful writing on videogames in Asia is scarce, and often hamstrung by cliché, stereotype and harmful exoticisation. We’re trying to fix that.
Find us at http://krishcat.com/edrive. We’d love to hear from you.
e:\>_ is published on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License. More information online: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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EDITORIAL
Towards a Working Theory
of Piracy and Games in Asia
Kids at a street-side arcade in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo by Karthik Krishnaswamy (http://madraseye.tumblr.com)
If there is a common language to gaming across the Asian
continent, it is that of access to pirated games.
While the specifics of videogame culture vary wildly between countries across the continent, many are probably intimately familiar with dabbling in ‘hacked’ consoles, choosing cheap CDs from a roadside shop, and copying the files from the ‘CRACK’ folder into
your installation directory. The language of faked, modded, improvised, hacked, cracked,
cloned and copied games is integral to Asia’s gaming vernacular.
Most countries in Asia were outside the world’s ‘formal’ gaming industry, and pirated
games often the only means of access to the medium. Many of these grey markets and
structures of discovery exist to this day, and their improvised modes of operation are
part of what make Asian gaming histories so unique.
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The question this issue hopes to ask is:
What does it mean to experience two decades of games through the
interlocking systems, practices and dynamics of what we dub ‘piracy’?
‘Piracy’ here could refer to software as well as hardware, and spaces both physical (markets, cyber cafes, schools) and psychological that mediate the discovery and commercial
exchange of games.
Aron Gan, from Singapore, unpacks the psychological landscape of grey markets and
access to cheap, pirated games. Consuming pirated games, he argues, was just as much
about social convention, and ‘fitting in’, as it was about saving money (Page 12).
Junliang Huang and “ZnYRock” write about China’s unique journey to gaming ‘modernity’, and how a top-down crackdown drove games culture underground. In 1990s China,
piracy becomes an additional charge to level at gamers, part of a moral panic over what
the government calls ‘electronic heroin’ (Page 6).
Kunal Joshi writes about piracy in a small Indian city (Page 17), and how gaming histories are remixed, mashed up and re-arranged by gamers cut-off from a formal global
market and community. And we get refracted views of different histories, different timelines, through despatches from Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines (Page 21).
Joshi once believed that The Legend of Zelda was a straight rip-off of a movie tie-in game
he’d played earlier called Willow. I once believed that an obscure 3d adventure game
called Largo Winch: Empire Under Threat was the defining game of the early 2000s.
Quang Nguyen, from Hanoi, believed that Chocobo Racing was Sony’s premier racing
game IP. Junliang Huang tells us that the only ‘Battlefield’ Chinese gamers knew before
the current one was an RPG based on a Chinese historical classic, The Romance of the
Three Kingdoms.
These alternate viewpoints aren’t just amusing anecdotes to underscore the quaint ‘provinciality’ of Asian gaming histories. They are perspectives that emerged from particular, complete structures of play and discovery. They are windows into different ways of
looking at games - at what they mean, where they came from, and the million directions
they could go in the future.
Krish Raghav is a comic book artist, games critic and policy analyst in Singapore. He shares a hometown
with Dhalsim from Street Fighter, but cannot shoot fireballs from his face. He writes at http://krishcat.com
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gaming with chinese
characteristics
two views from the middle kingdom
An internet cafe, or ‘网吧‘ in Turpan, China. Photo by Tom Thai (https://www.flickr.com/photos/eviltomthai/3579663737/)
PARADISE LOST: CHINA’S UNDERGROUND ARCADES
by ZnYRock, translated by Ann Luo and Xiao Zhang
I
T
he development path of China’s video game industry is quite unique compared to
other Asian countries. In the 1980s, video games entered the Chinese market for
the first time, pitched as an ‘entertainment lifestyle.’ Some open-minded young
people became its first batch of followers - the first Chinese gamers. Back then, most
games came from East Asia, especially Japan.
I group myself into the ‘second generation’ of videogame players in China - my father
played video game earlier than me. The first video game I played was Battle City on the
Nintendo Famicom, a console my father bought. It was developed by Namco and hit the
market in 1990.
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The reason my father’s generation was exposed to video games was that he travelled on
business, and his trips took him to relatively developed Chinese cities like Shenzhen and
Beijing. It was during one of these Beijing trips that he picked up an original Famicom, or
what Chinese gamers called ‘红白机’, or the ‘Red and White Machine.’
Here I should elaborate on the two kinds of consoles you could buy in China - the standard
Famicom (hacked or original), and the “FC machine”. The FC machine was a hacked Famicom, sold as an integrated “learning device”with a standard PC keyboard and a Famicom
cartridge slot. It was a local innovation catering to Chinese game players, but its compatibility with Famicom cartridges was not authorized by Nintendo. In other words, it was a
copycat, a infringing product. But its low price was more acceptable for Chinese families
back then, so it became quite popular, and it is this copycat than nurtured the second generation of game players in China.
A Chinese “FC Machine” with game cartridges.
A ‘Red and White Machine.’ Photo from 163.com
It’s important to know that back then, most Chinese families even didn’t have a TV set.
I lived in a so-called second-tier city, so there was also no way for my father to get new
games or software for his new purchase. So there was no material foundation for the
growth of the video game industry in China.
However, by the time I started playing games, the TV was a common home appliance, and
many began to upgrade their black-and-white TV to colour ones. So in that sense I was
lucky to be born some time after the Chinese Reform-and-Opening period. My father was
a teacher, and only well-educated people who grew up in this developmental period of
China could accept the concept of video games as a medium to consume and as a form of
entertainment. No videogames were localized, so some knowledge of English or Japanese
was necessary.
Even so, since many games weren’t really text heavy, even children could easily find a way
to enjoy the games, and put their own spin on the stories within. At that period, Japanese
games ruled the market, and most of the popular games were action side-scrollers like
Contra. Then, in the early to mid-1990s, Chinese game players were introduced into a new
world - the videogame arcade.
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II
Not long after arcades began to sprout up across cities in China, a government campaign
to eliminate pornography and illegal publications swept through China.
The media had widely reported violent crimes committed by teenagers, who were reportedly driven by their addiction to “electronic games” in these arcades. The general public
responded to video gaming culture with strong negativity. The public opinion dubbed
video games as “electronic heroin”. This led to the systematic shutting down and “elimination” of arcades country-wide. This backlash wasn’t just in China. Japan, too, had tried
to oppose the popularity of arcades by invoking a moral panic. Both China and Japan had
taken similar kinds of measures but somehow, in Japan, the gaming industry grew exponentially afterwards. Japan’s campaign to eliminate video gaming culture wasn’t quite as
debilitating as China’s.
Even so, a strong demand for electronic games and video games still remained. The neighbourhood arcades went underground, commonly known as 包机厅, or “Bāojītīng” These
small-scale underground arcades were usually hidden in alleys and operated illegally, so
to speak. But they were paradise for gamers. A large number of video game enthusiasts
gathered there. The operators usually provided a hacked console, a small TV screen and
gaming software. They charged an hourly rate at around 3 yuan. Game players could request for different games to be installed within the hours they paid for the services. And
those games were mostly pirated versions. Bāojītīng became a gathering place for a new
generation of video game players, where you could meet like-minded players to exchange
techniques and ideas. They were China’s earliest ‘speedrunners’ and self-styled ‘pro gamers.’
But because of these semi-legal operations lasting for a prolonged period of time (China’s
long-standing ban on the sale of gaming consoles was lifted only recently in 2014), most
gamers still rely on pirated games. The Bāojītīng operators usually offered Nintendo SFC
(SNES) cartridges, SEGA Saturn / Dreamcast as well as Sony Playstation and other mainstream game consoles and game software in the 1990s. But Bāojītīng came under the
government’s scanners in the beginning of 2000. The authorities started a new round of
crackdowns on electronic gaming activities. This round of bans and prohibitions cleaned
away all the Bāojītīng. Gamers were, once again, forced into a corner. That year, Sony released the Playstation 2. Only a handful of Chinese families were able to spend the fortune
it required to import this console. I was lucky. With the support of my (gaming) father, we
bought a PS2 under the pretext of purchasing a DVD player for the whole family. But we
hardly ever used the DVD function apart from ‘showing off’ the device to visiting relatives.
As the 2000s got underway, two things had become common in Chinese households. A
dedicated home PC and broadband Internet. The cornered and scattered video gaming
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community found itself anew through online gaming, and free-to-play multiplayer titles.
Slowly but surely, the number of gamers that fancied “traditional” electronic games greatly decreased in China. Only a few hardcore electronic game players continued to adhere to
the international console and AAA games release cycles.
Some of the fake handheld consoles popular in China.
Still from a media report showing a raid on a Bāojītīng.
In 2004, Sony tried to formally enter the Chinese video game market. They registered the
PS2 as a “multimedia entertainment terminal” and launched it officially in. But this move
became a deterrent for other gaming device manufacturers - Sony not only failed to create and boost the console gaming market, they also made huge losses on sales of the PS2.
In less than a year, they were forced to give up the console market in China.
Fortunately, at the same time, there was a boom in the popularity of handheld game
consoles because of their convenience and low cost. The Gameboy Advance, albeit illegal
versions of it, was flourishing in China. In 2005, when the Nintendo DS and Playstation
Portable were launched, gaming reached the mainstream. It wasn’t uncommon to see kids
in Beijing with one of these handhelds, and families investing in larger TVs for their consoles. Due to the prohibition on retail sale, however, it took a while for this development
to trickle down to players from smaller cities in China, who were not able to purchase the
game consoles. Therefore, cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen are still a few years
ahead in their knowledge and development of games culture than other Chinese cities.
When the Chinese government finally terminated the prohibition of video game console
sales, companies started to standardize the video game market to push it grow further.
Now, many local companies unite with foreign software providers and hardware companies to strengthen the Chinese video games market. As a long-standing player and witness
to China’s gaming journey, I hope this is a portent to more gaming paradises in our future.
ZnYRock writes for a Chinese gaming website, and lives and works in Beijing.
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ADVENTURES IN CHINESE PC GAMING
by Junliang Huang, translated by Chanchan Wang
Background
My hometown is Heyuan, a small inland city in Canton (Guangdong) Province, 200 km
away from Hong Kong.
1999
In 1999, I was in Grade 3 of elementary school, and back then having a PC at home was
definitely rare, a ‘luxury’ appliance. Classmates would flock to a student’s home who
owned one and longed for a chance to play with it. When I was invited by one classmate
in 1999, I got a chance to see him clicking one folder after another, finally stopping at a
well-hidden icon that said ‘Command & Conquer: Red Alert’. That game, low quality graphics notwithstanding, totally expanded my mind. I had no idea how my classmate had run
some special crack software when setting it up, but the game was definitely not authorized. It was my first encounter with a pirated game.
2001
This year I got my own PC, which was assembled by my uncle in nearby Shenzhen. As a
free gift, I got 2 game discs which contained nearly 20 different kinds of games. The CDs
were of terrible quality, and most of the games were crippled with CRC errors and couldn’t
be installed. In the end, only 1/20 actually worked and ran on my pc: Sega’s PC port of Virtua Cop. To be honest, I didn’t quite realize that it was a pirated version. Sure, the concept
of intellectual property rights, wasn’t quite well developed in my mind, but I just assumed
it was a free video game.
2004
This year, I got my second PC and a Chinese game called Battlefield was my favourite
(‘三国志: Battlefield‘, based on the historical epic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, not
be confused with EA’s first-person shooter series). Back then, a lot of game developers
embedded anti-privacy mechanisms into their games, and one of them required the original CD to be in the drive when playing. Counter mechanisms were invented to go around
these restrictions, special “service packs” which enabled a “no cd” mode, or installed a virtual CD drive on your PC. When I set up Battlefield on my PC, I used one of these cracks.
But since I was young, I had no idea that this was ‘infringement, and the only thing I could
remember about the whole experience was, “Why is it so much trouble to setup and play
this stupid game?”
2005-2008
During this period, PC markets were everywhere in mainland China. Illegal game discs
were available for a paltry 5 yuan, and you can also get cheap pornography there. However, “999999 games in 1” discs were becoming rarer and most discerning pirates preferred
1 game to a disc, even when the game files took less than 100 MB of disc space. Many of
these discs even had rudimentary production values, with a custom installer extolling the
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technological skills of the pirates, or with cracks and patches pre-installed for ease of use.
In 2008, I began to play EA’s Spore. EA’s DRM required some form of troublesome spoofing or patching at every stage of gameplay, and not just the installation. Pirates were
also denied the ‘value-added services’ that legal players had, such as seeding their game
universe with creatures from other Spore players. This was the moment I finally had a full
understanding of the infringement economy, and how it had impacted the way I approach
games and games culture. I gave up on painstakingly pirating this title, and went out and
spent a fortune to buy the actual game.
It wasn’t that good.
Junliang Huang is a programmer at a Beijing-based startup called Orgrimmar Tech.
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between the causeway
piracy and games in 90s Singapore
The Singapore-Johore Causeway bridge that links the country to Malaysia. Creative Commons photo by Mohamed
Shaaz on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/shaaz/2354147209/)
W
hen I started pirating games, it wasn’t so much about ‘intellectual property’ or
theft. It was really more about social conventions, fitting in, making friends and
being a ‘rebel’. As I got older, the rationalizations for pirating games and software definitely became more logical and practical but old habits die hard, right?
I’ve often wondered if piracy is a matter of choice or compulsion.
The answer, as always, is somewhere in between.
My first brush with game piracy, albeit second-hand, happened when I was 13. I was in an
all boys’ school in Singapore and my classmate casually asked, “Hey, do you want to play
this new game I’ve got?” The year was 1994, and most games, even at $19.99, were out
of allowance range for the average 13-year-old. “Here, take these disks and give them
back to me when you’re done” was all he said, dropping it in my hands. Now, no one would
look a gift horse in the mouth or miss the chance to brag about playing a new game with
everyone else either, so they were stuffed diligently in my bag and installed on my x486
desktop computer.
You knew you were with the ‘in’ crowd if you had a chance to play the latest game that
was being passed around. If you were the progenitor of the copy that was being spread
around in 3.5” floppies, either through elder siblings, relatives or even a rare original, then
you were a status symbol to be admired. The cool kid. No one really cared about the ori12
gins of the game. It was more important to be the next link in the chain - receive early and
bequeath wisely. Piracy, in other words, was a popularity game.
Of course that this wasn’t just limited to the big name games of the time like SimCity,
Might & Magic or Civilization - pirate copies of educational software were being passed
around as well. These were things that either flat-out unavailable, or priced well beyond
what any student could afford without lengthy persuasion of the parental units. For the
longest time and only until recently, I have used pirated copies of the Microsoft Office
Suite, Norton Utilities/Antivirus and other software - even when occasional guilt behooved me to make a purchase, the high initial cost and added expense of annual ‘new’
versions dissuaded me.
Cost has always been a major factor in promoting piracy and
not much has changed.
When Final Fantasy VI appeared on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), I
was dying to play it. I owned a four-year old Sega Mega Drive system, and was already falling well behind the trends and newest games. There was one kid that I knew who had an
SNES, the game and a device that allowed you to play SNES games stored on floppies. This
doesn’t probably sound like piracy right off the cuff,
but it was playing games using a floppy disc copy instead of the actual cartridge - which I’m sure involved
some sort of ‘cost-saving’ along the way. Now that
would probably be a huge investment to own and not
many sane average-wage parents would be agreeable
to it in 1995 (no matter how much begging or promises of good grades were involved).
So I got to play it after cutting a deal with said kid - I
can’t remember what it involved but I did get an en- The ‘Professor SF’ device for the Super Famicom
Photo by Evan Amos
joyable four weeks of playing Final Fantasy VI among
other games on the Super Famicom and I still savour that memory. It was great going back
to school and being able to join in on geeky conversations and gush about how cool it was
when “Kekfa destroyed the world” or “recruiting the elusive Shadow or Gogo”, like it was
all current affairs.
When CDs came along, floppy disc pirating died almost overnight. Everyone started taking to buying their pirated games from CD shops. Initially, you had to know someone
who knew where they were. Some were quaintly hidden away in the back of some dark,
far-off shopping centre but more often, they were legitimate game stores where a secret
password, whispered to the shop assistant, let you view the pirated goods. It was our own
alternate reality game, - discovering where these shops were and how long they had to
survive before the authorities busted them.
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This state persisted for perhaps a year or two before the market exploded. Now, you
could see shops prominently displaying their pirated games and software for purchase in
almost every neighbourhood corner. Many of them were hole-in-the-wall shops; no signboards, no markings, no fancy attractions needed - just racks upon racks of games and
software and a bored, shabbily-dressed man with a large waist-pouch which he’d dig into
for change.
They’d always put your games into these distinctive black plastic bags, even if you didn’t
want them to. It was an easy giveaway, and fellow pirates could be spotted even on crowded public transport. With growing demand and eventual competition, prices went from
one for $10 to four for $10 and everybody lapped it up. Lack of purchasing choice wasn’t
the problem, with everything from the Warcraft series (conveniently collected on a single
disc) to Worms: Armageddon on sale, but lack of purchasing power still was.
Now piracy became a social bond.
A group of us would get together and head to the shops after
school where we would agree (and argue) on sharing the cost
for certain games. We would gather at the school gate, change
into nondescript T-shirts to avoid our school being identified
(and reported to our discipline master for ‘loitering’) and hop
onto the public bus led by the appointed ‘leader’ - the one guy
who knew where the best place to get the games were. Of
course each of us would eventually have our own posse that we
would take there to gain popularity points.
Black plastic, the pirate’s choice.
It democratized the popularity market.
Now everyone had a chance to be the ‘cool’ kid, the source of the newest games. We
would trade the games between each other until everyone had played it before we’d go
and trade with other kids who had games we didn’t get. It was cost efficient and an easy
way to socialise, especially when you would throw in free hints and tips on how to beat the
game. At the time it wasn’t about beating the legal system, the producers or their costs. It
was about being in touch with trends and being popular. For me, it was a chance to fit in
with the crowd, to try a game I wouldn’t be allowed to buy or could afford on my meagre
allowance and to simply have fun. It was social interaction for geeks. Many a friendship
started from the words “Hey, what game do you play?” and if I didn’t have that game, it
was easily provided with a CD.
I bought the original Playstation in 2001, 7 years after its initial release. It was still a big
investment that needed to be defrayed, and part of the reason I waited this long was that
the modification chips allowing you to bypass the console’s copy protection had been perfected. The shop that sold me the console also bundled in the modification chip ‘upgrade’
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and a set of 20 pirated games ranging from Street Fighter Alpha 2 to Twisted Metal.
It was still easy to buy pirated console games since stores that stocked consoles also sold
them. But in a further attempt to cut my gaming costs, I would cross the border from
Singapore into Malaysia, where the vagaries of exchange rates meant I could get them for
half the price. Crossing the causeway into Johor Bahru was almost a videogame-like quest
of epic proportions.
Neighbourhood pirate CD shops exhibiting their wares. The more clandestine ones would give you folio books to browse through.
Later, when Singapore started its crackdown on illegal software, it became an adrenaline
rush whenever I crossed the border to get my goods home – almost like Metal Gear Solid
come alive. I’d come up with creative ways to hide my CDs, or make them look like they
weren’t what they were. Once, I even brought an empty CD spindle with me to hide the
discs amongst blank CDs, and a folio to keep the covers in. The customs officials probably
weren’t that interested in small timers like me, but it was still exciting thwarting their random searches. Every successful crossing would cue the victory fanfare from Final Fantasy.
My rationale for piracy at this point evolved from social pressures to pure cost-benefit analysis.
It would only be a waste of money, I figured, if I bought a game at retail price that wasn’t
any good, and with the flood of games on both consoles and PCs that chance was extremely high. My only source of game reviews, apart from hearsay, was limited to expensive imported magazines with short demo videos on CD, or believing the hype on back of
the game packaging. Cheap, pirated copies were like shareware.
The next evolution of my pirate life came along with four factors - The Playstation Two,
ADSL internet connections, peer-to-peer sharing (Napster, BitTorrent) and the DVD burner. Once again, the Sony console had hundreds of games to pick and try from and I had
already made a sizeable investment buying the console (+modchip) itself. Peer-to-peer
sharing and a quicker internet connection meant that I could pirate games without even
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leaving the comfort of my room.
All I needed was the name of the game (now based on ratings and reviews on GameFAQs
or IGN) and an empty DVD. Time to new game: less than a day. But more freedom meant
self-imposed responsibility, and I would only get the ones I really wanted and impose strict
rules on completion. Not fretting over the monetary cost of games meant extra fretting
over the value of time spent playing them.
Piracy was a matter of convenience in my handheld gaming era. Owning the Playstation
Portable and the Nintendo DS gave me gaming on the go, yet if I went the legal route, I
would have had to carry a huge bag of game cartridges with me everywhere I went - not
as portable as you would think. With a simple Operating System flash ‘upgrade’, I could
just play 20 games or more preloaded into my memory stick or MicroSD. You might say I
was self-validating my actions, but it’s just about making the gaming life that much easier. It’s strange to think of piracy as ahead of the times, but companies have only recently
begun to provide huge on-board-memory and digital downloads.
All these facets to piracy have become part of my inherent passion for games, and I have
yet to get the latest gaming consoles because of their stringent anti-piracy controls and
steep price tag. It’s a mix of being used to non-existent costs and that innate fear of buying
an expensive game I would hate. Free demos, trials and more marketing through gameplay videos on YouTube have definitely taken away some of that apprehension. Perhaps
I’ve just gotten a little too old to keep up and enjoy much of all the newfangled games
available these days. Some days I brush the dust off my old consoles and download games
for them just to relive my gaming moments.
I’m nostalgic, but not for the big boxes, cartridges or other
physical artefacts of games culture.
I suppose I’ve lost the compulsion to pirate games but neither am I compelled to invest in
expensive games. I guess it’s also a choice in both aspects. Perhaps there won’t ever be a
clear line between choice or compulsion when it comes to piracy.
Times like this, maybe the best thing to do is sit back and play all those old-school games
on an emulator…but wait, is that still piracy or just appreciating something that’s impossible to get legally?
Aron Gan has been an avid gamer for over 20 years, starting with Rainbow Island on the Amiga Commodore.
These days he’s still keeping up with the latest game developments as a hobby - mostly as a backseat viewer
on Twitch.
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There and back again
Discovering videogames in Aurangabad, India
The author at a party for Indian expats in Jos, Nigeria. Pre-NES entertainment, he says, involved endless games of musical chairs.
On
my 8th birthday, a peculiar package arrived at our house in Jos, Nigeria.
My father was a production manager for the local Jos International Breweries, a subsidiary of a Danish company called Cerekem. Some of his colleagues
were visiting from Denmark, and he had arranged a rather special birthday gift for me.
It was a brand-new NES. Complete with Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt and a light gun.
Birthdays don’t get much better than that, and although I may not have shown a lot of
emotion, I was exploding with joy inside. My next birthday brought some more gems Mega Man 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3.
Later that year we moved from Jos to the city of Pune in Western India. I was born in Nigeria, had lived there all my life and considered it home. But my parents had always planned
to return to India at some point. There was a sense at the time that some form of political
upheaval was in the air, and that the relative stability of the preceding years wouldn’t last.
It was an unsettling time for a little boy like me, moving continents, countries and schools.
My elder brother went to attend college in the US almost immediately after our move,
which left the trusty NES as my only constant companion in a turbulent time.
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The NES made sure I never lacked for company.
If owning a cricket bat was the traditional gateway to friends in an urban Indian neighbourhood, the NES was an even more potent portal to popularity. However, within a year I
had to move again - to the town of Aurangabad, 250 kilometres away. Another transition,
another new environment - By this time me and the NES were inseparable.
I didn’t have to wait long for new frontiers. My parents bought a PC. I vaguely remember
the specs - 80286 processor, with the customary Turbo button (that didn’t seem to do
anything), and a CGA monitor. After setting up the computer in our house, the computer
dealer showed us a few commands - cd, dir, del, and how to start WordStar. My father
probably expected me to learn how to use WordStar or do something serious with it, but
the first thing I did was to see if there were any games on the thing. The only games that
the local assembler had loaded was Dangerous Dave, and a boxing game that didn’t run
too well. The boxing game was probably my first encounter with ‘bugs’ and defective
games, as I’d only ever played polished Nintendo titles before that. When two players
played the game, it would sometimes ignore a player’s inputs, thus making knockouts a
matter of pure chance. These were also the first ‘pirated’ games I’d played, though that
term meant nothing to me. After playing through Dangerous Dave, and giving up on the
boxing game, there was nothing left to play.
I had no idea how I would find more games.
It was impossible to find any piece of media in Aurangabad that wasn’t related to the latest Hindi / Bollywood movie (Case in point: I went to a local video shop once to rent The
Godfather, and the clerk replied “Woh nahin hai, chahiye to Godmother hai” [“We don’t
have that, but you can rent The Godmother, a 1999 Hindi drama, if you like”]) Computers
were so rare in that town that you couldn’t even find any local pirates. And of course India,
or at least the small towns in India, certainly weren’t on the radar of any game publisher
so legitimate software was even scarcer. Most of my summer vacations were spent in Kolhapur - a town worth visiting for mutton & misal, not computer games. During short trips
to larger cities it was hard for a kid to know where to go looking for computer games.
What follows is a sort of thank-you note to the people who helped me in this vacuum.
I knew that there were a few computers at Aurangabad Breweries, where my father
worked. The brewery was located in Waluj, an industrial district outside the city proper.
I tagged along with my dad on a Saturday - they used to run the brewery on weekends
sometimes when power outages disrupted the regular week. I skipped the bottling plant
and headed straight up to the offices where the accountants and managers sat. I asked
some of the staff if they had any games and they were happy to oblige. An accountant
had a copy of Prince of Persia which he graciously copied onto a floppy and handed to me.
He also walked me through the initial stages, being careful to point out the potion that
reduces your health. I played through that game thrice.
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I wasn’t bored for long. Some visiting relatives brought a “999 games in 1” handheld device on which you could play what I now know as Tetris.
Sometime later, during a trip to Pune, we visited an uncle who ran a computer institute
where his son (older than me, and just starting college) helped out from time to time.
When I visited their institute, I thought, “This is what Disneyland must feel like”. He
showed me Wolfenstein 3D and I honestly couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He also had
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (with that opening cutscene that had digitised speech!), and Commander Keen. Commander Keen didn’t seem too impressive at first
(even at that time, I could discern that Super Mario Bros 3 was a superior platformer), but
I think seeing the miniature game of pong that you could play on Keen’s wristwatch made
me a fan. I had to beg my parents to buy me some floppies and I spent the night at the
institute copying these treasures to take back home. This meant a quick crash course on
DOS, and at the end of which I felt comfortable editing the autoexec.bat file, setting the
sound blaster and enabling extended memory. On a subsequent trip I came back for more,
and this time he had a special new game to show me.
That game was called Doom.
To save floppies, he used a tool called ARJ that reportedly compressed files even better
than a regular zip file, thus saving a couple of precious floppies. This may seem like an unnecessary detail, but those extra floppies were then used to copy more games. This friend
now works at Facebook and I’ve told him to go visit the Oculus team and apologize to John
Carmack for pirating all his games.
My school in Aurangabad was ahead of the curve and it was pretty awesome having a
dedicated class to computers where we learned BASIC. Again the teacher there was kind
enough to lend me two ‘educational’ games - Mavis Beacon’s Typing Tutor, and Where in
the World is Carmen Sandiego? The previous year, my mother taught me to type on an old
typewriter, which meant that I was now easily hitting 70+ words per minute on Typing
Tutor. In BASIC, I attempted to make my own rudimentary games, which included a Tic
Tac Toe clone, and a mashup of Typing Tutor and Breakout.
I don’t ever remember games being looked down upon by friends or family. Parents and
elder relatives were probably glad that there was something occupying the kids’ attention.
I remember once playing Wolfenstein 3D and my father and uncle peering at the screen,
unperturbed at the sight of dogs and Nazis being gunned down, instead commenting that
these games “help improve hand-eye coordination.” Friends generally showed a keen interest in trying everything and would argue over who got to play next, which forced me to
set up the NES to take some of the crowd away from the PC. They later argued over which
system had the better games.
Console-vs-PC arguments predate the Internet and are universal to all societies.
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All this time, I would make periodic visits to the computer dealer who had sold us our original 286, which by now had been upgraded to a 80486. Again, he was kind enough to give
me a few games that he had run across - Accolade’s Test Drive, Barbarian (with its creative
use of the PC speaker), and Sky Road.
Looking back I consider myself extremely lucky. Many classics just fell into my lap, despite
being in a place without a real ‘gaming culture’. I got to play Tetris, Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Years later, I picked up a copy of Masters of Doom - Dave Kushner’s entertaining story about the beginnings of id Software. I remembered the copy of Dangerous
Dave that the local computer shop had preloaded onto my 80286 and thought about how
strange it was that a game made in John Romero’s spare time at an office in Shreveport
found its way to Aurangabad.
I’m not qualified to speak of the effects of large scale commercial piracy on developers
and artists. But I can’t think of a better example of the benefits of casual piracy than my
story, and those of others who found themselves in small towns across India who were
largely isolated from developments in the West and Japan. Within a few years, computers
were more widespread, the Internet arrived and there was easier access to games but
these years between my NES and the wider proliferation of computers in Indian households are the ones I remember vividly, where casual piracy of games kept my interest in
the medium alive.
Kunal Joshi is an engineer, currently residing in Ann Arbor. He once thought that The Legend of Zelda was
a ripoff of Willow. He makes games in his spare time at babablacksheep.in and tweets as @kunaljoshi.
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A continent of
gaming stories
Despatches from Vietnam, Pakistan and The Philippines
We asked three gamers from across Asia a series of questions about discovery, piracy
and retail culture in their respective cities and neighbourhoods. Edited excerpts below:
We asked three gamers from across Asia a series of questions
about discovery, piracy and retail cultures in their respective cities
and neighbourhoods. Edited excerpts from email interviews:
Q. Do you remember the first video game you ever played? What was it, where did you
play it and how did it happen? What were people predominantly playing at that time?
Quang Nguyen: My first video game was Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Because in Vietnam we called it by its Vietnamese name, its difficult to name
all the games I played that time. But the most popular games were Contra, Mario Bros,
and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was around 1995 that NES come to my hometown.
I don’t know about the big cities, but in my hometown there were not many families that
afford to have a NES at home, so we played it in some game centre.
These had 4-5 machines set up in a row, and we paid money to play every hour. 1 or 2
years later, that game centre expanded, and bought newer Sega systems, then PS1, PS2 ...
I checked on the internet, and found that the game centres were up to date really quick.
In 1998 we all can play PS 1 already, and PS 2 appeared in Vietnam just a few months after
releasing internationally. And most of the time, till now, only children and students play
games, plus some unemployed people. Unlike Americans, Vietnamese people stop playing
games when we graduate and get a job.
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Faizan Rafi Hashmi: I remember that I played my very first video game at my granddad’s
house with my by siblings and cousins on (what is now an old) Atari console. If I’m not
mistaken, this is back in the very late 80s or very early 90s. I tried very hard to recall the
name of the video game, but it completely eludes me! Nevertheless, it was a very fun side
scroller where you drove a vehicle of some sort on the moon. I don’t remember much of
it, but I do remember that the vehicle could actually jump, and there were ‘craters’ you
could fall through.
I don’t think there was a big gaming scene in Pakistan back then. People were more into
gali, street, cricket.
I actually got into video games a few years later when one day, my dad decided to get us
the Sega Master System. It was a funky little console (8 bit, made as a direct competitor
to the original NES console). I still remember playing Captain Silver, Vigilante, My Hero,
The Ninja for hours on end.
Gaming started getting big when the Sega Mega Drive 2 was released. I didn’t have the
Sega MD2 (we did have a couple of computers along the years, but hardly did any gaming
on them until the early 2000s - that’s around the time the PS1 and PS2 were all the rage)
but a few close friends and cousins did. That’s when we’d have all-nighters button mashing on Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games, laughing through the controlled
insanity of Earthworm Jim I & II, solving the frustrating puzzles of Ecco the Dolphin, Tiny
Toons, Aladdin, Lion King, and Pitfall with Maggi noodles, mango shake and homemade
desi burgers! Sigh... good times!
‘Chichi’ Morales: The first video game that I played was Super Mario Bros. It was the very
first version (1985) of the game and it was initially produced for the Super Nintendo console. However, our (my brother and I) version was the ‘knock-off’ or pirated version of the
game and we played it on a console called the “Super Family Computer”. If I remember it
correctly, the console was also built by Nintendo but I am not sure if the design and the
specifics were made for the Asian market. It was smaller than the console they sold in the
US market.
We had the Super Family Computer as a result of a “bandwagon” effect within our family.
A cousin visited her mother in the US and this resulted to her coming home with the console that had the Super Mario game and Zelda. Our parents saw that we enjoyed playing
the games in my cousin’s house and the rest was history.
At that time, the consoles were sold in the malls and computer gaming shops and a lot also
sold pirated games. The more popular games during that time was Super Mario Bros, Zelda
and Pac Man. I believe these were the games commonly bought by other video gamers
because these were also the ones available in the arcades during that time.
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Q. What was the first game you remember going out and buying - pirated or otherwise?
Where did you hear about it, and how much did it cost? Was there a particular shop, or
street, or market you went to? How often did they have new games? Who told you about
the shop or street?
Quang: In Vietnam, 99% of us buy fake, cracked games. Both game centres and individual
players only pay 1-2 $ for the CD, and play it on every system imaginable ( PC, PS, Xbox,
Wii). Because everyone of us has go to a game centre at least once, there is small community that emerges, where we share game information, and make friends with others.
Everything I know about games is from going to game centres, and recently from the
Internet.
Faizan: The first game I actually went out and bought was Need For Speed 2: Special Edition. As with almost all games in Pakistan back then, it was pirated. I heard about this
“amazing racing game” from my school friends, and a 120 Rupees for a CD isn’t that bad!
That being the case, I used to get games fairly regularly - once a month or something like
that. But many CDs we bought back then were often corrupted and refused to load.
The game shop itself was in the market behind the house--just a run of the mill computer shop that sold games, software, drivers, cracks etc. And yes, they were all pirated (no
complaints there, because otherwise they would have been too expensive). I’m pretty
sure this shop (and many many more) sourced all their CDs from this one seedy building
called Rainbow Centre in Karachi’s Saddar area. In fact, Rainbow Centre was (is) situated
just behind my school, so my friends and I used to go there often, mostly to get games,
music and movie CDs, and other computer accessories, which is very understandable,
since Rainbow Centre is perhaps the hub of (pirated) computer digital media in Karachi.
Chichi: Most of the games that we played in the Super Family Computer were my brother’s
choices since I was only 5 when we had the console and he was 10. He had more authority
in choosing the games. However, as I grew older, I had more autonomy in choosing the
games I wanted to play for the consoles that we had (e.g. Super Nintendo Entertainment
System, Super Famicom, PS One and PS2).
I was able to know about the games that I wanted to buy mainly from gaming magazines
that were available in bookstores and newspaper/magazine stands. These magazines cost
a lot during that time (i.e. $10) and we were only given a limited amount to purchase
them. Often times, we bought them through our allowance. So, we had to choose carefully which magazine we wanted to buy. Sometimes, the ones we bought also had cheats or
walkthroughs of the games we played (e.g. Final Fantasy VII, VIII)
When the PS One was made available as retailers increased, there was a particular place
in Manila that developed to be the “main source” for pirated games. It was a shopping
complex called Greenhills (http://www.greenhills.com.ph/). Every gamer knows that this
place is the source for pirated games aside from cheap cellphones and services that would
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“jailbreak” your phone. It is known to have many computer (e.g. PC games) and gaming
shops. Whether you are a console or PC gamer, this was the place to be.
As for the availability of new games in Greenhills , I am not quite sure about it. We only
went there for once after two or three months. Information of it being a source of pirated
games spread through word of mouth because I had cousins who were avid gamers as well
and they obtained their information through their friends and classmates. I was also able
to learn about it through my brother since he had friends and classmates who frequent
Greenhills.
Q. What was your favourite game from your first few years of playing games? And if you
had to choose 3 games from that early era that most gamers in your city would remember fondly, what would they be?
Quang: The first game I played was Contra, not too difficult because we all knew the Konami Code. Just mash those buttons, and we became immortal, so its quite easy. In the first
few years we used NES, and there were many games so its difficult to name the games,
but I think most popular game in Vietnam at that time were Mario and Contra. Lately, with
PS1, most popular games are Yu Gi Oh, Chocobo Racing, and a football game that we all
called ‘FIFA’ but wasn’t. But FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer are also extremely popular in
Vietnam.
Faizan: Need for Speed II: SE hands down! Other than that, I really liked Tazmania, Tiny
Toon Adventures, Monkey Island, and this one button masher called X-Men: Children of the
Atom. I LOVED that game!!
​ ames that Pakistani people will remember for sure are Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat 2
G
and 3, Doom, Sonic the Hedgehog, PoP, Lion King, Aladdin, and Brian Lara Cricket.
Chichi: I would have to say that Super Mario Bros has been my favourite because it sparked
my interest in action/adventure game or even open-world games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto).
I also played every possible variation, homage and fan version of that game, even on the
PC platform (e.g. Where in the World is Luigi?). I had to say it got me obsessed in finishing
the game because of the world and the same goes for other action/adventure games that
I’ve played in much later consoles (e.g. Tomb Raider).
If I were to choose 3 games from that early era, I would say these are my top 3: 1) Super
Mario World (cause the concept of going to different worlds was really awesome and
challenging); 2) Castlevania (being a vampire hunter is nice and the gameplay for a 16-bit
game was nice); and 3) Battle Tanks (it was one of the games were we first had our brother-sister tournament on video games). Philippine gamers surely remember these games
as they were on the popular list.
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