I’ve been pirating software since about 1993. Probably when I still had my first Hayes 2400 modem. I mostly went for games back then to give them a good preview before buying (well before the days when a “game demo” was common, or even pc gaming was common). Did a lot of BBSing, and saw the piracy revolution developing well before it hit the mainstream. Hell, I even made the welcome ANSI for the biggest Razor USHQ. Of course later into the 1990’s I got into downloading MP3’s of the obscure music I was hearing coming from far corners of the globe that I couldn’t get in our limited record store markets in Miami (bleep bloop anyone?).
So of course a couple years into Merck we started to get annoyed by the weak ass Scene releases of our CDs. Barely even listing the name ‘merck’ on the release, but smearing their crappy half-assed group name all across every damn file in the release. We decided to do our own scene release of the Lackluster, Adam Johnson, and Mix 2 cds, complete with a wickedly done .nfo file, and all the proper scene crap. Was entertaining for the few releases (gave up on it after that), I even remember some kind of ‘backlash’ from the scene about it, like we were somehow hurting them. Quite funny. Nonetheless, I spent several hours the other day trying to track down that original .nfo file on my hard drive, but unfortunately I think it may have gotten the chop some years back by accident. Fortunately my friend Shawn had one laying around, and Esa had a version of an Ascii done for us by reanimator from iCE for potential use as well. Here they are.
