The Copy Party
In 1991 I was the proud owner of an Amiga 500+ with a Philips color monitor and an external drive. I had plenty of games. Maybe ten of them were legitimate copies. The rest—and there were hundreds—came from friends, from the schoolyard, from the mail. That’s how it worked. You didn’t buy games; you swapped and copied.
One day I loaded a cracked disk and was flying through the intro when I noticed a phone number with an area code I recognized—some town nearby. Contact us for the latest stuff,
it said. I picked up the phone. A kid answered, maybe eighteen years old, and within a few minutes I had an invitation to a copy party happening the next day.
I showed up with a stack of blank disks. It was a small setup—maybe fifty people, some of them with their own computers on camping tables, the rest of us just watching and waiting. One guy was Frank. He was in the middle of cracking Monkey Island 2, which hadn’t even been released yet. Not for another two weeks. I stood behind him and watched him work, dropping comments about memory protection and copy schemes, words I half-understood but which made me feel like I was part of something technical and forbidden.
You can lay out eleven disks,
he said after a while. I’m almost done.
Monkey Island 2. Two weeks before the stores.
The actual copying was tedious—load, wait, eject, repeat—but I didn’t mind. By the time I left that afternoon, I had all eleven disks.
I went straight home and basically disappeared into my room for two days. I only came out for the kitchen and the bathroom. I played through Guybrush’s second adventure—the insult sword fighting, the voodoo dolls—and I laughed. Really laughed, in a way that surprised me. And underneath the laughter was something else: the feeling of getting away with something. Playing a game that technically didn’t exist yet, that was supposed to be protected, that I had no right to have. I was a tiny, pointless thorn in the eye of the entire industry, and for two days that felt like the best thing in the world.