Physical, Forever: The Shady Side of The Street

Physical, Forever: The Shady Side of The Street

Sometimes, the most interesting physical games were the most illegal.

You can do so many cool things with physical media that are impossible with a digital game. Add in special chips to expand the features of hardware? Good luck with that! A solar UV detector to tie in with an onboard, battery-powered, real-time clock? No bandwidth-destroying multi-gigabyte game download can do that. And even something goofy, like the profoundly horrible flavor additive manufactured into Switch cartridges, demonstrates the breadth and versatility of physical media.

Yes, physical media is truly something to cherish. But not everyone uses physical media for the power of good. Since the beginning of video games becoming a commercial concern, physical media has also been used as a vehicle for piracy and bootlegging. Please do not attempt this at home. It is illegal, and physical media should only be used for good.

Bootlegging goes back all the way to the earliest days of gaming: The guy who invented the entire concept of home games, Ralph Baer, made a pretty good case that the entire concept of Pong was lifted from his “Brown Box” system prototype (which eventually became the Magnavox Odyssey, they world’s first game console). So questionable behavior came pre-baked into the entire industry, really.

By the end of the 1970s, home computer games had begun to enter the retail space, and it didn’t take long for people to realize that a technological ecosystem that offered easy access to cheap rewritable media (through diskette and tape drives) translated into an easy, cheap way to copy video games for free. Talk to anyone who played computer games in the U.K. or U.S. in the ’80s and they’re likely to admit that their gaming experiences largely involved a case of blank disks or cassettes with handwritten labels detailing the stolen games contained within.

Over on the console side of things, piracy was a little harder to get away with. Most consoles couldn’t load games from magnetic media, and cartridges have a lot of components that take real effort to bootleg! Theft would become easier once compact discs took off and you could wander down to Frye’s to buy a huge spindle of CD-Rs for the same price as a new PlayStation game. But that’s not to say bootleggers didn’t give it their all during the solid-state era. The Nintendo Entertainment System (called Famicom in Japan) was a huge hit in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, and its hardware was widely copied in territories where Nintendo didn’t operate—or couldn’t operate. That included both the Soviet Union and China, where Famiclones like the Dendy occupy the same nostalgic space that the NES and Famicom do for American, European, and Japanese gamers.

You can’t really do much with a clone video game system without cartridges to play on it, and the Famiclone grey market was quickly filled with ersatz cartridges. Sometimes, these simply resembled direct copies of existing Famicom carts (which were half the size of NES cartridges and therefore probably much cheaper to manufacture). More often, though, they took the form of multicarts. These were single cartridges containing the data for dozens of NES and Famicom games, which used memory management chips to allow players to select different carts. Usually these contained early Famicom releases, the kinds of games that Nintendo sold in America in the “Black Box” format. Since those games all ran on basic NES chips that didn’t require memory expansion features, it was easy enough to stuff a bunch of them into a single cartridge without the need for any particularly elaborate add-ons to account for the more complex programming and hardware of the original releases.

A lot of those multicarts launched into a front end menu that allowed players to select the game they wanted to play from within the cart. But that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes they took a more tactile approach, as with this strange little cartridge (which has Duck Hunt art on the label but may or may not actually contain Duck Hunt—you never know with these things!).

This bootleg, whose title translates from Chinese as “Video Game 3150: Dual Cassette,” deals with its user-selectable contents in a very hand-ons way. The front of the cartridges contains a series of actual physical switches that can be pushed up or down to physically configure the media to run different games. Swapping access between different memory spaces in expanded cartridges was known as “bank switching,” but it wasn’t usually presented in such a literal way.

The front label helpfully lists the games contained within along with the switch configuration required to activate each game. Of course, the titles are all listed in Chinese and don’t directly transliterate the original names, but with the ability to read Chinese (or the help of a translation app), you can usually make a pretty good guess. For example, title #1 (which you access by pushing all five switches into the down position) has a name that translates into “Two-Person Water Pipe,” which we can safely assume refers to early Famicom/NES release Mario Bros. Of course, the surest way to figure it out is to stick the game in a Famicom console and start throwing switches to see what comes up. Generally, these bootleg titles didn’t make significant changes to the title screens of games (often not even removing copyright information), so it didn’t exactly require much detective work to determine what had been crammed onto a multicart... just a little familiarity with the original, legitimate releases.

So, no, the physical side of gaming hasn’t always been the domain of angels, which is undoubtedly a part of why publishers are happy to phase out discs and cartridges. Not that there’s a booming business in bootleg PS5 discs. These days, digital piracy is a whole lot easier to effect than physical piracy. But that’s a different matter altogether....