This is during the era when the N64, PS1, SNES, Dreamcast or Sega Genesis were popular. Games back then were released physically via disc or cartridge, meaning distributors or publishers would’ve implemented anti-piracy (like Lenslok) measures onto physical copies but some knew how to tamper with anti-piracy if they have a computer using other sources of capturing data (floppy disks).
Also, games at the time were ‘simple’ to torrent but with a catch (dial up was still a thing at the time meaning downloads could take a while if you have a PC). Discs were more straight forward than “torrenting” cartridges (unless you have connections with the manufacturer on smuggling circuit boards). Like with movies, games that came on discs were “torrented” through CDs by using a PC.
My uncle was an electrical engineer back in the day and our family would get hand-me-down PC’s, and every DOS game I ever played as a kid was pirated. I’m guessing my uncle would get them on BBS or something it’s that far back. I was 10 in 1993, and I remember struggling with Leisure Suit Larry (which, because one needed to type in English taught me a great deal! Including the “prove-you’re-an-adult quiz” to even get into it). I also remember thinking how easy Civilization 1 was but it turns out I was playing with a “trainer” the whole time and could just pump out units at near 0 cost 😄. But as a kid I didn’t know any better.
In 1996 I bought my own PC, AMD K2 200mhz, 3 GB HDD and who knows how many ram, but only a measly Matrox 2D card to begin with, and yep, even then a lot of the games were pirated, and a few years later, probably 1998 I got my first CD-rom drive which just made piracy even easier. A friend from school had a dad who would get pirated games, almost like it was linux distributions. Most of these CD-rom’s would be repackaged games without cutscenes but with custom installers with music. It’s how I got into Blümchen at the peak age of 15.
Then in 1999 I began going to a local computer club which was mostly a way to play LAN games with friends and share pirated stuff and use a faster dedicated internet connection. Oh and lots of LAN parties were if course had from around 1998 and onwards into the mid 00s, which is how I was introduced to anime like Rurouni Kenshin (aka Samurai X for y’all yanks (why?!)). And then home internet got good enough that one could pirate at home and LAN’s began falling off after the mid-00s.
As for consoles, I never pirated. I went from Sega Master System to Sega Game Gear (gifted to my brother and I from a German family that my parents were friends with) to Sony Playstation. And funnily enough I never played any pirated games on any of these consoles, but that’s also why I stuck with PC from there on afterwards, with the exception of a PS3 in 2011 which I never really played on…
I’m a couple years younger than you, but a lot of this resonated for me. Custom installers were some of my early inspirations for making apps that didn’t have the traditional gray box aesthetic.
However, I will say that Kenshin was a thing in the US. Samurai X was only the name of the OG movies where he was still lethal AFAIK.