This week we have an awfully huge topic, brought to you courtesy of Bobby Najari, who made this request as his reward for backing our Patreon at the "pick your own topic" tier. Sometimes a topic request comes in via Patreon and we kind of grimace and wonder how we're going to handle it. This one, though? No sweat. Video game piracy is a massive topic with a broad spectrum of historic and ethical ramifications—frankly, I feel like we barely scratched the morally grey surface of this one.
Nevertheless, it's a lively conversation that touches on our own first encounters with piracy, enumates some of the more notable attempts to thwart theft by publishers and developers, attempts to disambigute piracy and emulation, delves into the bad and good side effects of stealing game code, and more. Give it a listen, won't you?
For this week's art I decided to change thing up and experiement a bit with the diorama/collage at style I've been playing around with for Greenlit Content's social media feeds. If you can trainspot these characters, you can probably figure out the approach I used for this week's musical interludes...
Retronauts Episode 195
A History of Game PIracy
MP3, 49.9 MB | 1:39:44
Direct download | Retronauts on iTunes | Retronauts on Libsyn
Episode description: Chris Kohler joins Jeremy Parish and Bob Mackey to tackle the topic of piracy. It's not the same thing as emulation! But it's closely related? And it's bad! But it's important, good, and essential to game preservation!? There's a lot to unpack this week!