After learning english I was surpised to see the majority of the anglos see clicking on roms as something only ivory dealers sea clubbers and social media managers do, so here's a little window into growing up in southern italy in the 2000s!
Shoutout to Yousef's article for making me think of how international this nerd site is
In a recent survey we’ve conducted, we’ve verified that the overwhelming majority of users on these forums do not speak English as their mother tongue, only speaking it as a secondary language, thus unifying at least a semblance of a language barrier we all share. So a lot of us will be on the same page here.
The data is quite interesting, as the number of native English users hardly scratches the two digits, however don’t misunderstand this being evidence that you won’t find people who have English as their native tongue. Not only did we get a submission from hilarious...
In case the guardia di finanza is reading: this is satire and if you wanna play Asterix arcade on your pc you should buy an arcade cabinet, log it to your house, buy a rom extractor and make your own backup of the arcade board bios and rom, I would never steal a car
Sony will deny if of course but one of the reasons its first two consoles were huge here is because you could do "La Modifica"
Every home had both systems along with a stack of dvds and cds, every dubious disc was completly different from one another, you had no idea what would show when you pressed the power button be it bloody and vulgar and inappropriate or colorful and childish or utterly terrifying, the console menu felt like a monster could jump out from its the darkness, it was an exciting time to be a weird kid!
When you bought a playstation at most electronics stores the seller would ask you if you wanna mod it for an extra 50, so then when sunday comes and after you leave church you go to The Moroccan (nickname for african or middle eastern street vendors) to get your new games, you'd be handed a stack of discs. The cover art also made an effort to say "Fac-Simile" just in case the plastic sleeve holding a piece of paper with distorted art taken from google image wasn't a giveaway.
Amusingly, some games were clear scams like Pokemon on the ps1 being actually Rescue Shot, and it seems that every single seller Had pokemon on the ps1! Ever on the other side of the country! They must've been all getting it from the same distributor, I always thought they did it themselves
My very first fighting game was Superman for the ps1!
It was actually Marvel Superheroes while the cover art was Superman 64. Phew. Ive never been more glad to be lied to.
So there you were, excitedly holding a fat stack of games and you can pick like 2-3 if you've been well behaved, and my moroccan would give me a discount from 5 to 3 euros
cause I came every sunday, I still say hi to him on the street (if you're reading this hi Ivo!); you can only go with whatever has the coolest cover and then try it as soon as you get home.
And when the PS2 launched, that meant your guy could sell you both games, music AND movies for it! Even if sometimes your copy of the incredibles was missing 20 minutes of the things at at one point one guy offscreen starts Loudly snoring; some other times though you'd get a movie in pristine quality before it even came out! I wonder how they did that
Occasionally I still got some original copies for the case and manual (which was far easier then because games costed 20-50 instead of friggin 80 euros), but the funny thing is, the off-the-street discs were in most cases better.
See if you were european and you wanted to play videogames and wanted the best experience, you had to play against the rules because to the industry you're priority number 10.
A lot of games straight up didnt come out in italy: Final Fantasy 7, Katamari Damacy, The Simpsons Hit and Run, any of the Shadow Hearts games except Koudelka to name a few. While others came out but they didnt bother translating it into italian, I got Psychonauts for my birthday and everything including the manual was in italian Except the game. Got suck on level 1.
One instance that was particularly cruel was Kingdom Hearts Chains of Memories. It was the real Kingdom hearts 2, all the info in the manual cites events that made me go "When did That happen?" and it turns out this was the link between 1 and 2 but it was only in japan (yes it originally came out on gba and that got an ita release but unless you were looking at nintendo magazines specifically you wouldnt know, and why would I buy one for Kingdom hearts when the first game was on PS2?).
Well 3 years later, I open the most recent issue of PSM and lo and Behold: it's finally coming out outside of Japan...only in America. But to console all the disappointed players Square Enix's at the time CEO sent an handwritten letter to every avid reader that said "Fuck you Gaijin". Ok that last part I made up.
My man had it a week later, I couldnt understand it cause it was in english but at least I got to see what it was like, in Ivo I trust.
And also every ps1 game and most ps2 games ran 14% slower but I'm assuming you've already heard that a milion times-
So this makes the balooning cost of retro collecting even more infuriating because you want me to pay 280 bucks for Silent Hill? And its the shitty version on top of that??
There's a handful of other moroccan games that everyone seems to have had, like the Captain Tsubasa game; to this day I see them on every flyier thats advertising a local football school for kids, its one of those sows thats never stopped being popular and probably never will.
They did however release the Yatterman game so thank you for that Banpresto! It's quite good too! It's 50hz only as usual but hey I appreciate the gesture, because when it comes to jap cartoons games I wont harp on the publisher too much because it couldve been a case where our tv network didnt wanna make a deal to distribute it, as they hold the rights to sell it in this country; ah well, I haven't willingly watched an italian dub on tv since I was 10 anyway. And Bandai also went out of its way to release a Lupin the Third And Sailor Moon game in italy and the Saint Seya game came out in europe so some Champion who works there knows.
This continued with the PSP and that one console you control with a remote but there is less to talk about: the technical history about how they were hacked is interesting and I recommend the Modern Vintage Gamer videos on em, the console from you know who was hacked with a pair of Tweezers, hehe
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It was all much less personal, you give your console to the store owner and they'd mod it for you and add the games you like, and for you-know-what they'd either sell you games individually or give you an USB hdd loaded with stuff. For that one handheld with the dual screens you just get an R4 and that was that, if you didnt know how to use a computer again the seller would just add random ones to it
Moroccans stayed in buisness with the XBOX360 as that used DVDs and all my high school mates had The Stack while I made the biggest mistake of my life and bought a PS3, c'est la vie.
Today everything related to clicking on roms is digital, the street vendors moved on to selling iphone junk and fake sunglasses and now I My Own moroccan.
This era of "everything goes" where everyone from the nerd to the the little child that just got his first console had equal access to the underbelly of game distribution will probably never happen again, at least not here, it was fun while it lasted.
Goodspeed and that one anti piracy PSA stopped playing in theaters because they didnt have the rights to use the music.
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. I remember asking my local store a "legally downloaded" copy of DBZ Budokai Tenkaichi 3 and my brother and I were expecting to play the game in English but to our surprise the game was in Latin Spanish and we were "like whaaaaaat this is awesome!" And one other day a school friend and I asked for a copy of DBZ Budokai 3. And the thing we got was DB AF the most amazing thing we could have saw at that moment. So yeah it was fun living in those days were every 3 dollars disk was a fun Russian roulette where you could get your game or something totally different. Cool article! Congrats on your first.
Sweet nostalgic memories, I remember very well a shop (not some forgotten back alley, but a true shop with insignia etc! ) selling, ahem, dubious CDs and DVDs for both PS1 and PS2, in a big city of Sicily, nonetheless... 
)
I also remember seeing a "neapolitan edition" mod of GTA San Andreas complete with its own cover art, I shouldve bought it! By then I knew it wasnt a "real" game but I shouldve appreciated it nonetheless!
