Sony itself installed chips in PlayStations. Because of an engineering oversight, the console did not produce a proper signal on several older models of television, and instead of changing the design, Sony offered to fit an official modchip at its service centres so those owners could play. Every other kind of modchip, Sony spent years fighting in court.
When an executive brought Ken Kutaragi evidence of the piracy problem in Asia, including damaged consoles turning up at Sony service centres, the father of the PlayStation denied it, even after staff showed him people enjoying pirated copies. His answer: "There's no piracy issue with PlayStation." He already had the next PlayStation running on a different chip that would not play them.
Nobody had the internet in their pocket
Jailbreaking and modding are furniture to you. Every device you have ever owned had a scene and a tutorial with timestamps. So for this one, picture a teenager for whom the internet was something that lived at other kids' houses. Every piece of gaming knowledge arrived through magazines printed weeks ago, or through the friend-of-a-friend network, which ran at the speed of recess.
I was that teenager, in a dodgy shop in Queens, where a man swore that a magic disc and a small piece of cardboard would make a PlayStation play anything. Copied games. Games from other countries. Did it work? There was no review to check and no forum to search. I paid, I carried it home, and I hoped I hadn't just torched a month of allowance on a lie.
The bouncer at the door
Sony saw the danger coming. CD burners were getting popular, so every genuine PlayStation disc was pressed with a small section of deliberately irregular data, a specific wobble frequency the console checked before it would boot anything. A normal disc drive treated that wobble as the disc shaking and corrected for it, so any copy came out without it. The same marked section carried the region: SCEA for North America, SCEE for Europe and SCEI for Japan.
The weakness was that the console checked once, at the door, like a bouncer. It read the region data and the table of contents from a real disc, decided all was well and stopped looking. If you then swapped in another disc without the console noticing, it played. Opening the lid normally stopped everything, so people kept the lid sensor pressed down with a paperclip or a wedge of paper, and the PlayStation went on believing its own lid was closed.
European discs needed more. I remember the ritual for my PAL copy of Final Fantasy VI on an American console: the magic disc, then a second disc whose whole job was to make PAL games work, then the game, in exact order like a safe combination.
It started almost at once. In June 1996, one player swap-booted a Japanese dating sim, Tokimeki Memorial, on a first-generation US console and played it for just over five weeks. By that late summer, the newsgroups were trading stories of "10-wire PSX boot chips", the first modchips, which did the bouncer's job for him on every boot.
A place called online
Where did copied games come from? A mystical place the older kids called online. The internet existed. It just lived on certain humming machines behind phone lines, and a PlayStation game was a whole CD. A PlayStation CD could hold 650 MB, and on a 56k modem at full speed that was more than a day of downloading, which any incoming phone call could kill.
Burning was a rich person's hobby for a while, too. In 1992 a typical CD recorder cost $10,000 to 12,000. In September 1995 Hewlett-Packard's 4020i became the first to cost less than $1,000, at $995, and by August 1998 HP's CD-Writer Plus models started at £279 before VAT in the UK.
So most games travelled by hand. In Brazil, a trademark dispute meant the PlayStation could not be released officially at all, and once Sega's Saturn withdrew, imports and piracy filled the gap. Sony's own staff described Southeast Asia as especially hard because there was no intellectual property protection there to lean on.
I saw the deep end myself. In Vietnam I walked into shops that were libraries of copied PlayStation games: you pointed at a title in the catalogue and it was yours for pocket change. A TV in one of them was showing the Spider-Man movie while it was still in cinemas back in the States. I had no PlayStation with me, so every disc was a bet until I got home, and the biggest letdown of my young collecting life was a stack that turned out to be burned music CDs.
The developers fought back
Game makers started hiding traps on the disc. Insomniac gave Spyro: Year of the Dragon crack protection on top of the usual copy protection, and it held off hackers for two months instead of the week it had taken to crack Spyro 2. Since as much as half of a game's lifetime sales came in that early window, Insomniac counted it as a win.
The courts were less tidy. In Sydney, a man named Stevens sold and installed modchips, and Sony took him all the way to the High Court of Australia, which ruled on 6 October 2005 that Sony's Boot ROM chip and access code did not count as a technological protection measure under the law. Sony went after emulators as well, even legal ones. Connectix released the Virtual Game Station, a Macintosh program that played PlayStation games, in January 1999 after Sony had declined to help build it. Sony sued, and the appeals court ruled 3-0 that copying the PlayStation's BIOS while reverse engineering it was fair use. Bleem!, a PC and Dreamcast emulator, never lost a lawsuit to Sony either, but the court costs sank it anyway. It shut down in November 2001, and its website was left showing Sonic the Hedgehog tearfully holding a flower next to a Bleem! gravestone.
By the PlayStation 2 era the map was a patchwork: a UK judge ruled in 2004 that selling the chips was illegal, while an Italian court that same year called Sony's restrictions "absurd."
Why any of this glowed
None of this would impress anyone today. Disc images sit in the open, a lazy search away, and nothing is at stake because nothing is hidden.
Back then every link in the chain could fail you. The shop could lie. The disc could be music. The download could die on day two. The cardboard could slip. And when it all worked, when the bouncer got fooled and a game from another hemisphere bloomed onto the screen, you hadn't just launched software. You had pulled off something half the playground didn't believe was real.
The console survived it all. The PlayStation sold 102.49 million units, and more than 4,000 games came out for it.
