How people downloaded games before torrents became a thing in 2001?

How people downloaded games before torrents became a thing in 2001?

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Emule and bearshare. The thrill about getting what you downloaded was the highlight of it.

usenet

Emule was made in 2002

Pretty sure most people just rented them and copied them. That's what everyone else I knew was doing.

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You had to trade drugs and guns for games and emulators.

I remember back in 96/97 some rich kids dad bought a CD-R and that kid soon came with a list of games we could order a copy of and pay him a little bit for the CD. Was pretty dope.

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Warez sites. They were/are crawling with malware
Usenet
Those special CDs that contained rips of a bunch of games, basically pirate disks
Copying disks from friends
Copying stuff over at LAN parties may have been a thing too

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plenty of illegal copy for sale if you live in 3rd world like me

CDs?

File sharing programs. You installed them and added some files you wanted to share and while the program was running people could download them from you, while you could search through the files of every other person running the program and download what you want.

Before that, simple downloads from websites. pic related.

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Personal IRC file servers & FTP sites, mostly. Then the free file hosting websites.
Best were the corporate high speed FTP sites turned into dump sites, because the retard company IT guy left anonymous login open.

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I don't remember a time before emule and edonkey. I think I just rented/borrowed whatever game I wanted and burned a copy

CDs

Torrents existed in 2001 as well.

direct download

mirrors
I spent a whole saturday downloading 64 part rars resetting the IP every time for GTASA
if just one part was corrupted everything was for shit
you also had p2p like emule but was more used for music
even with torrents, the internet was so bad back then nobody could really seed and downloads would take ages

eDonkey2000

Yes, worse when some links got dead or killed and you had to find some other release

Yeh, I remember internet in 2004 was so slow that modern games were just too big to download with my speed, so I mostly played NES and SNES roms on the emulator and also flash games

oh yeah, flashgames were the shit back then

AOL warez groups via emails with rar attachments or IRC chatrooms with file requests

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There were a variety of methods. Borrowing disks to make copies, or install no-cd patches. P2P filesharing programs existed, but were super sketch. Some people even sent files through mIRC.

Don't copy that floppy

Pirated games on CD/DVD were dirt cheap in my country and were sold anywhere, so there was no need to use torrents until late 00s

So glad we hvae emule bros up in here. Do you guys remember the horse sex videos?
Shit got me into zoophilia at 12 years old.

>He didn't know a cousin who went to Hong Kong with their dad on a business trip and came back with a binder full of dozens of bootleg games

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>tfw dial up
>leave pc on overnight downloading all of those mighty 70mb's
those were the days,everything downloaded was treasured,miss them,honestly

I used to copy them or simply go to the local pirate store.

>Download a game
>It was actually CP

Good times

really? that shit only happened to me with movies