I think it was a game that needed activations to play and I ran out of activations or something. Predictably, pirating it was the better experience in every way.

Wanted a game. Was too expensive. said “fuck it” and set sail.

Are we counting like Ares and Limewire? I just wanted to listen to music and could never pay it. That turned into software I wanted but couldn’t buy. Then I stopped for a while and started up again years ago not wanting to pay for streaming

My childhood home only has dialup Internet. First year at college I found out someone ran a DC++ instance on the network and it was over from there. I got a 2tb HDD because I had to, and could, download enough movies/shows to last me the summer. I stopped for a while when I moved out and actually had broadband, but then Netflix stopped being Netflix and became $NFLX, and with all the other services popping up I heard the call of the seas again

I’m very fond of DC Talk’s So Long My Friend.

To answer your question, it was probably music that sent me sailing the high seas. The only way to get music back then was to tape songs off the radio, download them online or buy a bootleg CD off the street.

Otherwise you’d have a spend a tonne at the few music shops we have/had.

Shitty quality content/software/products. Now I pirate everything I need and if it’s good I pay to the developer.

My dads friend used to burn random movies to DVD and give them to us. Eventually, he showed my dad where to get them and my dad showed me. I think it was the uploader axxo on isohunt that my dad would always download from. I nearly completely forgot about that, thanks for making me think about it! We really had no idea what we were doing, we used to use utorrent and everything. That family computer was riddled with viruses. It took us about an hour to remove some random extensions that changed our default search engine one time

As a child my parents didn’t want to give me their credit card (like fair enough), but so I had to find other ways.

Then payed for netflix for a while and was pretty happy with it. Since you have to have like 13 streamubg services of which only about half are available on my country I found Plex. Now I use Jellyfin and couldn’t be happier.

As a lil boy of 8, I wanted computer games but I never had a fast enough computer so if my parents ever did buy me a game, it often wouldn’t work or would be too slow to play.

Fast forward to wifi in the house and I got San Andreas working on my IBM T42. Good times.

Upgradingbto a whooping 56k modem and seeing what was available via FTPs. GTA1 was the first booty I took on board.

Wanted to play some games, didn't have money but I did know someone that knew someone that knew someone that ran a BBS that had some pirated games.

Yes, I'm that old.

When I was a poor student I pirated everything. Music, software, games, you name it.

Now that I have a good stable income, I pay for the things I want because I want to encourage artists and developers. But corporations and capitalism are ruining it all.

So, I’m changing my habits. Paying money where it actually has a significant impact on the creators, (like going to live concerts and shows, buying albums directly from the artist or from their own site, buying indie games from small studios, going to watch movies from studios that respect their employees and artists and unions) and pirating the ever loving shit out of everything else coming out of a large corporation.

When my mom’s old laptop became mine in around 2011 it wasn’t even powerful enough to run Minecraft at more than 13 FPS, so I sure as shit wasn’t gonna spend the occasional money I got on a steam card at 7/11 to load up an account I couldn’t even use to play the games well with

I think every game I’ve ever pirated from childhood and actually liked enough to finish has been paid for now though

Just born to break the rules.

Ironically mine started without nefarious connotations… The family computer in the mid 80s was a minor novelty to me for ages, only good for simple text games really. Then…

My brother grabbed a cracked game toward 1990 off a BBS. The game itself I don’t even remember, but it had a cracktro that stunned me. Graphics I’d never seen, actual music out our little adlib card… Was crazy enticing.

Being stuck in the Midwest US while enamored with DemoScene is a hell of a drug. Every few kb down that modem was like crack.

That then opened a new world of games as well… Things my older brother had no interest in. Things my parents obviously would not have allowed. You know… The Good Shit ™️.

Obviously once codecs caught up video and audio quickly became a thing. My closest buddy and I would burn stack after stack of CDs to take a spindle at a time over to share between us and others.

Then the data hoarding set in… What good is just having these shiny things for yourself when you can share? True joy doesn’t exist without spreading it to others.

The sickness persists… Stronger than ever despite becoming a pessimistic old man. Multiple gigabit connections: check. 200tb arrays just for torrents: check. Seed times tracked in years: check.

Remember when 14.4k was the most epic thing for grabbing those disks at lightning speed? I certainly do.

When I discovered soulseek and could stop paying $20-$30 per CD. Incidentally, I bought an iPod round the same time and couldn’t copy my mp3s over, and that’s the last time i ever bought an apple product

Pitstop 2. I copied that floppy.

Being a poor elementary school kid who wanted to play the trendy singleplayer games.

When I was learning programming, free software for schools wasn’t (officially) a thing yet.

Lots of folks pointedly looked the other way so I could have a home copy of the development environment I was learning.

Back then: The prices of shit and ease of procurement. Nowadays, I’ll buy reasonably priced software because I’m not a broke dick and like to have support if needed. Though, understandably, there’s still a lot of bullshit software that’s way too expensive. But I lean towards foss software when I can get away with it.

But for streaming/cable/satellite? I’d rather wipe my ass with that money. I’ll go to the theater if a movie looks good enough, just to change things up, but with so much awful shit being produced… nope.

I pay for music streaming on Deezer, but also have a carefully curated media library and run Nicotine 24/7 to share on slsk.

I guess it’s a toss up between money and principle. 🤷‍♂️

Exclusive sports deals, geo-blocking, and the general greed of streaming companies that just keep increasing their prices while you don’t actually own anything.

Having no money and deciding that shouldn’t stand between me and media I wouldn’t pay for anyway. Also my local college’s DC++ network, where someone had about 20 TB back in 2006 (which was a bit of a culture shock after having been banned from watching most TV during childhood).

I think the first thing I ever pirated was Cars. I was like 13, They didn’t have a VHS for it at the library and our home internet at the time was too slow to even think about streaming, so I figured out how to torrent and it took like 6 days to get a complete copy of the movie.

I ended up sticking to pirating and pack packratting all the movie files locally specifically because our internet was so bad.

I was a teenager who wanted to be a 1337 haxxor so I found out what warez were, and then wanted to play a bunch of games for free.

My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn’t have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university’s T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.

I lived in Japan when streaming was becoming a thing. Everything was region blocked, and DVDs were (and still are) horrendously overpriced for what you get.

I didn't have money as a kid. I still don't have money.

I made bootleg tapes for my friends. I remember Little Feat and The Band were pretty popular.

I found a website that showed my how to use RSS feeds to automatically download TV shows. Having my favorite shows download automatically overnight was very convenient. There was no streaming services for TV shows back then and even if there was, my internet was way too slow for that. I had a portable media player with a massive 80GB hard drive that I could load my pirated TV shows and ripped DVDs on when I was away from home.

The pirates innovated and made content available long before the corporations did.

Before streaming services took off, it was the only way to get movies and music (besides some IRC rooms). There were even a few golden years where movies would get leaked to torrents in full quality, before the theatrical release.

Music too was easier to find on napster, limewire, and torrents, than your local music store.

I love sea men, and free stuff.

TLDR; It started as a young teen who just wanted to get games for free; It continues because companies don’t giving two flying hoots about me.

Currently, I pirate because I can’t rightfully give any money to these anti-consumer companies that will only victimize me. I can’t own anything anymore, and this absolutely frustrates me. If I could own the media I purchase, I wouldn’t pirate anymore. (by this I mean I wouldn’t pirate the media I consume. I’d still data hoard because it’s a literal addiction, please help!!)

I don’t pirate games anymore; or better said, I rarely pirate games, and when I do they’re ran in a VM with VFIO because I really don’t like the idea of running arbitrary code on my system; even though we have reputable, vetted, and trustworthy groups. I buy all my games on Steam for convenience, and I opt to use Goldberg’s Steam Emulator (which is open source!!) to store backups of my games, and this setup works wonderfully! I stay away from games with invasive DRM like Denuvo (I play these in a VM), and I’ve long stopped buying EA and Ubisoft games. The only forms of media I pirate nowadays are movies, and music (and the occasional game).

Basically as soon as I found out about it. I really got into it when I later discovered emulation. Never felt bad about it; I was pretty much only looking for games I literally could not buy because they could only be had via retailers, and they didn’t always carry every title.

Emulation when I was younger (and to a lesser extent now. I own the vast majority of old consoles/games I have any interest in playing these days). These days it's near exclusively TV/Movies and pretty much entirely because of convenience. Between myself and the others in my household, we have near every streaming service, I just can't be fucked to figure out which one what I want to watch is on.

I really need to get around to turning my old pc into a media server.

I paid over $1k about 10 years ago for music software. My computer killed itself, so I made a new one and redownloaded the software…but the company said I’m an imposter. After years of fighting with them, they refused to activate my paid software despite proving my identity and showing proof of purchase. I didn’t chose to pirate, the system chose for me

Cable installer guy came to the house one time… Hooked up internet and asked me if I was going to Torrent or not. I had no idea what he was talking about as this was 2005.

Did some googling canceled my cable subscription and I never looked back.

Got off the The seas when Netflix was big… And then all that changed again…

So here we are again.

Was just trying to watch the original Star Wars from when I was young and found out that it is simply not available for sale. My money is no good! Then I found this Project 4K77.

Back in the day, sometimes USA TV shows would not air overseas for months depending on the schedule. Often spoilers online would ruin some parts. Piracy solved this. Then they started doing same time release worldwide but you had to use buggy streaming services and the quality was poor. Then they tried selling shows for much more than their worth on a per episode basis. Piracy fixed all these problems. Netflix was a good, reasonable solution and then they all decided to dontheor own thing. Piracy it is then.

Its funny that even Netflix knew that the greed of others was their biggest risk as they planned to be streaming HBO before HBO and others caught up. Its a pity they didn’t emulate the quality.

Hmm, this is an interesting question, as I live in a 3rd world country it is hard to pinpoint exactly which event drove me to this beautiful world.

With that said, the first console that we ever had (sis and I) was a PS1, it came with Gran Turismo and DBZ Ultimate Battle 22, I think.

Anyway, I was probably 6 years old, and my dad took care of chip it (took it to a place, it is common to do that in Mexico) and then I got the pirated games for dirt cheap in flea markets and such, a similar event happened with the PS2.

But when I truly sailed the seas for myself, at least in a gaming scenario, happened when I got my Nintendo DS phat, I quickly knew about a R4, and managed myself to find ROM sites, homebrew, heck I used to use Windows Live Messenger in that little thing lol (DS Lite at that time).

I mean, I pirated software for PC and possibly burned some games for the PS1/PS2 before having the DS, but having unlimited portable fun with the DS (and then the PSP) was when I turned into a no return point.