Piracy on the Commodore 64: A memoir

Last Updated on May 29, 2025 by Dave Farquhar

One of the indelible memories of owning and using a Commodore 64, at least for me, was the disk drive knocking and rattling loudly as your game loaded. This was the results of deliberately putting errors on the disk to make it difficult to copy. In this blog post, I’ll give you the straight talk on how big of a problem software piracy was on the Commodore C-64, at least in the United States, and what it led to, including the bad, the ugly, and the good. Not that the end justifies the means, but over time it did lead to some good things too.

The stereotypes

The stereotype in the 1980s was that all Commodore owners pirated software. I can tell you that isn’t true. I knew two families in the 1980s who had Commodore 64s who didn’t pirate software. There may have been more than that, and probably were. But I can vouch for at least two. If I knew some, so did others. Harsh absolutes are rarely true.

I will also say more people I knew in the 1980s who had Commodores pirated software than didn’t. But I can say the same thing about every other type of computer as well. Piracy dates back to the Altair, so it’s a problem nearly as old as the microcomputer itself. I write about Commodores because that’s the machine I was most familiar with when this was going on.

The cost of software factor

Part of the reason for this came down to simple economics. Commodore computers were among the least expensive on the market. If you shopped carefully, you could get the computer for around $150 and the 1541 disk drive for around $150, connect it to a bedroom tv, and join the computer revolution for around $300. Commodore’s schtick was that you didn’t have to be upper class or even upper middle class to afford one of their computers.

Some people think cheap hardware decreases software piracy. I think it does the opposite. Here’s why.

The problem was even though the computer was really inexpensive, the software frequently wasn’t. Productivity software like a word processor or a spreadsheet frequently was less expensive than similar software for Apple or IBM computers. You could typically find one for a Commodore for around $40, where a comparable piece of software for an IBM or Apple computer might cost $100, and a professional grade program might cost three or $400.

But games were another story. New releases from top tier publishers like Activision or Electronic Arts frequently cost $40 regardless of the computer platform. Some publishers would discount the Commodore version to $30, but that was unusual.

As software aged, it would drop in price, frequently in $10 increments.

Lack of affordable software

I know in the UK, there was a large market for budget software. Most drug stores and most stores that sold magazines also carried a selection of inexpensive software on cassette. And by inexpensive, I mean it cost one or two pounds. A kid could spend their weekly allowance on new software.

There wasn’t a good equivalent to that in the United States. Disks cost more than cassettes, but if UK publishers could turn a profit at 2 pounds, it stands to reason that US publishers could have turned a profit selling disks for $4.

But rather than doing that, the US publishers who imported UK budget titles either sold them for $10, or they bundled several together, sometimes with an older US release, and sold the bundle for $20. This felt like a rip off, and I think it was. They would put four titles on a single floppy, but then still charge $20 even though they only needed a single disk rather than four. When they saved money on media, they didn’t pass it on to the consumer.

I knew people who pirated software because software that fit their budget just didn’t exist. And I knew people who pirated software because they felt ripped off. They paid $40 for a piece of software that turned out not to be very good, or that was just too difficult to play, and they’d been burned enough times that they didn’t want to take a chance.

How people pirated

Commercial software usually had deliberate errors on the disk to make copying impossible. Commodore disk drives came with all of the utilities you needed to connect two drives and copy a disk. But if the disk had errors on it, the included copy program would fail. The program Commodore included worked fine for copying your own data disks, but not for commercial software.

Utilities to copy commercial disks existed, but you had to go underground to find them. The chain stores that sold Commodore software didn’t carry those copiers, and the independent software stores usually didn’t carry them either.

You could find these copiers advertised in the back pages of computer magazines. You sent $30 or $40 to a post office box somewhere in Washington, California, or Oregon, and a week or two later, an inexpensively produced disk and booklet would show up in the mail.

These copiers usually would copy commercial disks, at least until publishers came up with new and novel schemes to prevent copying.

A fair bit of casual piracy happened this way, with two or more people who owned Commodores splitting the cost of the copier, and then copying each other’s software. The more friends you had with Commodore computers, the better this worked.

But there was another option available to the pirate who was willing to dig even deeper.

My first pirated software

I was in eighth grade when I first pirated software. I justified it at first by only pirating software that was old and out of print. If I couldn’t buy the software, I figured I wasn’t hurting anybody.

I copied software from two friends from church who had Commodores. They copied software from a third person, a friend of their parents. Also from church. Now I’m not saying everyone who went to church was a software pirate. It could have been any social setting. I mention this because I know some people will say my friends and I stumbled onto some kind of anti-capitalist commune. And that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t just radical leftists or anarchists who copied software.

Unlike the software you could buy in stores, this software copied fine with any ordinary disk copier. They had something a little bit faster and fancier than the copier Commodore gave you, but it still didn’t copy protected disks.

Nobody knew the software came from, and they may have been afraid to ask. I figured it out accidentally.

Modems and bulletin boards

Modems existed in Commodore days, and they worked in much the same way as modern modems do, except they used copper phone lines rather than cable TV lines or fiber optics. They were also several orders of magnitude slower. But they opened a whole new avenue for meeting people.

I was the first of my friends to get one, a Commodore VICmodem on closeout from COMB Liquidators for $20.

Finding a bulletin board to call usually took some work. But a local computer store or computer users group often ran a bulletin board. The first bulletin board I called was operated by Systems Plus Computers, a Commodore dealer on Watson road in suburban St Louis. For them, the bulletin board was a way to sell products. If I remember right, if you bought the modem from them, they would give you special access on their bulletin board so you could download software. It was all public domain software of course.

Since I didn’t buy the modem from them, so I couldn’t download anything. But they did have a listing of other local bulletin boards. I wrote down a few numbers and tried calling them.

Most of those bulletin boards were run by hobbyists. They had enough disposable income to be able to afford an extra phone line and an extra computer to plug into that phone line. They saw it as a way to meet like-minded people and exchange information and software. Some of them were pretty adamant so that you could only upload public domain software, and if you asked for pirate or elite access, they would ban you.

But there were also a large number of bulletin boards that did allow pirate software. Most boards had ratios. In order to download something, you had to upload something. They would let you download more than you uploaded, but you had to give something to get something. That wasn’t a problem for me. I just uploaded something that I got from one of my friends, and in return, I could download something.

If all you did was transfer files all the time, they called you a leech or a squid. Most bulletin boards didn’t want those types of people. They wanted people who were interested in building some community.

I participated in the discussion forums and met a lot of interesting people that way, including the future best man at my wedding, and a guy named Chuck who was an electrical engineer at Emerson Electric. Chuck became a lifelong mentor, and we talked computer security for the last 15 years or so he was alive. He was retired most of those 15 years, but he never stopped learning.

The Elites

I also met some hardcore pirates. Elites, we called them. The modern slang “leet” or “l337” comes directly from that. Elites were the people who were members of the cracking groups who would acquire commercial software, defeat the protection mechanisms, and then upload them to bulletin boards. These were the ultimate sources of the software everyone else pirated.

If I ever knew any of their full names, I’ve long since forgotten them. We called each other by our first names. I presume they were telling the truth about their first name. They probably didn’t have any reason to lie about it.

Commonality in their stories

They all had similar stories. They came from working class families that managed to buy the computer, but couldn’t afford much in the way of extras or software. Computer skills came pretty naturally for them. Somewhere along the way, they procured a modem, called a bulletin board, and got recruited into a cracking group. But by the time all that happened, they had more software than anyone could want or need. They cracked software because they enjoyed the challenge as much as anything else. Some of them never used most of the software they pirated, other than an assembler or a disk editor.

Several of them tried to recruit me into their cracking groups. I never joined. Most of them were into other things besides pirating software, including but not necessarily limited to phone phreaking and hacking. They told me how they did it, but I sat on that information for about 20 years. I didn’t want to get in the trouble with AT&T. But having talked with actual phone phreakers in the 90s made that part of the CISSP exam really easy for me later in life. The hacking was fairly casual, mostly limited to guessing passwords.

Meeting in person

I even met a couple of them in person. And it was a little weird when I ran into one of them a few years later, when we were both in college. Of course, the journalist in me wanted to know if he was still cracking software. He said no. He said toward the end of the C-64’s time on the market, new software to crack and release was becoming increasingly scarce. And he’d seen one too many people ruin their lives so they could pirate Grover’s Magic Numbers.

I still remember the intonation in his voice on the title. It was exactly what it sounded like. These were males in their late teens, pirating software aimed at six year olds for kicks because that’s all that was left.

He became an expert in Unix, and we crossed paths a few more times when we were in our 20s. He was one of those people you learned something new and important from every time you talked to them. Every time I talk about something Linux-related, I find myself repeating things he said to me decades ago.

Copy parties

There was another form of piracy at rather large scale: copy parties. These were usually invitation-only events, where someone with connections would procure event space, often at a VFW hall, and they would set up folding tables, people would bring computers and disk drives, and if you couldn’t bring equipment, you were expected to bring your collection of disks. People would set up their computers and load up a copier like Fast Hack’em or Maverick, and everyone would hang out and copy disks for the afternoon.

As you can imagine, with 50 people at one of these events running a copy station, in four or five hours, well over 1,000 illegal copies could change hands. Potentially.

The thing is, it was a social event for a lot of people there. It was a chance to hang out with a bunch of like-minded people that you only got to see a couple of times per year. Chuck, the guy I mentioned earlier, spent most of the time talking to people. He was a fixture at these events, but I honestly don’t remember seeing him ever copy anything.

I still remember one copy party where several of us spent most of the time outside playing softball.

Some people never used the software

When computer magazines talked about piracy, they would sometimes mention that people would claim to have thousands of pirated software titles and they never use the software. Of course that raised the question of what the point is.

But I believe it. Some people absolutely used the software they pirated. But some people just wanted to have it. It’s just a form of collecting. It’s no different than having a large collection of digital music or digital movies and having titles you haven’t watched or listened to in years, or possibly not at all.

Some of them had enough games that it would take a lifetime to play through them all.

Confessions of a pirate

In case you haven’t gathered through all of this, I did sometimes pirate software. I tended to pirate things that were out of print or not available in the United States. If I liked the title and could get a copy legitimately, I would more often than not. Especially once I had a decent paying job and had some disposable income.

I’ll tell you about some other pirates I knew, because I think their stories are more enlightening. Or at least more interesting.

The pirate who went straight

I had a good friend who pirated tons of software when he was in high school. His life growing up was an uphill battle in every way.

But practically the day he turned 18, he got a job at a software store. He had perhaps the largest collection of legitimate boxed commercial software I have ever seen. And this was when all of the software was new. I know he used his employee discount to get all of it, but that still meant he was paying more than half price.

For him, it was largely about the money. Once he could afford software, he started paying for it. Computers provided the way to a better life for him. Eventually he escaped retail, found a job doing corporate IT, and he’s had a successful career. When my own IT career went into the toilet in 2005, he was one of a very small number of people who tried to help me.

The suburban housedad pirate

I’ll tell you about another casual pirate, because he and I talked about it. I won’t mention him by name, but his initials were TV, like television. TV was probably in his early 30s. He was a stay-at-home dad. I don’t know the exact circumstances. The economy at the time wasn’t great, so I don’t know if it was a conscious decision that his wife had a better paying job so he stayed home with the kids, or if he was in between jobs during the time we knew each other and it just took abnormally long for him to find something. I was under the impression it was a decision they made.

I do know one of the reasons we lost track of each other was because they moved a couple of hours away where are the cost of living was lower.

TV told me that he pirated software because he could afford the computer, barely, but he couldn’t afford the software. The way he saw it, he’d spent the equivalent of a mortgage payment on the computer, so he bought into the ecosystem, and was entitled to it.

The flaw in that argument, of course, is that none of the software publishers ever saw any of that money that he paid for his C-64 and disk drive.

But I know what it’s like to have two kids, a single income, and have a hard time finding the money to pay the bills. I was in that situation in a different decade than he was, so I had different options than he had. If our situation had been reversed, I may have felt the same way he did.

And don’t get the idea that TV was some sort of a radical freeloader. And don’t get the idea of a suburban housedad living a double life as a member of an elite cracking group, going to rave-atmosphere demo parties and cracking software into the wee hours of the morning while his kids slept. He looked and acted exactly how you would expect an ordinary guy in the working class suburbs of St. Louis to look and act. All the way down to voting conservative, going to church regularly, and listening to conservative-leaning talk radio on AM. But there was this computer revolution going on and he didn’t want to miss out on it.

The elites

I knew several people in the late ’80s and early 90s who were members of cracking groups. As far as I know, there was only one bulletin board in the St Louis area that catered exclusively to members of cracking groups. But some of them would call the regular bulletin boards as well.

Most of them got into legal trouble, and even the ones who didn’t had some close calls. But it wasn’t ever software piracy that got anyone I knew into trouble. It was phone phreaking or hacking.

Unlike today, calling outside your area code cost extra, and you paid by the minute. Calling your teammates was expensive. Calling bulletin boards was also expensive. When minimum wage was $3.35 an hour and calling long distance cost $0.10 per minute, it doesn’t take a math genius to see the ratios didn’t work.

The long distance companies would set traps for them, send them an enormous bill, and if the bill went unpaid, law enforcement got involved.

They tended to disappear and sometimes never come back. The attitude at the time was that harsh punishments would scare them straight. But usually what ended up happening was they’d grow out of it. Once they were old enough to get jobs, that tended to start a domino effect. They’d find some fulfillment in work, find other creative outlets, get involved in a romantic relationship of some kind, eventually get a job that used the skills they had, and become a productive member of society.

I lost track of the guy I knew who got treated the most harshly. I know he spent multiple stints in juvenile detention. He kept coming back, until the time he didn’t. The story I heard was he ran away from home and disappeared. I hope he became like the others and found his way to a productive IT career. If he didn’t, it’s because society failed him.

Did Commodore bring this on themselves?

It’s possible to make an argument that Commodore created the situation by targeting a demographic that could barely afford the computer, and couldn’t afford software. A Commodore and a disk drive cost about $50 more than a Nintendo, but then you could buy a box of disks for $10 and pirate $400 worth of software. So for the cost of a game console and one game, you could get in on the computer revolution in addition to playing some fun games.

I never thought to ask TV if he considered that when he bought the computer. It would have been interesting to hear the answer.

And even though Commodore and Atari owners have the reputation for pirating stuff, I know piracy happened on other platforms. Cracked Apple software exists too.

And clearly there were people buying software, because there were software publishers advertising, and they advertised heavily enough to support four monthly magazines about Commodore computers for half a decade.

But it’s also clear the lost sales made the economics difficult for publishers, especially publishers that targeted platforms that didn’t have an installed base of 12 million like the C-64 did, or a higher-income demographic like the Apple II, or, ideally, both a large install base and a higher-income demographic like the IBM PC.

Piracy was complicated

Everything about piracy was complicated. The reasons it happened were complicated. The reasons it persisted was complicated. The social issues were complicated. But I’ll also argue it wasn’t all bad.

Here’s how my journey went. Although I never joined any cracking groups, I did crack some software with a disk editor. In college, I used those skills to recover word processing documents from corrupt disks for my classmates. I became a go-to data recovery guy. That and my knowledge of hardware got me my first non-retail, non-food service job. It also led to my first serious relationship. The job and the relationship were both problematic, but we learned what we were looking for. If you never have any setbacks in life, then you don’t ever learn how to solve anything.

When my second employer made the Wall Street Journal for all the wrong reasons, I used those skills to conduct a data forensics investigation that led to them collecting a settlement of nearly $10 million. No one else in the organization knew where to begin. I sat down with an attorney, asked her what she needed to make her case, and used a disk editor to find it. After a few more setbacks, I worked my way into a position to help hundreds of large companies solve complex computer security problems.

My story isn’t unique. And there was no one to teach us assembly language, the use of sector editors, data structures, and the other skills we learned figuring out how to pirate games. Those games provided the motivation we needed to sit down and teach ourselves useful skills. And then we figured out, sometimes by accident, that we could use those skills to become productive members of society.

Happy accidents

Another happy accident was that piracy led to preservation. In some cases, the pirated copies of software were all that we had left. And some commercial retro computing products use the cracked copies of software because it’s more practical. So 1980s piracy led to 2020s commercial products.

The problem of software piracy seemed simple enough. Software was more expensive than some people could afford. But that led to other things. It also required a domino effect to solve, one pirate at a time.

And it’s not lost on me that I’m talking about piracy in an age where large AI corporations are pirating my content, forcing me to compete with my own work. Some good will eventually come of that too. In the meantime, I feel for the content creators who won’t survive it, knowing it’s possible I’ll be one of them. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes said thousands of years ago, there is nothing new under the sun.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.