The Scene, The Pirates, and The Empress
How an increasingly radicalized society has shaped the world of video game cracking
For an act of theft as simple and brazen as piracy, the act and its proponents contain surprising multitudes. Like everything else, piracy has changed — one imagines that the floppy disks and hardware wiring skills of the typical 80s pirate would not go very far today. But the typical baton-passing has brought with it a darker, terrifying change- one that needs a great deal of exploration.
In the shadowy worlds of game piracy, there are a hundred layers to explore. On the surface are, of course, the gamers, simply looking to grab their favourite titles for free. But the mechanisms that deliver these coveted “cracks” to them are anything but simple. Beneath the surface, the world of game cracking is dark, ever-twisting, and brimming with petty intrigue — lots of material to be explored.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back.
The decade is the 1980s. Apple is a young up-and-comer, Google non-existent, Amazon a river. The “internet” is more like the Usenet, 8-bit is more than a retro style, and dial-up is the name of the game. The dominant names in gaming at this point were Atari and Nintendo, and the industry itself was still in the now-nostalgic golden years of NES and Tetris. As you can imagine, the cracking scene wasn’t brimming with talent either.
But by the end of the decade, things were changing. The Commodore 64, an early model of home computer, had allowed computer gaming (and subsequently, game cracking) to get a very tiny start. And among the amateur computer-centric groups of Sweden, an interest was sparking to see if the rudimentary security of these simple games could be hacked, cracked, and otherwise bamboozled.
So we have a time, a setting, a nice idea of the climate. Enter the hAxx0Rs. I’ll skip the details of the amateur teenage west-Swedish cracking scene of the mid-80s before them, because, well, it’s details about the amateur teenage west-Swedish cracking scene of the mid-80s, but suffice it to say that one of the active groups at the time was named the West Coast Crackers.
“The Scene” has never been noted for its stability, and this was true even before it was known as “The Scene”: for some (undoubtedly meaningless) reason or the other, the West Coast Crackers decided to split up. This left a number of its members without groups, most prominently “№1” and “Sir Galahad”. These two decided to band together, and on 14 April 1987, they founded Fairlight. They also decided to switch up their handles, presumably wanting to disassociate themselves from WCC: the founding members of Fairlight now called themselves “Strider” and “Black Shadow”.
These two were soon joined by other mainstays of the group, including “Gollum” and “Bacchus”. By the early 90s they’d moved on from the C64 and onto the Amiga and IBM PCs, and they were no longer alone. “The Dream Team” had been founded within Sweden itself, and similar Swedish group “The Humble Guys” had already started using NFOs as a convenient way of documenting their releases. But Fairlight made their mark; they were prolific in their time, and even had a short reign in the PC scene as a collaboration with the USA (United Software Association).
But as it turned out, Fairlight was just the first of many. By the mid-90s, they’d been driven out of the cracking scene-proper by increasing competition and had instead turned into a demoscene group, creating various pieces of art and music that the vintage cracking scene was famous for. They continue to exist in this niche even today, under the leadership of the now-veteran Bacchus.
But back to the warez groups. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that the 90s were the golden age of gaming piracy. Fundamentally, they were the same people as in the 80s: crackers, subculture artists, techies who thought the digital world was the epitome of cool. The Eternal September of 1993 had brought radical change to the fledgling internet, but even though AOL was the new king, the Scene continued partying blissfully uncorrupted.
The winds of change weren’t far off, though. By the mid-90s, the World Wide Web was common knowledge, even outside the academic circles, and the giants of the internet, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, were already tussling for control as usage numbers exploded into the tens of millions.
But the Scene didn’t really start evolving with the times until 1998, 1999 or so. That was the time some of the biggest groups in the history of hacking/cracking were founded: DEViANCE, CONSPIR4CY, Centropy — they dominated the Scene, went toe-to-toe with game developers, movie studios, anyone who represented Big Media. It was around this time, somewhere in the haze of the 1990s, that the definitive rules and spirit of the Scene started to take shape.
You have to understand, when talking about “The Scene”, that there is no “The Scene”. The term just refers to the culture as a whole, the entire collection of individuals, groups, aliases, IRC servers, whatever else you can think of. There’s no single Scene any more than there is a single Tech Industry.
Like the tech industry, though, the Scene is ever-shifting and ever-dominated, by one group or the other. This ties in fundamentally with its very ethos, its motivation, the reason for its existence. The Scene is not a group of pirates. It’s not even a group of crackers. It’s more like… a bunch of bored, talented people, trying to have fun. It’s hard to explain, especially when the concept of warez scenes has forever been linked to piracy and especially game piracy, but the Scene doesn’t really care about pirating at all; in truth, the piracy is just incidental to their real purpose.
The fact is, to the members of this shadowy Scene, it’s all a game. They choose fanciful names and tags because they can, and it’s fun to have cool names. They crack games and rip films, because they can, and because everyone else can’t. The real purpose of the Scene isn’t to pirate, it’s to prove you’re the best, to write your name in internet history.
Historically, the Scene has been composed almost entirely of young, white men. This wasn’t for ideological reasons, but because of demographics: young white men were overwhelmingly more likely to have access to computers and resources than any other demographic. And to borrow a now distastefully corrupted phrase, “boys will be boys”. The Scene was founded out of that very boyish spirit. It’s not really the shadowy cabal it’s portrayed as; and while their activities are obviously illegal, the spirit of their illegality is less murder and fraud, more.. weed and street racing, underage drinking.
The entirety of the trappings of the Scene are rooted in that boyish, fun-seeking spirit, that underlying desire to have a good time one-upping your rivals, and working on cool projects with friends. The rules they live by — nuking, pre-ing, NFO art, aren’t really necessary to protect their privacy; they’re essentially just race rules. That’s what Scenes groups really do, race among each other for bragging rights. While governments and media-houses paint them as pantomime villains eating into their profits, the fact is that the Scene really doesn’t care — they just wanna win. The members of the Scene are not exactly career intellectual-property-violators. Most have real jobs, careers, families, usually semi-important positions in the tech world. The cracking is just a side-project; they’re hobbyists, using the internet for fun and competition in the same way a DOTA or Fortnite player would.
This ethos of competitive fun served them well for more than a decade — groups like CPY are still active, 22 years after their founding. But the Scene isn’t alone on the scene. By the turn of the century, the Scene had hit a rough patch, with the tech bubble bursting forcing many to focus on their jobs (or their job hunts). The reigning groups of the 90s faded away and younger, newer groups started forming with very different ideas.
These groups, often smaller and more motivated than their elder peers, had very different motivations. Where before the scene carried with it a remarkably flippant “because we can” attitude, the tone quickly switched to one echoing a more populist sentiment. The scene didn’t crack for fun anymore (well, not entirely for fun), it cracked for satisfaction. While they continued to maintain their intense privacy, a “stick it to the man” was understandably developing among their ranks.
It’s not that the spirit of fun and competition vanished (not yet anyway). But there was certainly far more of an element of self-satisfaction at the crime than at the display of “skillz”. As the world of video games became rapidly commercialized, so too did the world of video game piracy.
And so the Scene ruled the 2000s, weathering the dotcom bubble with the same ever-shifting continuity that had withstood the Soviet collapse — the internet is global, naturally, and “i don’t want to pay for that” is about as universal a sentiment as it gets. The spirit of the high-profile dotcom bubble, in fact, was not so far removed from the spirit of the rather quieter Scene — ride the highs, don’t think about lows.
The Scene being in comparative turmoil opened opportunities for others, though. Pirates of the 00s might remember a certain persona called aXX0 (or aXX0) — for most of the 2000s, aXXo had replaced the Scene as the leading sources of film and TV piracy in the world; so much so that, at his height, it’s estimated that aXXo films accounted for more than a third of all pirated films.
But while the Scene endured, shuffling through various groups and crackers, aXXo quickly vanished. The same has been true of most of the individuals who engage in cracking or piracy outside the scene — without the protection afforded by their strictly-enforced rules, and more importantly, without the motivation of their eternal race, it’s hard for an individual to achieve the same level of mythical fame that CPY or DEVIANCE have.
Strangely enough, it was at this peak of the pre-crash fun-loving age that the rules of the Scene began to harden. The rules that had earlier been simply a mechanism to facilitate competition became rigid and unyielding — a force unto themselves rather than a framework for talent. The Scene’s hierarchy was always complex — due in part to the utter chaos that comes of an entity referred to singularly but in fact completely disparate and only organized in the loosest sense of the word. Over time this hierarchy began to consume itself from the inside out — for a variety of factors.
I’ve been using the present tense to refer to the Scene this whole time, but now I’m wondering if the past tense would have been more suitable. The thing is, the Scene as we know it is a husk of its former self. In its heyday, the Scene, like the internet, was a digital Wild Wild West. But as the internet has matured, it’s become less GeoCities, more Amazon and Linkedin and Cloudflare. And somewhere along this transformation, the Scene was set adrift, torn between the hacking spirit that typified the Fairlights and Humble Guys in the 90s and the all-business ultra-commercialized digital industries of EA and Netflix that rule today.
That’s not to say that the Scene’s death was a bad thing. Even ignoring the misogyny and the obvious disregard for the law, the Scene cultivated a horrible atmosphere of toxicity, backstabbing, and sheer contempt that rang out loud enough to hear from inside their digital lead walls. Not to mention, they were, at the end of the day, criminals; some of them, as we would later find out, for far more serious things than breaking open a couple games.
Regardless, the financial crash came and went, and with it many of the same patterns that had followed the dotcom bubble. As the 2010s progressed, the typical shuffling of Scene groups started to show early signs of decline — one consequence of their distrust of outsiders and the dying exploratory spirit of the internet was that far more Scene groups were dying out and not enough were starting up. Somewhere along the line, digital security and the dastardly DRM industry became more important than the ragtag scene that opposed them.
But the real death knell of the Scene as we know it rang in 2014. An unknown Austrian software company had been working on something special for a while now, and when the curtains lifted on FIFA 15 in September 2014, the Scene had been changed forever, though few knew it at the time. The name of that company was Denuvo Software Solutions.
Their product, the eponymous Denuvo Anti-Tamper, was unlike any game DRM seen before. It was fiendishly complex, baked into the game itself, incredibly difficult to crack. Overnight, cracking games went from something fun to do with the boys on the weekend to a gruelling, full-time job that would require hours upon hours of devoted research and effort. That was never a strong point within the Scene.
That’s not to say that they were unable to crack Denuvo. Till date, atleast five different groups or individuals have been known to have cracked the infamous software, among them CPY and CODEX, perhaps the best known. But these victories for the pirates are few and far in between. Frankly, the Scene as we known it is dead — killed by the heavy hand of copyright enforcement.
What has risen from the ashes is a very, very different kind of cracker. What brought groups like Fairlight and even CODEX together was a spirit of competitiveness and fun, of a race to bragging rights. This is far removed from the motivations and actions of pirates today.
The harbinger of this seeming doom (though we scarce knew it) was a young Bulgarian hacker named Voksi. This particular haxx0r was, in hindsight, the first of the new breed — an ideological cracker, not a fun-seeking hobbyist. Voksi kept a very high-profile online presence, directly interacting with friends and fans — he didn’t just break Scene rules, he ignored them at every turn, pretended they didn’t even exist. Starting in 2016, just two years after Denuvo’s acquisition, Voksi made a name for himself as a bit of a revolutionary.
He uploaded videos to Youtube (a few of which, surprisingly, can be found there even today) explaining cracking for the “n00bs”. He cracked games for fun, yes, but he then uploaded them specifically for people to play, rather than to win a race. Voksi, in short, was the beginning of the end of the Scene cabal.
Unfortunately for Voksi, he was a bit too cavalier with his irl identity. He was soon raided by and shut down by his nation’s police, and he subsequently cut a deal that involved giving up his illegal activities. But he had lasted long enough to make a mark, and perhaps to serve as inspiration to a special someone. Voksi had, in fact, been the prototype crusader cracker that we’re so familiar with today.
The modern scene and this archetype of crusader coders is typified by one woman (though her gender has been a surprisingly controversial issue): EMPRESS. Also known as C00005 from her time working with CODEX and CPY, EMPRESS is the present and future of the anti-Denuvo brigade. But there are no two groups and no two ideologies as different as are EMPRESS and the Scene.
In blunt terms, EMPRESS is a zealot, a maniac, and a genius. Her arrival onto the scene (hah!) caused an incredible stir not just because of her skills (I don’t think it would be unfair to say that she is the most prolific anti-Denuvo cracker to date), but also because of her unconventional methods. The Scene has always been elusive, shadow, hidden behind a veil of their own creation — not so EMPRESS.
EMPRESS gladly and openly parades around on the clearnet. She even has her own subreddit, r/EmpressEvolution, where ‘philosophy talks’ are not an uncommon occurrence. Unlike the Scene, she openly asks for donation and support. Unlike the Scene, she openly feuds with other denizens of the pirate world, most prominently the popular repackers Fitgirl and Masquerade. Unlike the Scene, she is downright deranged.
I know at this point that it feels like I have something against her — I can almost hear the misogynist cancellation bells ringing — but I really don’t. The facts, however, do.
EMPRESS’s philosophy is impressive in a very villainous sort of way. She routinely talks about how Denuvo is the scum of the earth, about how they are, essentially, worse than murderers and rapists and drug pushers and the other lowlifes. In the early days, this wasn’t too much of a red flag. After all, the rigours of Denuvo demand someone who can offer this fiendish dedication, one that must necessarily be driven by a burning hatred for the software and its ideology.
But EMPRESS’s actions have grown increasingly deranged. Earlier this year, she picked a fight with FitGirl for no apparent reason, despite having collaborated closely before and even allowing her (FitGirl) to get a headstart on repacking Red Dead Redemption when she (EMPRESS) cracked it.
But the fame (or lack thereof) went to EMPRESS’s head. A short while later, she posted an extremely incoherent, inconsistent lambasting of how FitGirl and her fellow repackers “stole credit” from the crackers (namely, EMPRESS) who “actually did the work”.
This was soon followed by another polarizing move — when EMPRESS cracked Immortals: Fenyx Rising, she then proceeded to rate-limit her seedbox (essentially a server she used to distribute the illegal content), thereby ensuring that nobody could get the whole game for an extended amount of time (see FitGirl’s statement on the subject).
The point, it seems, was to not allow repackers to “steal the spotlight”. The actual effect was to tear the pirate community asunder. FitGirl immediately announced that she would stop repacking EMPRESS’s games whatsoever; Masquerade soon followed suit. Many in the pirate community were furious, but, typically for a community built around getting free stuff no matter the means, many sided with EMPRESS.
The “millennial” term for EMPRESS’s followers is, I believe, “simps”. A quick trip to r/EmpressEvolution will answer your doubts: the words “goddess” and “marry” are thrown around far too handily for my comfort. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of her “simps” would be far higher if not EMPRESS’s next move: pretend she was being arrested.
Yes, a few days after the FitGirl row, EMPRESS posted on reddit that someone (cough FitGirl cough, she said) had “doxxed” (given away her real identity) her to the police and that she was waiting to be arrested. Why the police would allow her to keep using her devices and why they would give her advance notice of her own arrest, was not explained.
This, then, is the state of things. 2020 and 2021 have been and will be dark years not just for the game piracy world but also for the gaming world. The only active Denuvo cracker in the world is, shall we say, not completely reliable. The Scene that was relied on and worshipped for decades is a floating corpse. The cracks are in short supply, the anti-cheats aplenty.
But as I type this, I have a feeling EMPRESS will never be short of supporters. Assassins’ Creed Valhalla was cracked shortly after Immortals, and one imagines it will not be the last we’ve heard of C00005. Set aside paranoia, possible lying, meaningless feuds. EMPRESS may not be the cracker pirates wanted, but she’s the cracker pirates need.
In the pirate world, nothing matters except skill. For the Scene, skill mattered because it made you top dog in their childish, misogynistic races. Today, skill matters because so few have it.
Gone are the days when cracking a game meant getting hold of an early copy and knowing someone who owned an IBM PC. Gone are the idle, bored techies, the college kids drunk on beer and Pacman hacks. Cracking today is more demanding than perhaps any other profession in the software industry, more even than the notoriously painful game development careers. And it shows in the crackers. The EMPRESSes of today are fuelled by burning hatred; -men on a mission, a mission that will only end with the collapse of an empire or the arrest of some weirdo.
“When the Dark Side rises, the Light Side rises to meet it.” It’s a deep quote and all that, but it’s from Star Wars. I think Fairlight would approve. The arms race that the anti-piracy world (inconveniently, the Dark Side) started has reached its natural endpoint — it has driven the, as they say, casuals out of business, and it has given birth to this entirely new breed that we see today. The zealots. The revolutionaries. The philosophers. The EMPRESSes.
I see EMPRESS as, simply, the product of her environment. When the anti-tamper industry was non-existent, cracking was a hobby — thus, the Scene. Now, it’s a full-time job for Very Motivated Individuals — thus, EMPRESS. There has been immense outrage at the fact that EMPRESS asks for donations to keep her operation running but, frankly, I fully expect it to be the new norm. Not because crackers are getting greedier, but because the corporations are.
In the fight of multimillionaire game studio versus amateur hacker, the pirates have always been the underdog. But the feeling doesn’t really seem to measure up to the results. After all, for decades and decades, piracy was extremely successful, barely pausing to brush off the efforts of the studios. Now though, things look very different. Call it a lack of perspective, but never before has the world of pirates and crackers and freebies teetered on the brink as much as it does today, resting, as it does, on the shoulders of one slightly psychotic genius.
What’s the solution, you ask? Perhaps I should point you to a certain CD Projekt Red. Despite their very public fail with their flagship game Cyberprank, CD Projekt Red’s ideology is one that I could see being the future of a sustainable gaming world. There is value in piracy, even to the sellers — after all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Though illegal gaming is naturally an area that’s not exactly bountiful with research, internet wisdom says that piracy rarely, if ever, hurts a game’s sales. Those who like it usually buy it if they can afford it, and if they can’t, they wouldn’t anyway. The distinction between losses and unrealized profits is, surprisingly, better understood by internet pirates than multibillion dollar anti-cheat companies.
But who knows? Maybe tomorrow Denuvo will announce they’re switching to an honour code system. Maybe EMPRESS will join the NSA. Maybe Todd Howard will actually release an Elder Scrolls game doesn’t contain the word Skyrim. Two years ago, nobody would have predicted EMPRESS. Maybe in two years we’ll laughing at the schmuck who thought the soul of the internet was coming to a dark, painful end.
Disclaimer: I have never participated in, nor intend to participate in, any violation, whether direct or indirect, of any copyright or intellectual property law, nor any private terms and conditions, through any act of piracy. My research for the article consisted entirely of two internet chats with people who (claimed that) were part of the fringes of the Scene in the 00s. I can confirm the truth of Denuvo-era info and the Fairlight-era info (which is now mostly common knowledge). The rest, well.
