WEBVTT

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JACK: Okay, so, I read about this story about a video game that I thought was interesting.

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So, it starts out on Steam. Steam is a video game marketplace, right, and you can download Steam,

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and through there you could buy video games to play and stuff. It’s a nice

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system. I like Steam because it provides a sort of standardized way to get games. See,

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before this, games for the PC were just all over the internet.

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There was no central place to go other than your local GameStop, and you had no idea if the game

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you found on the internet was legit or not. It could have malware in it, or maybe it wasn’t

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a complete game, or some weird, knock-off, pirated version. Steam saw this problem, too,

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and this is why they made the marketplace, and they developed a three-step process that all games

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must go through before they can be sold on Steam. First is that you have to submit your Steam page,

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then you have to submit your game for review, and then if those things are approved by Steam,

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you have the option to publish your game on their platform. Yeah, well, someone looked at this and

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they were like, hm, I wonder if I can get my game onto Steam without having to go through any

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of that process? So, they made the most boring game you can think of called Watch Paint Dry.

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Yes, in fact, if you downloaded and installed this game, all you do is sit there and watch paint dry.

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Surely a game this stupid would be rejected by Steam. Well, this game developer started going

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through the steps on how to get a game into Steam. They first created a developer’s account and was

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going through the process, but during those steps on Steam’s website, there were some questions,

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and one of them was a drop-down menu that asked what stage your game is in.

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Well, this person decided to try submitting some answers that weren’t in the drop-down options,

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which returned some weird results. Using that information, they were able to send data to

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Steam saying the game is currently published. They basically skipped the first two steps where Steam

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had to review it and just tricked the website into thinking it was published. Sure enough,

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that worked. The game was available on Steam for anyone to download. Watch Paint

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Dry bypassed all the checks to get onto Steam. It was there for like, a whole day before they

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noticed it and took it down. Steam has fixed this problem so you can’t bypass it anymore,

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but it’s an interesting exercise, isn’t it, to try to trick a video game marketplace to list

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your game as been reviewed and approved which makes the users trust that this game is okay?

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There’s a lot of trickery that goes on in the world of video games.

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(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m

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Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

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JACK:

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I’m real excited about this episode because I think this is one of the most-requested episodes

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I’ve been asked to make. But even though a lot of you have sent me article after article about this

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story, the problem is, the main guy in this story, Gary Bowser, has been unreachable, until now.

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GARY: Testing one, two, three. Testing one, two, three.

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PROXIMITY SOUND: Alright, I’m recording when you are, Jack; anytime.

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JACK: Great, thank you. Hi, Gary.

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GARY: Hello, Jack.

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JACK: Good to hear from you. What is it like being on the outside?

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GARY: It’s interesting. It’s a lot of getting used to.

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There’s things that I’ve taken for granted. Today, just sitting outside waiting come here, the rain

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had stopped, and watching the squirrels and listening to the birds sing, it’s — it was — and

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smelling the flowers and the garden, it was like, I never even felt that in three years. So,

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that was — it was a new experience to me all over again. So, little things like that are amazing.

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JACK: [MUSIC] So, what happened to Gary? Well, let’s find out.

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So, let’s go back; 1984. 1984, is that right?

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GARY: Yeah, it’s a long time ago, actually. Well, I was born in 1969,

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and by 1979, I was already working on computers and stuff. So, by 1984, I had already started

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my own company and was manufacturing software at that time for the tech system at Home Computers.

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JACK: So, Gary is in his fifties now, but to properly tell this story, we need to go back

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in time to the eighties. At this point, Windows wasn’t even a thing yet. Apple

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was just tinkering around in their garage. So, who was the big player in the personal

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computing scene? Texas Instruments. They built this little machine that you could play a few

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games on and type on and do some basic tasks. Gary loved it and thought it was really cool.

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GARY: The home computer world crashed in the ‘83, ‘84 period. Everybody went belly-up; Commodore,

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Atari, TI, Timex/Sinclar. The whole industry collapsed. [MUSIC] So, there was a huge market of

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people that wanted to support the machines. Now, the manufacturers

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weren’t making them anymore, but there was hundreds of millions sold. So, that’s where

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the original hobbyist market came out and people were grouping together trying to

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figure how to program the machines themselves, make new hardware, and continue supporting the

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equipment. So, that’s one of the areas where my company fitted in. I was manufacturing devices;

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originally just software and then eventually hardware, and that continued keeping the

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machine alive, waiting until new ones came out. So, it was a very profitable business when I

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started it in the eighties until it started to die out in the nineties when Windows came out.

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JACK: Gary would program software using the BASIC programming language, Assembly,

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and Texas Instruments’ own proprietary language called GPL. He’d make little programs on it to

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make the computer do more stuff. But then on top of that, he was also creating replacement

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parts for this computer, because if something were to go bad, Texas Instruments wasn’t making

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replacement parts, and Gary loved this little machine, and he knew how. So, he would just get

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the parts and solder them together and make new parts like graphic processors and other hardware.

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GARY: I was sourcing the parts from the company, the video processors and the memory, but I was

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actually making the — I designed the circuit boards myself; I had a contract manufacturer.

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Then bringing the parts in from like, Arrow, and then I had employees that were hand-soldering the

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devices together, and we were shipping them out by mail order once the orders came in.

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JACK: He was manufacturing computer parts, and I find that fairly impressive. He was

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certainly ahead of his time to be a start-up computer part maker in the 1980s, right?

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GARY: I didn’t actually start making the hardware until about 1990. The

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first part of the eighties was just concentrating on software.

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So, it was around ‘89, 1990, I started actually manufacturing hardware. I had a lot of inside

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contacts in Texas Instrument that had released information on how the video processors worked.

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TI licensed the original code to Yamaha, so I just piggy-backed on using the processor from Yamaha

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and finding a way to make it compatible with the Texas Instrument, which required some changes in

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the operating system, and that — I actually went back to Texas Instrument and got a license from

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them to modify the original operating system so that it would support the newer graphic systems.

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JACK: This is an interesting note that I want you to keep in your head; Gary was making

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programs for this computer and then working on ways to even improve the whole system. Like,

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making it work even better than intended and have more features and abilities. He was altering the

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computers so much that he asked Texas Instruments for permission to do this just to play it safe.

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They were done with that system and didn’t really care. In fact, they did a whole tax write-off to

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dissolve that whole arm of the company that was working on this, so they didn’t mind him

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cracking it open and modifying it to his heart’s content. They were fine if he even made money

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on his mods or software, and I think that’s the way things should be. It’s how we progress with

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technology. It’s to improve upon someone else’s code and someone else’s hardware, and the improved

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versions take us to new places, and it becomes a new standard for how things work. So, to me, this

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sounds great that he was modifying this little computer to do bigger and better things with it.

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GARY: Back then, I never owned a Super Nintendo or a Nintendo or even a Atari. I wasn’t interested in

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it. But when Windows came out, things started to change. [MUSIC] My business started to

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go downhill, people were moving on, they were starting to build PC computers. There was no more

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market for Texas Instrument stuff. So, I switched my business into — with another partner, we formed

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a company called Gen-X Computers, and I started building custom PCs based on people’s orders.

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From that type of business, I started repairing video game systems. So, by 2001, there was a lot

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of video game consoles. People were coming in with PlayStation 1s, original Xboxes,

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and it went from building computers to fixing the video game systems. So, that’s where it slowly

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slid, because there was no more market for the Texas Instrument systems during that time period.

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JACK: Fixing broken video game systems; this seems like an easy pivot for him. After all,

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a gaming system is simply a computer. It has a graphics processor, microchips,

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logic boards, same as a computer, but there was a big difference.

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GARY: The biggest difference with the video game systems is there were no computers that were

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manufactured in the seventies and the eighties — they allowed you, right out of the box, to program

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it. They came with a language. They came with a manual that told you how it worked. You could

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just sit down and start typing code and using it, recording it to cassette tape if you didn’t

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own a floppy drive, or recording it to a floppy drive yourself. But with the video game systems,

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that wasn’t possible. So, that’s where the sly came in, is like, well, why? This is a computer.

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It has memory. It has everything on it. Why can’t we just sit there and program it ourselves?

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So, that’s where the — I slowly started switching to the dark side. I wanted to see these systems

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unlocked. It was difficult to repair the systems, too, because you couldn’t just source the parts.

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With a computer, it was easy; you could order new memory chips from Future. You could order

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new processors from the original company. You could remove them and put them in. Now

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they had custom stuff and you couldn’t just put a new device in. So, there was more of an

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intrigue there of like, well, how come I just can’t replace the lens in the PlayStation 1?

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JACK: I mean, is it really Gary who’s going to the dark side to try to code these things or modify

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them, or is it Nintendo going to the dark side by locking out developers and purposely making

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it hard for them to modify it in any way? Nintendo did not want people tinkering with their system.

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Adding things to it or writing any custom software for their system was just a big no-no for them.

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I want to remind you that the NES system was just a little computer. It had a bootstrap,

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bios, firmware that all needs to load before it can execute a game. I mean,

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just look at the first version of the NES; it was called Famicom, which is sort for

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Family Computer. It’s clearly a computer. Now, when something failed on the Nintendo NES, it

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was very tricky to fix it. You might find someone who knows a few basic things that they could try,

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like maybe taking a part out of another NES and putting it in yours, but Nintendo wasn’t helpful

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at showing you how these things were architected to allow you to fix it or buy replacement parts.

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So, by hiding all this info, it made it extra-hard for people to just fix their own systems,

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and it also made it really tricky to modify them, to improve upon them, to upgrade them.

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They also used weird custom hardware that — was just crazy hard to find those parts. It’s like

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these game system makers were anti-innovation. They did not want people to customize or add

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on anything special to their systems; just play the games that we approve the way we want you to,

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and that’s it. Don’t try any funny business with your own computer. Was there pushback from the

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video game makers of like, hey, what are you doing getting inside our consoles? What’s going on here?

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GARY: Not originally. I mean, the original stuff that was done, like on the PS1 and

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the original Xbox, there was no pushback whatsoever. They looked at it as just a

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percentage of loss in business, and they would take more protection on their disks if piracy

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started happening. In the PlayStation 1, when the first chips started to come out, I’d bypass

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their boot-up system — they added more checks on the game itself to look and shut it down.

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Electronic Arts, the publishers themselves, were the ones that were more into locking out

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system — Electronic Arts was one of the first ones that started adding anti-piracy stuff on the PS1.

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JACK: Okay, so, yeah, people in the gaming scene were taking these systems apart and

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trying to modify it, making the game systems do new things that they didn’t originally do,

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and the game-makers hated this. They wanted desperately to keep their systems from being

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tampered with, and started making games that wouldn’t work if you did tamper with it.

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GARY: So, the original PS1 chips wouldn’t shut down. They would just keep injecting the signal.

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So, Electronics Arts, they added code in their game itself to check to see that signal was

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still being injected. Then they were like, well, that must be — it must be modified because we’re

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not sending a signal anymore from the disk. Why is the signal still there? So, then newer

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chips had to come out. They were called stealth chips that would shut down after a little while,

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and that would bypass the original checks that EA did.

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JACK: Let’s back up a second. [MUSIC] As I’m learning about all this, I’m getting

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super fascinated with the history of video game systems. So, before the PS1 was the Nintendo,

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and there was some drama going around over the air that’s worth highlighting.

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There was a UK game developer in the nineties called Codemasters, and they started making

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games for the Commodore 64, which is just an early computer, and you didn’t need to ask Commodore for

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permission to make a video game for their system. In fact, Commodore made it super easy for you to

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program on it. It came with a compiler that was easy to access. So, Codemasters made games for

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it. Then when Nintendo came out with the NES, Codemasters wanted to make games for this,

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too. But there was a big problem with this plan; Nintendo only wanted approved games to be played

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on their gaming console. So, they were strict on what game studios got a license to make games for

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Nintendo, and they didn’t share any information publicly like how to develop for it or anything

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unless you had a license. What’s more is NES had a little lockout chip that would check

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if the game you inserted was licensed, and if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t let you play it.

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Well, Codemasters thought, this is an interesting challenge, and poked and

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prodded at the NES until they figured out how to get an unlicensed game to load on the NES,

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bypassing the lockout chip. With this, they were able to create and sell NES games. Nintendo was

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not happy about this. An unlicensed game for sale on our system? How dare you! But Codemasters took

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it a step further. Since they had this working knowledge of how the NES loaded games and stuff,

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they developed something called a Game Genie. This was a clever little device, and it modified the

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game in real time to let you cheat. If you wanted extra lives or jump extra-high or just go right

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to the final boss, Game Genie could do that for you. It essentially gave you superpowers in the

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game that you were playing. Now, these were all one or two-player games back then. There was no

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online play, so cheating in a one-player game isn’t really ruining the game for anyone else.

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Codemasters didn’t call this a cheat device, though. They called it a video game enhancer.

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They developed this in the UK and licensed it in the US to a company called Galoob,

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which was a major toy-maker back then, and they started selling them in regular toy stores.

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You could buy a Game Genie in Kmart or Toys“R”Us. I remember my neighbor had one,

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and I think his mom bought it from Sears. But little did I know, when I was playing on my

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neighbor’s Game Genie, Nintendo was taking Galoob to court over this little device,

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saying it was a copyright violation. Nintendo was saying the Game Genie was a derivative work,

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and therefore subject to copyright infringement. This means Nintendo is saying that the Game Genie

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made minor modifications to the game to make it something new, but not making it unique enough to

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be something original, and was profiting from the original creators. Kind of like, if I put

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googly eyes on the Mona Lisa and try to sell it as my own original work. Well, it went to court,

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and judge ruled in favor of Galoob and the Game Genie. The judge said, look, the definition of a

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derivative work means you have to have a separate copy of that original work. Game Genie does not

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create a separate copy, but instead adds to the original copy because you still need the

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original copy to use it. So, clearly it’s not taking away from the sales of the game.

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The judge also went on to say that consumers have the right to fair use and commodify games

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however they please for personal use. This was a huge win for game-modders. Now they had

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a court case to prove that they had the right to modify their systems and games for personal use.

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Now, if we look across the aisle at the PC world, the software-makers there had no problem with you

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making personal backups of the software you bought. The thing is, floppy disks and CDs

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were notorious for going bad and getting ruined, so it was practiced by everyone. Even my grandma

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knew that as soon as you buy a new game for your PC, the first thing you do always is make a copy

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of it as a backup. Everyone was cool with this. PC-makers didn’t care. Game-makers didn’t care.

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They were fine with it because it was protected under the Copyright Act. Section 117 says,

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if you buy software, you have the legal right to make a personal copy of that software. In fact,

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it’s even essential if you want to do proper archiving of your digital files. So,

00:19:25.860 --> 00:19:32.040
with early computer games and software, there was no anti-copying methods in place to detect

00:19:32.040 --> 00:19:37.040
or stop copied games from being played on the computer. That brings us to the Dreamcast.

00:19:37.040 --> 00:19:43.920
[MUSIC] In 1999, Sega launched the game console called the Dreamcast, and this was a

00:19:43.920 --> 00:19:49.260
really cool little system. One thing about these console-makers is the console itself is a loss

00:19:49.260 --> 00:19:55.020
leader. That is, Sega was pricing the Dreamcast at below the cost it took to make the system,

00:19:55.020 --> 00:19:59.760
but that was okay because they’d know they’d make the money back on the games they sold. So,

00:19:59.760 --> 00:20:05.040
Sega was very aggressive at making sure that you could only play the games that were approved for

00:20:05.040 --> 00:20:11.040
the Dreamcast and not any copied versions or anything. In my opinion, this may go against

00:20:11.040 --> 00:20:15.780
Section 117 of the Copyright Act, where you’re allowed to make copies of the games you have for

00:20:15.780 --> 00:20:21.540
archival reasons. The Dreamcast used something called GD-ROMs, which basically means a gigabyte

00:20:21.540 --> 00:20:27.060
CD, and most people don’t have a drive on their computer that could read these kind of disks. But

00:20:27.060 --> 00:20:31.320
even if you did get those drives and tried to make a copy of it, there were two problems with it.

00:20:31.320 --> 00:20:37.560
One is it was protected and you couldn’t copy it, and two, the Dreamcast had a system in place that

00:20:37.560 --> 00:20:42.780
even if you did copy the disk, it wouldn’t let you play the copy. It’d only let you play originals.

00:20:42.780 --> 00:20:48.300
Sega did not care if this violated your right to make backups of the game you own. In fact,

00:20:48.300 --> 00:20:51.840
if you put it in your computer and tried to play it, all you’d hear is this message…

00:20:51.840 --> 00:20:55.860
SEGA: Warning; this disk is for use only on Sega Dreamcast.

00:20:55.860 --> 00:21:00.180
JACK: Anyway, long story short, this was a challenge for some to figure out a way

00:21:00.180 --> 00:21:05.100
around this whole system, and someone did figure it out. They found a way to bypass the

00:21:05.100 --> 00:21:09.000
anti-copy protections on the Dreamcast, and essentially what happened is that you could

00:21:09.000 --> 00:21:15.060
go online to a pirate website, download any games you wanted, burn it to a regular CD, and put it

00:21:15.060 --> 00:21:20.160
in the Dreamcast without having to modify the Dreamcast at all. This was really remarkable

00:21:20.160 --> 00:21:24.480
because there was no hardware modifications needed. [MUSIC] The way the CDs were written

00:21:24.480 --> 00:21:29.220
is that they would trick the Dreamcast that it was a playable disk by a clever use of reversing

00:21:29.220 --> 00:21:36.360
the randomization method on the Dreamcast. This opened the door up to pirating Dreamcast games.

00:21:36.360 --> 00:21:41.160
I remember when this happened, too. My friend told me, dude, you can download any pirated games you

00:21:41.160 --> 00:21:45.540
want for the Dreamcast now and just write them to a regular CD and they’ll play. I was like, no way,

00:21:45.540 --> 00:21:49.200
man, those games are like, on GD-ROMs. They’re not CDs. This will never work.

00:21:49.200 --> 00:21:56.040
But he demonstrated it to me, and I was blown away. Well, this didn’t last long. Soon after the

00:21:56.040 --> 00:22:01.380
pirating community announced that you could pirate games on the Dreamcast, Sega announced that they

00:22:01.380 --> 00:22:07.560
were discontinuing the Dreamcast and were leaving the video game console business altogether. This

00:22:07.560 --> 00:22:15.180
was only a few months after launching it. So, yeah, some say piracy wrecked the Dreamcast.

00:22:15.180 --> 00:22:21.900
But did it really? Two months after the Dreamcast was released, the PlayStation 2

00:22:21.900 --> 00:22:29.040
came out, [MUSIC] which blew away the Dreamcast in every way performance-wise. The killer feature on

00:22:29.040 --> 00:22:34.080
the PS2 is that it would play DVDs, which at the time was fairly rare for people to have in their

00:22:34.080 --> 00:22:39.840
home. So, why buy a DVD player when you could just buy a PS2 which has a DVD-player built into it?

00:22:39.840 --> 00:22:45.840
People were buying it for that feature alone. So, in my opinion, the thing that killed the Dreamcast

00:22:45.840 --> 00:22:53.340
wasn’t piracy but the fact that two months after its release, the PlayStation 2 destroyed them in

00:22:53.340 --> 00:22:59.280
sales. So, that brings us to the PlayStation 2 world. Remember the Messiah chip back then?

00:22:59.280 --> 00:23:01.620
GARY: Yeah, I remember the Messiah chip and everything.

00:23:01.620 --> 00:23:02.340
JACK: Did you get one?

00:23:02.340 --> 00:23:03.600
GARY: No.

00:23:03.600 --> 00:23:04.800
JACK: What about the Enigma?

00:23:04.800 --> 00:23:06.600
GARY: The Enigma?

00:23:06.600 --> 00:23:12.600
I think I had an Enigma at one time. It was a lot of wires to solder into the Xbox.

00:23:12.600 --> 00:23:15.540
JACK: Yeah, tell me your experience with either of these chips.

00:23:15.540 --> 00:23:20.280
GARY: Messiah was for the PlayStation system. It was one of the first chips

00:23:20.280 --> 00:23:23.040
that allowed a DVD to boot on the PlayStation 2.

00:23:23.040 --> 00:23:28.800
JACK: So, the Messiah was a mod chip that you could solder onto a PlayStation 2, and it was

00:23:28.800 --> 00:23:34.500
created by Paul Owen. I believe it bypassed the anti-copy protections and let you play

00:23:34.500 --> 00:23:39.840
copied games, and then when the Xbox came out, Paul also made a mod chip for it called Enigma.

00:23:39.840 --> 00:23:44.760
GARY: They came out with a bios that added new features; it allowed you to put in bigger hard

00:23:44.760 --> 00:23:53.880
drives, unlock the system. I hated the way you had to modify the system with the wires

00:23:53.880 --> 00:24:00.300
and everything. My solution at the time — I would actually just take the flash chip off

00:24:00.300 --> 00:24:07.860
and just reprogram it and solder it back on. Since I was in business before manufacturing hardware,

00:24:07.860 --> 00:24:12.300
I had the programming equipment and the soldering tools. So, for me,

00:24:12.300 --> 00:24:20.220
it was quicker just to de-solder the flash chip, reprogram it on my PC, and then solder it back

00:24:20.220 --> 00:24:25.140
in. I could do that whole operation within less than five minutes, which was a lot

00:24:25.140 --> 00:24:29.520
quicker than actually opening — sitting there and soldering a bunch of wires in.

00:24:29.520 --> 00:24:34.200
JACK: Did you ever sell that as a service? Like, hey, I’ll mod up your Xbox for you?

00:24:34.200 --> 00:24:41.580
GARY: I did for a while during the — 2004 to about 2008.

00:24:41.580 --> 00:24:45.240
I did do some modifying of consoles for people as a service.

00:24:45.240 --> 00:24:49.980
JACK: Did anybody ever get mad at you for that, video game makers or anything? Like,

00:24:49.980 --> 00:24:53.340
hey, cease and desist that you’re modding our stuff; we don’t want you to?

00:24:53.340 --> 00:24:55.440
GARY: No, they didn’t.

00:24:55.440 --> 00:24:56.900
JACK: Do you think they cared?

00:24:56.900 --> 00:25:03.900
GARY: I think so. They were actively moderating the forums even back then,

00:25:03.900 --> 00:25:05.700
and watching the information.

00:25:05.700 --> 00:25:11.460
JACK: Yeah, the game-makers were absolutely watching the video game modding forums, and

00:25:11.460 --> 00:25:16.920
they wanted to know what cheats and mods were out there for their systems and games. When Paul Owen

00:25:16.920 --> 00:25:22.380
made these two chips, that’s when Sony came in and threatened him with legal action. This forced Paul

00:25:22.380 --> 00:25:27.720
to stop importing Messiah chips for the PS2, but it didn’t stop people from buying them directly

00:25:27.720 --> 00:25:33.300
from Taiwan, and it didn’t stop Paul Owen from making more chips for the Xbox. In my opinion,

00:25:33.300 --> 00:25:37.860
it’s really cool that someone is able to make a microchip to enhance the gaming system,

00:25:37.860 --> 00:25:42.960
because I hate it when these things are so proprietary and secret and locked down that

00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:46.860
you can’t even repair the game system if it breaks. In fact, I don’t even want to

00:25:46.860 --> 00:25:51.000
call these things mod chips. They’re just accessories for your gaming system. Like,

00:25:51.000 --> 00:25:55.020
the other day, I wanted to put an M2 hard drive in my computer,

00:25:55.020 --> 00:26:01.440
but my motherboard didn’t have a slot for it, so I had to go buy a PCIE card that enabled

00:26:01.440 --> 00:26:06.720
me to use the M2 drives. This is not against any rules. This is a perfectly fine accessory

00:26:06.720 --> 00:26:12.840
to buy for your computer. The Xbox is a little computer, and it didn’t let you add a hard drive.

00:26:12.840 --> 00:26:16.920
So, it was Paul Owen’s release of the Enigma chip that allowed you to add an extra hard

00:26:16.920 --> 00:26:22.020
drive. Can you imagine if your PC was so locked down that you could not add a second hard drive

00:26:22.020 --> 00:26:27.660
if you wanted? Not even an external USB one? Paul made another mod for the Xbox,

00:26:27.660 --> 00:26:33.480
this time calling it the Xecuter. He liked that name so much that he started calling his little

00:26:33.480 --> 00:26:38.880
group Team Xecuter, which is an important part of this story. It’s the title of the episode,

00:26:38.880 --> 00:26:45.120
right? So, even though he was threatened with legal action to stop producing the PS2 mod chips,

00:26:45.120 --> 00:26:51.900
it didn’t stop him from making new Xbox mod chips and publishing them under the name Team Xecuter.

00:26:51.900 --> 00:26:57.480
Now, the courts didn’t think all this modding was cool like I do. In 1998,

00:26:57.480 --> 00:27:03.780
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA, was established, creating a whole new set of rules

00:27:03.780 --> 00:27:09.180
for copyright infringement in the digital age. Specifically, there were clauses that talked

00:27:09.180 --> 00:27:15.240
about circumvention. The DMCA criminalized the act of circumventing access controls,

00:27:15.240 --> 00:27:20.220
which is what video game makers were pointing out when trying to take down these mod chip makers.

00:27:20.220 --> 00:27:26.880
They were saying, look, you’re going through great lengths to circumvent our anti-piracy controls.

00:27:26.880 --> 00:27:33.000
That’s a DMCA violation. Video game makers were taking their cases to court and winning them.

00:27:33.000 --> 00:27:40.740
GARY: The video game companies, they wanted to protect the quality of the system, and

00:27:40.740 --> 00:27:47.280
that’s where — Nintendo actually started that and would put labels on their boxes that they sold,

00:27:47.280 --> 00:27:55.680
being quality assured, certified. Because what killed the systems in the eighties was

00:27:55.680 --> 00:28:01.980
one of this — a shovelware that was just too much stuff. The Atari 2600,

00:28:01.980 --> 00:28:10.140
the Timex/Sinclair, even the Texas Instrument home computer, there was tons of stuff being developed,

00:28:10.140 --> 00:28:15.240
and a lot of it wasn’t worth the $89, the $69.

00:28:15.240 --> 00:28:21.420
JACK: I don’t buy that because I’m a PC gamer myself, and there’s pretty much an infinite amount

00:28:21.420 --> 00:28:25.980
of games out there for me to play, and yeah, while I’ve bought some duds, I never get mad at

00:28:25.980 --> 00:28:31.380
Microsoft for making a PC with bad games. I don’t even blame Amazon when I buy something from there

00:28:31.380 --> 00:28:36.180
and it breaks right away. I just learn that I’ve got to do my research more before buying stuff.

00:28:36.180 --> 00:28:43.080
Hasn’t anyone in the video game industry heard of the term ‘caveat emptor’, or buyer beware? The

00:28:43.080 --> 00:28:48.960
buyer knows they’re taking a risk when buying something. It’s okay. Did you do much piracy

00:28:48.960 --> 00:28:54.140
at the time? Were you downloading wares? What was your experience with wares in the nineties?

00:28:54.140 --> 00:28:58.920
GARY: In the nineties, I didn’t do too much piracy,

00:28:58.920 --> 00:29:06.480
actually. I bought almost all the games that came out that I was interested in.

00:29:06.480 --> 00:29:09.540
The only piracy I did a little bit was actually on the computer side.

00:29:09.540 --> 00:29:15.060
JACK: By the 2000s, with the DMCA starting to show itself more and more in courts,

00:29:15.060 --> 00:29:22.020
PC game-makers started adding their own anti-copy protections. This attempted to make it impossible

00:29:22.020 --> 00:29:26.280
for users to make copies of the software they bought. I remember when this started

00:29:26.280 --> 00:29:32.340
happening at the time. The sentiment was, we no longer own these games; we’re just renting them,

00:29:32.340 --> 00:29:37.980
because it’s only a matter of time before this disk stops working or it locks you out somehow

00:29:37.980 --> 00:29:45.660
and you just have to buy a new one. I get it; there’s money lost due to piracy, sure,

00:29:45.660 --> 00:29:52.500
but I think all these anti-copying measures hurt the regular consumer and stifles technological

00:29:52.500 --> 00:29:58.680
growth. What do you mean I can’t add anything to my computer that I bought and own? It’s mine. I

00:29:58.680 --> 00:30:04.500
should be able to modify it any way I like. But the truth it, the major driver for most

00:30:04.500 --> 00:30:10.920
of these mods was to enable piracy, to let you download games off the internet for free and play

00:30:10.920 --> 00:30:16.680
them on your console. Video game makers thought this was drastically hurting their revenue, and

00:30:16.680 --> 00:30:22.260
that’s why they went to war in this way. I just wonder if there were better ways to deal with it.

00:30:22.260 --> 00:30:25.740
I mean, listen to this talk by Tony Chen, the head of security for Xbox.

00:30:25.740 --> 00:30:30.900
TONY: When I first joined Xbox, a lot of people throughout Microsoft — I have to explain to them

00:30:30.900 --> 00:30:36.660
why the problem we’re facing is fundamentally different than the problem that Windows needs

00:30:36.660 --> 00:30:43.500
to solve for its security. So, on a Windows PC system, the PC owner is the good guy.

00:30:43.500 --> 00:30:49.200
He’s working with us to prevent his PC from being attacked.

00:30:49.200 --> 00:30:54.300
The bad guys are the guys out on the internet trying to compromise his PC. So, Microsoft,

00:30:54.300 --> 00:30:59.340
as a operating system vendor, is working with the PC owner to fight the bad guys out on the

00:30:59.340 --> 00:31:06.060
internet. Okay, on the Xbox, the owner is the attacker, although the majority of our

00:31:06.060 --> 00:31:10.980
customers are good, but you have to treat them as the attacker in terms of designing your hardware.

00:31:10.980 --> 00:31:17.460
JACK: Do you hear it the way I hear it? Video game system owners are the bad guys?

00:31:17.460 --> 00:31:24.180
It just sounds weird to me. Like, that’s just being too aggressive towards your customers.

00:31:24.180 --> 00:31:27.960
I understand what your reasoning is here because they’re gonna pirate everything,

00:31:27.960 --> 00:31:33.540
but is there any research on if you don’t do anything to stop the pirates what percent of

00:31:33.540 --> 00:31:39.000
people will pirate? I bet the vast majority of people who can afford it will buy it. I

00:31:39.000 --> 00:31:43.620
bet you’ll see breakout hits due to piracy. I bet you’ll see people pirate stuff and then

00:31:43.620 --> 00:31:47.160
buy the full version later because they like the game so much and want to support the game-makers,

00:31:47.160 --> 00:31:51.900
and I bet you’ll see a much bigger impact with your game worldwide if it’s available for anyone

00:31:51.900 --> 00:31:57.000
to play on any budget. Look at the Humble Bundle, for instance. This is a website that sells video

00:31:57.000 --> 00:32:01.920
games, and the whole idea here is that you can pay whatever you want for the games. They’re

00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:06.240
put together like a bundle of ten video games, and then you pick the price of what you want to

00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:11.820
pay for the bundle. I love this model because if you’re poor, you can get great games for pennies,

00:32:11.820 --> 00:32:17.340
and on top of that, they’re giving a percentage of the revenue to charity. It’s a great way to meet

00:32:17.340 --> 00:32:22.260
your players where they are and be cool with whatever they can afford. Or, here’s another

00:32:22.260 --> 00:32:26.520
thing; I have a merch shop, right, where you can buy shirts and stuff on my online store.

00:32:26.520 --> 00:32:32.040
Yeah, well, with that comes a certain amount of scammers, people who buy my stuff and then try to

00:32:32.040 --> 00:32:37.440
get a refund on it, but then send back the wrong shirt or nothing at all, and it sucks, right? It

00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:41.760
sounds like my shoppers are not to be trusted and they’re crooks and they’re scammers. Yeah,

00:32:41.760 --> 00:32:47.820
well, no, I absolutely do not think my customers are crooks and scammers. I think my customers are

00:32:47.820 --> 00:32:52.380
fantastic and should be respected, and even though there are some bad apples involved,

00:32:52.380 --> 00:32:56.880
I go out of my way to treat everyone with respect. I’ll work to make you

00:32:56.880 --> 00:33:01.500
100% satisfied with your order, even if you’re a scammer. I don’t care. If something isn’t right,

00:33:01.500 --> 00:33:05.940
I’ll send you a new item or give you a refund, and that’s because I personally am more loyal

00:33:05.940 --> 00:33:10.380
to companies that treat me with respect, and I don’t like going into shops that treat me

00:33:10.380 --> 00:33:16.320
like some crook or some scammer when I’m not. I remember I visited Austria once, in Europe,

00:33:16.320 --> 00:33:20.400
and someone there told me that when you get on the train in Austria, they never check your ticket,

00:33:20.400 --> 00:33:25.620
and it’s because Austrians get personally offended if you question whether they paid for their ticket

00:33:25.620 --> 00:33:30.000
or not. Ticket, please! How dare you think I don’t have a ticket. What, do you think

00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:33.600
I’m some kind of thief and snuck on this train? What’s the reason of this line of questioning?

00:33:33.600 --> 00:33:39.240
So, they just stopped asking people for proof that they paid their way. You know what? I took the

00:33:39.240 --> 00:33:44.400
train there and nobody asked for my ticket. There wasn’t even a turnstile. It was such a culture

00:33:44.400 --> 00:33:50.760
shock to me, but I actually loved that level of trust and respect that the trains gave their

00:33:50.760 --> 00:33:56.340
passengers. The good people are gonna pay their way, and the majority of people are good. Yeah,

00:33:56.340 --> 00:34:02.040
sure, some will sneak on the train, but we’re not gonna inconvenience all those good people just so

00:34:02.040 --> 00:34:08.760
we can find the few bad ones. We’d rather have happy, good customers than making a little extra

00:34:08.760 --> 00:34:14.460
money by enforcing a pay-to-ride policy. Would it even generate more money to check everyone’s

00:34:14.460 --> 00:34:19.920
tickets? Now you have to have a ticket-taker on every train all day and night and pay their

00:34:19.920 --> 00:34:26.700
salary. My point is if you distrust your loyal customers, it’ll create a bad relationship between

00:34:26.700 --> 00:34:32.220
you and them. Anyway, back on track. I feel like this episode is getting me all worked up

00:34:32.220 --> 00:34:36.420
and it’s causing me to go all over the place. I’m sorry if I’m ranting too much. Okay, so,

00:34:36.420 --> 00:34:41.160
our players in this story so far are Paul Owen, the guy who made Team Xecuter and was selling

00:34:41.160 --> 00:34:46.080
mod chips, and there’s Gary Bowser, who’s very front-and-center of this whole mod chip scene.

00:34:46.080 --> 00:34:50.580
In fact, he’s so present on the forums that he’s starting to make a name for himself on there.

00:34:50.580 --> 00:34:57.720
GARY: I was more popular — originally on Xboxhacker BBS, I was a very popular poster

00:34:57.720 --> 00:35:05.100
on there. I started then posting on Xbox-Scene, posting news for the administrators on there,

00:35:05.100 --> 00:35:12.000
and then on another site for the PlayStation — it was called PSX-Scene — I was a very popular

00:35:12.000 --> 00:35:16.620
poster on there, and I started working with the administrator at that site.

00:35:16.620 --> 00:35:23.880
I was there when geohot — if you remember George Hotz, he found the original — what

00:35:23.880 --> 00:35:30.840
they called a root key for the PlayStation 3. He posted it publicly on PSX-Scene, and that

00:35:30.840 --> 00:35:38.940
caused that site to just take off, skyrocket, go from 100,000 users per day to a million

00:35:38.940 --> 00:35:46.140
users per day. There was lawsuits involved. By the time that happened, I was actually hosting

00:35:46.140 --> 00:35:52.800
that website for the administrator, and then Sony cracked down hard. They went after geohot;

00:35:52.800 --> 00:35:59.820
there was court orders. I started posting all of what was happening in the court case. There was

00:35:59.820 --> 00:36:05.760
actually, at one time, a movie deal being worked. People thought that George Holt would fight Sony,

00:36:05.760 --> 00:36:13.140
go all the way, and unfortunately, he decided to settle and that was the end of it.

00:36:13.140 --> 00:36:17.940
JACK: Gary Bowser was so active on these forums that he started getting approached

00:36:17.940 --> 00:36:22.980
by people to actually be paid to be a forum admin. The first place that offered him a job,

00:36:22.980 --> 00:36:27.360
he didn’t like that one, but then a guy with the screen name MAXiMiLiEN approached

00:36:27.360 --> 00:36:32.880
him and offered him a paying job to be a forum admin. How did you meet MAXiMiLiEN?

00:36:32.880 --> 00:36:35.040
GARY: Well, I never met him in person.

00:36:35.040 --> 00:36:36.300
JACK: Not ever, ever?

00:36:36.300 --> 00:36:40.500
GARY: No, never seen him in person. I know what he looks like from his

00:36:40.500 --> 00:36:45.060
Instagram and Facebook posts and I know what his voice sounds like from

00:36:45.060 --> 00:36:49.860
phone calls that I had with him, but I’ve never actually met him in person.

00:36:49.860 --> 00:36:50.280
JACK: Alright.

00:36:50.280 --> 00:36:58.620
GARY: But I was introduced to him — well, the original owners of PSX-Scene, they knew him,

00:36:58.620 --> 00:37:04.980
so they introduced me to him and we had some phone calls, and then he said,

00:37:04.980 --> 00:37:11.400
look, I need someone to run the site. You can do whatever you want with the site as long as you’re

00:37:11.400 --> 00:37:17.040
available to post news when I give you information about new products that they’re gonna release.

00:37:17.040 --> 00:37:24.240
JACK: The site was maxconsole.com, and MAXiMiLiEN had just purchased it from another person. It was

00:37:24.240 --> 00:37:28.980
a fairly popular forum at the time talking about how to hack video game consoles, where to buy

00:37:28.980 --> 00:37:34.260
mod chips, and just news about the modding and video game world. But it didn’t trade any piracy

00:37:34.260 --> 00:37:39.060
or have links to any pirated games. You know, MAXiMiLiEN is the main character of this story,

00:37:39.060 --> 00:37:45.780
so let’s back up and learn more about him. [MUSIC] He’s from France. In the 1990s, MAXiMiLiEN was in

00:37:45.780 --> 00:37:52.620
the Warez scene, which is piracy. A Warez group is one that rips games off the disk, cracks it

00:37:52.620 --> 00:37:57.300
free from any anti-piracy methods that were on it, and makes it available for anyone to download and

00:37:57.300 --> 00:38:03.420
play for free. MAXiMiLiEN led the Warez group Paradox in the nineties, and if you played the

00:38:03.420 --> 00:38:09.180
pirated game Spyro back then, chances are it was MAXiMiLiEN’s group that supplied it to you.

00:38:09.180 --> 00:38:15.960
In 1994, MAXiMiLiEN had an innie in the telephone company. An innie is someone who works inside the

00:38:15.960 --> 00:38:22.380
company who would be part of the scam. This innie was sending him thousands of free calling cards,

00:38:22.380 --> 00:38:27.660
and I don’t know how, but MAXiMiLiEN took these stolen calling cards and racked up a

00:38:27.660 --> 00:38:34.440
$22 million phone bill with them. MAXiMiLiEN was arrested for this and he pled guilty and

00:38:34.440 --> 00:38:40.800
was sentenced to almost six years in jail. He was sent to prison in Virginia, and I think

00:38:40.800 --> 00:38:44.460
this is a good time for an ad break while we wait for him to get out of prison, but stay

00:38:44.460 --> 00:38:54.480
with us because that’s just MAXiMiLiEN’s origin story. What he does next is even more crazy.

00:38:54.480 --> 00:39:00.300
So, MAXiMiLiEN served six years in prison for stealing calling cards, but when he got out

00:39:00.300 --> 00:39:06.180
of prison, it seemed like he went back to the pirate scene. He bought the website Divineo.

00:39:06.180 --> 00:39:08.400
Do you remember a site called Divineo at the time?

00:39:08.400 --> 00:39:14.460
GARY: Yeah, that was one of the first resellers out there that were selling

00:39:14.460 --> 00:39:19.680
devices from Team Xecuter and other companies and third-party controllers

00:39:19.680 --> 00:39:26.460
and stuff. I actually used them myself to buy some mod chips back in the day.

00:39:26.460 --> 00:39:31.080
JACK: So, what MAXiMiLiEN saw was that Team Xecuter had been making and selling these mod

00:39:31.080 --> 00:39:36.240
chips by the tens of thousands, and there was a whole system in place. The chips were created

00:39:36.240 --> 00:39:41.460
in Asia somewhere and then shipped in bulk to the US, and then sold through the Divineo

00:39:41.460 --> 00:39:46.260
site. Max thought this looked like a good business and got in touch with Paul Owen,

00:39:46.260 --> 00:39:52.500
the owner of Team Xecuter, and Max offered to buy Team Xecuter from Paul. The Team Xecuter branding,

00:39:52.500 --> 00:39:58.980
the website, the supply chain, everything was sold to MAXiMiLiEN. Now that he had this little

00:39:58.980 --> 00:40:04.200
mod chip business, MAXiMiLiEN needed a solid way of getting the word out on his new products. So,

00:40:04.200 --> 00:40:10.320
that’s when he decided to buy maxconsole.com, a popular modding forum. His idea was that he could

00:40:10.320 --> 00:40:15.300
use this place to just basically have unlimited marketing for all the things that Team Xecuter was

00:40:15.300 --> 00:40:20.460
releasing, and he just needed someone to help run the site, and that’s when he asked Gary.

00:40:20.460 --> 00:40:26.220
GARY: Yeah, the original idea was I could do whatever I want with the site, keep 100%

00:40:26.220 --> 00:40:34.380
of the ad revenue, but he wanted a couple spots on the site just for his products. So,

00:40:34.380 --> 00:40:41.700
the top banner spot would be for his products, and whenever he had a press release made for a

00:40:41.700 --> 00:40:50.040
new product, I had to be available on-call, post it right away. That way, that site would have the

00:40:50.040 --> 00:40:56.280
news first and then everybody else would have to link to that site because of the exclusive news.

00:40:56.280 --> 00:41:01.920
JACK: Well, Nintendo was all over these forums and seeing when new mod chips were announced,

00:41:01.920 --> 00:41:07.800
and didn’t like this one bit. They started doing their own research. They found that Divineo had

00:41:07.800 --> 00:41:12.420
been getting their chips from Hong Kong, so Nintendo went to Hong Kong and opened up a

00:41:12.420 --> 00:41:17.340
court case against Divineo, [MUSIC] claiming it’s an infringement on their intellectual property.

00:41:17.340 --> 00:41:24.840
The Hong Kong Supreme Court ruled in favor of Nintendo, which immediately froze all of Divineo’s

00:41:24.840 --> 00:41:33.420
operations in Hong Kong, and the ruling demanded that Max pay Nintendo €44 million in damage.

00:41:33.420 --> 00:41:40.980
€44 million; that’s a huge fine. But I believe MAXiMiLiEN just found a different country to

00:41:40.980 --> 00:41:46.140
get his chips from and kept on doing business without paying any of the fines put on him.

00:41:46.140 --> 00:41:51.720
So, Nintendo went to his home country, France, to take legal action on him there. They took him

00:41:51.720 --> 00:41:55.380
to court and they told the courts, look, we already found this guy guilty in Hong Kong.

00:41:55.380 --> 00:41:59.940
He’s supposed to be paying us €44 million in damages. He hasn’t paid a cent of it yet

00:41:59.940 --> 00:42:04.740
and he keeps violating our intellectual property. Can you please do something?

00:42:04.740 --> 00:42:11.880
But the French courts ruled in favor of MAXiMiLiEN. Max’s defense was that Nintendo

00:42:11.880 --> 00:42:17.280
was locking out developers from being able to develop on the system, and his mod chip allowed

00:42:17.280 --> 00:42:22.800
anyone to develop on it and play home-brew games on it. The courts liked that. They said, yeah,

00:42:22.800 --> 00:42:26.520
Nintendo, what’s up with you putting all these locks on your game system to people

00:42:26.520 --> 00:42:33.420
can’t build on it? Seems rude. Leave Max alone. So, Nintendo took a bad blow there. I think they

00:42:33.420 --> 00:42:36.900
tried to appeal that case, but I couldn’t find any articles that followed up with it.

00:42:36.900 --> 00:42:44.400
GARY: There was this craze of bringing back the older systems, the Super Nintendo, the Nintendo,

00:42:44.400 --> 00:42:50.400
the PlayStation, the Sega, many versions of those original consoles that people loved,

00:42:50.400 --> 00:42:55.680
but those systems were locked down again, and that they only had a

00:42:55.680 --> 00:43:01.680
certain selection again. The PlayStation 1 Mini only had like, twenty games on it.

00:43:01.680 --> 00:43:08.040
JACK: Yeah, so, Sony came out with this little PlayStation Mini. It had no option to put any

00:43:08.040 --> 00:43:14.460
game in it of any kind. It had no game disk reader or a cartridge reader, and it wasn’t online so

00:43:14.460 --> 00:43:19.260
you could download anything more. It only came with these twenty games that were built into it,

00:43:19.260 --> 00:43:24.360
and that was it. You could never play anything more, which is kind of weird,

00:43:24.360 --> 00:43:29.580
isn’t it? If you release a mini version of your system that clearly can play PS1 games,

00:43:29.580 --> 00:43:35.700
why restrict it to just those twenty games? So, of course, the gaming community was like,

00:43:35.700 --> 00:43:39.540
we need to figure out a way to get this thing to play any PS1 game we want.

00:43:39.540 --> 00:43:48.000
GARY: The PlayStation 1 actually used an open source emulator and just added their own little

00:43:48.000 --> 00:43:53.520
skin to it to select the games. So, they were just taking someone else’s work that they had made,

00:43:53.520 --> 00:43:59.040
an emulator that they could find on GitHub, assemble it themselves, add their own skin,

00:43:59.040 --> 00:44:06.660
and use an Android board from China, without the battery or the screen to run the emulator.

00:44:06.660 --> 00:44:11.460
JACK: Okay, I had to look this up and research it deeper because this is gonna become important

00:44:11.460 --> 00:44:19.560
later. The mini PlayStation used the PCSX emulator, which, yes, is open source,

00:44:19.560 --> 00:44:25.920
and it’s also under the new public license, the GPL. Now, even though the PCSX emulator

00:44:25.920 --> 00:44:33.960
is free and open source, Sony took it and put it on the PS1 Mini and charged for it.

00:44:33.960 --> 00:44:40.440
But the GPL clearly states that’s okay; you can put this software on some commercial product and

00:44:40.440 --> 00:44:46.560
charge for it. There’s a few things that are interesting about that. The spirit of free and

00:44:46.560 --> 00:44:51.960
open source software that’s licensed under the GPL is that you shouldn’t charge for this. It’s free.

00:44:51.960 --> 00:44:58.080
It’s developed by a community of volunteers, and here Sony is lifting it off GitHub and slapping it

00:44:58.080 --> 00:45:03.360
on their little console. But there’s nothing wrong with that according to the letter of the license.

00:45:03.360 --> 00:45:10.980
It just contradicts the spirit of the GPL license, and it’s so strange to me that a

00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:18.600
video game console maker such as Sony would use an open source emulator on their latest console.

00:45:18.600 --> 00:45:22.800
Well, the modding community did manage to get into this little PS1 Mini,

00:45:22.800 --> 00:45:26.640
and they loaded up their own emulator on it which unlocked the system to be able

00:45:26.640 --> 00:45:34.740
to play any and all PS1 games on it, not just the twenty that came with it. [MUSIC]

00:45:34.740 --> 00:45:38.760
Now, when MAXiMiLiEN saw how the community was able to bypass this whole thing,

00:45:38.760 --> 00:45:43.440
he started manufacturing a little USB drive that you could plug into the PlayStation.

00:45:43.440 --> 00:45:48.960
It would bypass the protections on it and allow you to play any pirated games you had. In fact,

00:45:48.960 --> 00:45:55.140
it came with a hundred games on it. This was called the True Blue Mini. For Nintendo,

00:45:55.140 --> 00:45:59.880
there was one called the Classic 2 Magic. Both of these products were by Team Xecuter,

00:45:59.880 --> 00:46:03.060
but they were selling it under a different brand at the time. So,

00:46:03.060 --> 00:46:08.760
how much did these — the Classic 2 Magic and the True Blue Mini cost people?

00:46:08.760 --> 00:46:14.100
GARY: Well, I think that the prices — there wasn’t — the Classic 2 Magic didn’t have no

00:46:14.100 --> 00:46:21.420
games. It was mainly to allow you to plug the original cartridges in. So,

00:46:21.420 --> 00:46:27.900
it added the cartridge slot itself. I forget what the price was. Like, $59 or $79 or something.

00:46:27.900 --> 00:46:31.620
JACK: So, who was making this stuff? Was it MAXiMiLiEN? Do you think he

00:46:31.620 --> 00:46:36.900
had the ability to design circuit boards and come up with these hacks, I suppose?

00:46:36.900 --> 00:46:46.080
GARY: No. Max — for me, I was the PR man to get the internet — to get the posts out there

00:46:46.080 --> 00:46:50.820
on the internet, to get people to know about it, to find people to review the products,

00:46:50.820 --> 00:46:56.940
to get the reviews published. Max is more — was more on the marketing side,

00:46:56.940 --> 00:47:04.260
coming up with the ideas. He came up with the names of the products. He came up with

00:47:04.260 --> 00:47:12.360
the ideas of the websites and how to market it to the people. He dealt with all the — finding

00:47:12.360 --> 00:47:21.240
the resellers to sell it, to get it — all the background stuff, but he was not a techno guy.

00:47:21.240 --> 00:47:26.160
He was smart; he knew how technology worked and stuff, but he wasn’t an engineer or anything.

00:47:26.160 --> 00:47:33.420
JACK: Did you have any input into how they were made or helped create any of those devices?

00:47:33.420 --> 00:47:41.640
GARY: No, no. I didn’t help — any of the newer devices, I had no help in creating them. I knew

00:47:41.640 --> 00:47:46.800
some of the developers that were working on it. I would chat with them a little bit. I

00:47:46.800 --> 00:47:55.020
would get advanced copies of the product for testing, sometimes do a product review so that

00:47:55.020 --> 00:48:03.780
before they started chipping, it was like, this is how it works. But I was mainly to do the PR,

00:48:03.780 --> 00:48:09.180
to do the press releases, which I didn’t even write myself. I would be given the

00:48:09.180 --> 00:48:13.860
press release pre-written and then I would just add my own words to it and post it.

00:48:13.860 --> 00:48:18.240
JACK: Did he collaborate with you on just like, what new product can we come out with? ‘Cause…

00:48:18.240 --> 00:48:18.870
GARY: No.

00:48:18.870 --> 00:48:22.440
JACK: …you have a very good understand of the whole modding scene, what’s coming out,

00:48:22.440 --> 00:48:26.280
what can work, what can’t work, and then you’re seeing, well,

00:48:26.280 --> 00:48:31.620
there’s this new exploit that just hit. Max, you might want to make a

00:48:31.620 --> 00:48:36.600
mod for this. This, I think, would take off. You know, just a little suggestion like that to Max?

00:48:36.600 --> 00:48:40.140
GARY: No, I never had those discussions with him.

00:48:40.140 --> 00:48:46.920
I mean, I would post the news on what was happening. He made those decisions on what

00:48:46.920 --> 00:48:52.980
he would do business-wise and what he would do next. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know — like,

00:48:52.980 --> 00:48:56.760
when he was working on the Switch, I didn’t even know he was working on the Switch. He would just

00:48:56.760 --> 00:49:01.320
tease me saying there’s something else coming up, there’s something coming up. Until something was

00:49:01.320 --> 00:49:05.520
actually concrete, a lot of times I was out of the loop to. I didn’t even know about it.

00:49:05.520 --> 00:49:10.980
JACK: So, surprisingly, while sitting here researching things, I’m currently seeing a

00:49:10.980 --> 00:49:18.480
True Blue Mini clone right there on Amazon for $43, and it says it has 15,000 games on it. This

00:49:18.480 --> 00:49:23.700
is an illegal product being sold right there on Amazon, and it just makes me think because video

00:49:23.700 --> 00:49:29.760
game system makers are actively taking websites to court who sell mod chips. This Amazon listing

00:49:29.760 --> 00:49:37.440
has 15,000 games bundled into the mod chip, which means you can buy pirated games on Amazon. Now,

00:49:37.440 --> 00:49:41.280
of course, Amazon themselves isn’t selling it. Someone listed it there on the Amazon marketplace,

00:49:41.280 --> 00:49:45.960
but still, they’re facilitating the sale of it, fostering the whole deal,

00:49:45.960 --> 00:49:53.160
bringing this mod chip and pirated games to the masses. Why isn’t Sony suing Amazon over this

00:49:53.160 --> 00:50:00.120
or trying to take down their website? Because in 2005, Sony did get mad at MAXiMiLiEN for

00:50:00.120 --> 00:50:05.880
selling these same mods for the PlayStation and they took him to court, and Sony won that case,

00:50:05.880 --> 00:50:12.480
which resulted in Max having to pay $5 million in damages. That’s what,

00:50:12.480 --> 00:50:17.700
the fourth time he’s been to court now, and he now owes over $50 million in fines

00:50:17.700 --> 00:50:22.920
to these game system makers at this point. The guy seemed to be unfazed by any of this, though.

00:50:22.920 --> 00:50:28.800
He had a rebellious mindset. While he felt like an enemy to the game-makers,

00:50:28.800 --> 00:50:34.260
he felt like a hero to the players of the world. Yeah, a lot of people did really like the stuff

00:50:34.260 --> 00:50:38.640
he was releasing. He claims that he just wanted to unlock the game system’s potential

00:50:38.640 --> 00:50:43.620
and give users more access and to be able to do more things. My personal opinion about him

00:50:43.620 --> 00:50:48.960
though is that he’s just a businessman and he’s business-minded and he just is looking for unique

00:50:48.960 --> 00:50:53.700
ways to make some extra money. He understands this whole development cycle and manufacturing

00:50:53.700 --> 00:51:02.820
process, the marketing and supply chain very well, and he’s using it all to his advantage. [MUSIC] In

00:51:02.820 --> 00:51:10.020
2017, Nintendo released the Switch. Of course, the modder community immediately began breaking

00:51:10.020 --> 00:51:14.760
it open and trying to find a way to mod it, and someone discovered that you could glitch

00:51:14.760 --> 00:51:20.400
it by taking the right Joy-Con off and bridging the two points with a paperclip, and from here,

00:51:20.400 --> 00:51:25.680
you could then get it to boot into recovery mode and have access to diagnostic tools. The modder

00:51:25.680 --> 00:51:30.180
community took that and figured out how to get the Switch to boot to their own operating system,

00:51:30.180 --> 00:51:37.200
which basically made it so that you could play any pirated game on the Switch.

00:51:37.200 --> 00:51:41.940
When MAXiMiLiEN saw what the modder community had done, he jumped on it.

00:51:41.940 --> 00:51:46.740
His developer got to work building two physical devices; one that would slide into the Joy-Con

00:51:46.740 --> 00:51:51.720
port and trigger the glitch, while the other would go into the USB drive to have the system boot into

00:51:51.720 --> 00:51:58.320
a custom firmware. Team Xecuter called this add-on the SX Pro. The idea is that it enabled

00:51:58.320 --> 00:52:04.020
you to copy games that you already had or play any pirated games that you had. The design was clean

00:52:04.020 --> 00:52:09.660
and super simple. People who had no experience modding systems could easily get this working

00:52:09.660 --> 00:52:15.660
and were giving it great reviews. So, they had this thing all developed and manufactured,

00:52:15.660 --> 00:52:20.640
and then they wanted to announce it on the forum that Gary was the mod for, and this is where

00:52:20.640 --> 00:52:26.820
Gary was obligated to promote this device, since that was the deal that he made with MAXiMiLiEN.

00:52:26.820 --> 00:52:30.840
Now, when you’re a mod-maker, you’ve got some potential things that can go wrong with your

00:52:30.840 --> 00:52:36.780
whole business. See, sometimes Team Xecuter would sell their products for, let’s say $30, but then

00:52:36.780 --> 00:52:44.040
see the exact same product being sold directly out of Asia for $2. It was pirate versus pirate,

00:52:44.040 --> 00:52:49.020
because the factory that was making the chips for Team Xecuter would just sometimes make some extra

00:52:49.020 --> 00:52:55.020
and sell them directly to the consumer, totally undercutting Team Xecuter. So, Max didn’t want

00:52:55.020 --> 00:53:00.360
that happening with SX Pro, so he decided he was going to add his own software into the thing.

00:53:00.360 --> 00:53:07.380
So, instead of loading the Switch’s native operating system, the SX Pro would load up SX OS,

00:53:07.380 --> 00:53:13.260
which was basically just an open-source emulator. But Max took it a step further. He didn’t want

00:53:13.260 --> 00:53:19.020
someone pirating SX OS, so he decided that he was going to require everyone to have a license

00:53:19.020 --> 00:53:26.400
key before using the SX OS. So, you had to pay like, $25 just for the license to use this mod,

00:53:26.400 --> 00:53:31.920
and this angered quite a few people. First of all, paying a license for pirated software?

00:53:31.920 --> 00:53:36.840
That’s unusual. The whole method to do this hack was posted right there on the forums.

00:53:36.840 --> 00:53:42.180
You could just use a paperclip and a USB cable and your phone and get the Switch to boot into

00:53:42.180 --> 00:53:46.920
the same emulator. You didn’t need the SX Pro at all. But the idea of it, though,

00:53:46.920 --> 00:53:52.320
was that it makes this whole process of hacking your Switch easier. You just had to pay for this

00:53:52.320 --> 00:53:57.360
easier method. But it still bothered people that they were charging for pirated software. I mean,

00:53:57.360 --> 00:54:02.640
the whole point of piracy is to go around having to pay for stuff, you know? On top of that, some

00:54:02.640 --> 00:54:08.400
users were getting mad that the emulator in this thing was just a free and open-source emulator. A

00:54:08.400 --> 00:54:13.860
lot of people were upset because you’re taking a free and open-source software and charging

00:54:13.860 --> 00:54:18.840
for it? But this is ironic because this is the same thing PlayStation did with their PS1 Mini,

00:54:18.840 --> 00:54:24.420
remember? The emulator that was on the SX OS was called Atmosphere, which was licensed

00:54:24.420 --> 00:54:29.340
under the GPL, the same as what Sony did, and people were mad at them for charging for this.

00:54:29.340 --> 00:54:35.760
GARY: Yeah, well, that’s a problem that’s going on with everything, even recently of Red Hat.

00:54:35.760 --> 00:54:41.700
JACK: Oh man, I didn’t think about that. But yeah, Red Hat is a version of Linux, and yeah,

00:54:41.700 --> 00:54:46.560
they took the free and open-source Linux software and suddenly started charging for

00:54:46.560 --> 00:54:51.300
it. There’s been quite a lot of controversy over that. Like, why are you taking other

00:54:51.300 --> 00:54:55.800
people’s code and charging for it? You didn’t write that. But Red Hat’s like,

00:54:55.800 --> 00:55:01.740
look, it’s free to use by anyone and it’s licensed under the GPL, so, it’s cool. Again, I think this

00:55:01.740 --> 00:55:06.300
argument is going back and forth between the letter of the license versus the spirit of the

00:55:06.300 --> 00:55:11.520
license. The other thing that people were getting mad about is that some users were reporting that

00:55:11.520 --> 00:55:17.760
their Switch would become broken after using the SX Pro. Yeah, they were, because what Max did here

00:55:17.760 --> 00:55:22.680
is that he didn’t want someone else trying to understand or steal the software on the SX Pro.

00:55:22.680 --> 00:55:27.060
So, if you were detected trying to crack into it or poke or prod at it,

00:55:27.060 --> 00:55:30.840
it would send a signal to completely break your Switch,

00:55:30.840 --> 00:55:38.520
and I think that’s going too far. Sure, this never happens as a normal user of the SX Pro, but if you

00:55:38.520 --> 00:55:43.440
poke and peek into it too much it breaks your system? Yeah, setting your pirated software to

00:55:43.440 --> 00:55:48.240
destroy your Switch is just not cool to me at all. [MUSIC] But despite all these complaints,

00:55:48.240 --> 00:55:59.260
the SX Pro did very well. A lot were being sold and the reviews were almost always positive.

00:55:59.260 --> 00:56:05.040
As its popularity grew, SX Pro was making someone else really mad; Nintendo.

00:56:05.040 --> 00:56:10.080
They were like, wait, what? You’re charging for a device that lets people play pirated games?

00:56:10.080 --> 00:56:15.780
You’re making money from our hard work? We’ve gotta stop this. So, first they patched it. All

00:56:15.780 --> 00:56:21.540
Switches made after 2019 were no longer vulnerable to this attack, and then they started trying to

00:56:21.540 --> 00:56:30.480
find and stop this whole Team Xecuter operation. So, uberchips.com was another place you could…

00:56:30.480 --> 00:56:38.820
GARY: That was one of the resellers in the United States that got sued

00:56:38.820 --> 00:56:43.740
by Nintendo for selling the device. They were one of the first resellers

00:56:43.740 --> 00:56:49.020
that were gonna be selling the SX Light and the SX Core for the Switch.

00:56:49.020 --> 00:56:57.300
JACK: So, at any point do you feel like you were a member of Team Xecuter?

00:56:57.300 --> 00:57:05.160
GARY: At the original beginning during the early 2000s, I was just

00:57:05.160 --> 00:57:10.020
a user posting on the forums and helping other people out. In the end,

00:57:10.020 --> 00:57:17.280
I was just the PR guy posting the news and making sure that the testers

00:57:17.280 --> 00:57:21.780
could get information on what was happening with the products over to the developers,

00:57:21.780 --> 00:57:28.020
but I was never on the actual development side of doing the actual exploits of the coding.

00:57:28.020 --> 00:57:34.680
JACK: I don’t know if I would feel like I’m a member of this at any point,

00:57:34.680 --> 00:57:39.960
you know? Just being a member — you would be a member of maxconsole.com and feeling

00:57:39.960 --> 00:57:43.380
like you worked for them, but not so much a member of Team Xecuter.

00:57:43.380 --> 00:57:52.500
GARY: Not really. I wasn’t — I could just say I was a in-between guy. I was more than a tester

00:57:52.500 --> 00:57:56.634
but not a developer. More of just a go-between guy. [CROSSTALK]

00:57:56.634 --> 00:58:02.100
JACK: Yeah, but what’s interesting here is that

00:58:02.100 --> 00:58:08.520
if we were to put you on the trial here, we like to look for — when we’re prosecuting someone,

00:58:08.520 --> 00:58:15.000
if they have the know-how, opportunity, and motive to do all this — and you have all three. You have

00:58:15.000 --> 00:58:19.620
the know-how of modding chips, you have the opportunity of doing it ‘cause you’re doing it,

00:58:19.620 --> 00:58:27.240
and you have the motive ‘cause you like doing it. So, you seem to be the perfect person to

00:58:27.240 --> 00:58:33.120
create this, to improve upon it, to come up with ideas, all these things. You’d be such a

00:58:33.120 --> 00:58:39.360
great value asset to the team. I’m surprised Max didn’t ask you for more stuff to do.

00:58:39.360 --> 00:58:45.660
GARY: He never really wanted me to get too involved. He knew I could,

00:58:45.660 --> 00:58:54.000
but he wanted me to be arms-length away from it in case something did happen.

00:58:54.000 --> 00:58:59.580
He said just stay as a PR guy because that way — freedom of press,

00:58:59.580 --> 00:59:06.360
you know. I’m not directly connected. If anything does happen, it won’t hurt you.

00:59:06.360 --> 00:59:11.100
JACK: Did you have a moral line where — or even a rule set on Maxconsole where it’s like,

00:59:11.100 --> 00:59:15.420
listen, we don’t distribute pirate software here or anything like that?

00:59:15.420 --> 00:59:25.080
GARY: Yeah, there was actually a lot of rules. I would not allow links to pirated stuff. I would

00:59:25.080 --> 00:59:32.400
take down ads that advertised SD cards full of chips. There was a few times resellers would

00:59:32.400 --> 00:59:36.900
try to do that. I would send them a letter and say, hey, you can’t do that. I’m taking

00:59:36.900 --> 00:59:42.240
down your ad. There’s no refunds. You can’t — you can advertise a product, but you can’t advertise

00:59:42.240 --> 00:59:50.340
games. I would actually take action if I got an actual enforcement letter. When I used to

00:59:50.340 --> 00:59:58.200
publish mods for Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar would send me a letter and say, hey, don’t talk about

00:59:58.200 --> 01:00:07.200
games — mod patches for GTA, please? I would say, okay, no problem. I took down the post.

01:00:07.200 --> 01:00:13.320
When the Activision stuff got hacked and the Skyliners, which were a very popular toy,

01:00:13.320 --> 01:00:19.920
Activision contacted me. They sent me a cease and desist. I took down the information.

01:00:19.920 --> 01:00:27.600
When the leaks of the Sony SD case came out and I posted about it, Sony would say, hey,

01:00:27.600 --> 01:00:32.520
it’s okay, but take down any links to it. I would take down the links.

01:00:32.520 --> 01:00:38.760
So, there was some back-and-forth that way, too. There was not supposed to be any links to

01:00:38.760 --> 01:00:45.780
any ROMs on the site. There was a couple posts that I missed that were in the Classic 2 Magic

01:00:45.780 --> 01:00:51.480
area that had links, again, to this ROMs site, but they weren’t supposed to be on that at all.

01:00:51.480 --> 01:00:58.500
JACK: Hm, no pirated games on these forums were allowed. I’m trying to think; so,

01:00:58.500 --> 01:01:03.900
Team Xecuter wasn’t actually selling anything on the site. They’d just link to places like

01:01:03.900 --> 01:01:09.660
Divineo where you could buy it from. But still, the Team Xecuter stuff mostly enabled your

01:01:09.660 --> 01:01:14.760
device to be able to play pirated games and didn’t actually have pirated games on them,

01:01:14.760 --> 01:01:21.120
except for one device. Yeah, but the — okay, but the True Blue is stick-full of pirated games.

01:01:21.120 --> 01:01:27.780
GARY: Yeah. That is true, but with the True Blue,

01:01:27.780 --> 01:01:37.560
those were basically for older systems; the PS1, the Sega Genesis, the Commodore 64.

01:01:37.560 --> 01:01:42.300
JACK: So, you had a line in your head of like, oh, hold on a second, is this a discontinued

01:01:42.300 --> 01:01:47.520
game or not? Yeah, I guess there’s no other way to get it other than to pirate it, so go ahead.

01:01:47.520 --> 01:01:56.760
GARY: I mean, we didn’t sell the devices on the Maxconsole website. We talked about it.

01:01:56.760 --> 01:02:01.200
It was up to you to find the devices. I didn’t profit off of it, either, so…

01:02:01.200 --> 01:02:06.060
JACK: I guess I should talk about where the characters of the story are at this point. So,

01:02:06.060 --> 01:02:10.920
Gary moved from his home town in Ontario, Canada to the Dominican Republic while he

01:02:10.920 --> 01:02:15.960
was doing all this, and the ad revenue that he was making from maxconsole.com was enough

01:02:15.960 --> 01:02:20.760
to support his lifestyle down there. He was making about $40,000 a year, and this was

01:02:20.760 --> 01:02:27.180
his main job and source of revenue for about nine years. MAXiMiLiEN was living in France.

01:02:27.180 --> 01:02:33.840
Any idea how much Max was making off of these products that he was selling?

01:02:33.840 --> 01:02:39.420
GARY: Not really. I mean, people come up with estimates and stuff. Nintendo themselves came

01:02:39.420 --> 01:02:49.320
out with an estimate; they estimated around 500,000 SX OS licenses were sold at the time.

01:02:49.320 --> 01:02:56.580
So, you could think of 500,000 times $25 for the license fee, and that’s not on the hardware;

01:02:56.580 --> 01:03:04.560
that’s just on pure profit. So, that’s not counting the Gateway 3DS or any edit devices.

01:03:04.560 --> 01:03:14.280
JACK: [MUSIC] Then 2020 came along. The pandemic happened, and Gary was in the Dominican Republic.

01:03:14.280 --> 01:03:21.960
GARY: What happened to me is on September 27, I was looking forward to waking up that day

01:03:21.960 --> 01:03:27.240
because where I was living was in the Dominican Republic,

01:03:27.240 --> 01:03:33.660
and we were under a Covid lockdown for the longest time. When Covid hit Dominican Republic,

01:03:33.660 --> 01:03:39.960
the president there put the country into basically martial law. You couldn’t be outside your house

01:03:39.960 --> 01:03:45.720
after 5:00 at night, you couldn’t leave your neighborhood, there couldn’t be more than

01:03:45.720 --> 01:03:50.940
ten people into a grocery store or pharmacy or a bank. Those were the only three things that were

01:03:50.940 --> 01:03:58.560
allowed to be open. Everything else was shut. It was total lockdown. In fact, so hard that

01:03:58.560 --> 01:04:04.200
where I was living, it was like, I couldn’t even leave my apartment and go into my little office

01:04:04.200 --> 01:04:09.480
I had, which was right next door. So, I actually broke a hole through the wall

01:04:09.480 --> 01:04:15.120
instead of having to be able to walk outside and walk in so I could actually work at night.

01:04:15.120 --> 01:04:21.180
So, I was looking forward to September 27, because that was gonna be the end of the lockdowns.

01:04:21.180 --> 01:04:27.360
Airports were gonna reopen, you’ll be able to go outside all day long, the bars will be open again,

01:04:27.360 --> 01:04:35.040
the beaches will be open again. It was gonna be the end of the extreme lockdown. So, I was looking

01:04:35.040 --> 01:04:43.740
forward to it. But 5:00 in the morning, instead of waking up at 7:00 in the morning and going outside

01:04:43.740 --> 01:04:51.420
and enjoying outside, [MUSIC] 5:00 in the morning, I woke up with a shotgun pointed to my head and a

01:04:51.420 --> 01:04:56.220
bunch of people in my place. At first I thought I was getting robbed. I didn’t know what was going

01:04:56.220 --> 01:05:04.620
on. There was a lot of crime during Covid. All I knew is I’m getting dragged out of my house early

01:05:04.620 --> 01:05:08.460
in the morning and there’s a bunch of people in the place looking at all my electronics,

01:05:08.460 --> 01:05:15.240
grabbing all the computers. I tried to talk to them to find out what’s happening. They refused

01:05:15.240 --> 01:05:23.220
to talk to me in English or Spanish and acted as if I were speaking Russian or German, looking at

01:05:23.220 --> 01:05:29.820
each item and — oh, what’s this guy talking…? Even though one girl that I knew lived above

01:05:29.820 --> 01:05:36.480
me came downstairs, they even didn’t tell her what’s going on. They were just saying, oh, he’s

01:05:36.480 --> 01:05:45.540
being taken to have his papers checked and once his papers get checked, we’ll release him. So,

01:05:45.540 --> 01:05:54.660
they took me out of there, brought me to the Interpol office. I sat down on a couch. They still

01:05:54.660 --> 01:06:01.260
continued to refuse to talk to me. I was screaming that I wanted to talk to the Canadian government.

01:06:01.260 --> 01:06:07.980
After about a day of just sitting on the couch, the next day on the 28th, they drove me to this

01:06:07.980 --> 01:06:15.300
cage in the middle of nowheres with a bunch of other patients that they had rounded up, and

01:06:15.300 --> 01:06:25.020
threw me in there. I spent like, two or three days in that cage, still not knowing what’s going on.

01:06:25.020 --> 01:06:30.900
Luckily, I got a little bit of food from someone else that got food brought to them,

01:06:30.900 --> 01:06:35.760
another Haitian, an old guy that took pity on me. He gave me some of his food, shared it with

01:06:35.760 --> 01:06:43.740
me. ‘Cause in the Dominican Republic, when you go to jail, you don’t get fed. Your family has

01:06:43.740 --> 01:06:53.400
to show up and bring you food. Otherwise you just starve. So, I spent three days like that.

01:06:53.400 --> 01:06:58.560
Come October 1, they take me out of the cage and they said, we’re taking you to

01:06:58.560 --> 01:07:04.860
see the Canadian government. Finally; about time someone listened to me. But instead,

01:07:04.860 --> 01:07:08.760
they drive me to the airport. I start yelling and screaming at the airport again, saying, hey,

01:07:08.760 --> 01:07:13.920
where is the Canadian government? Well, they can’t make it. You can find out when you get back home.

01:07:13.920 --> 01:07:20.100
They handed me my passport, they handed me 3,000 pesos, they handed me a plane ticket to Toronto,

01:07:20.100 --> 01:07:24.840
and they said, once you’re on the plane, you get to Canada, you can figure it out. You have

01:07:24.840 --> 01:07:28.860
to leave the country. I said, well, am I under arrest? They said, no, you’re not under arrest.

01:07:28.860 --> 01:07:33.300
You’re just being kicked out of the country. Your Visa is expired.

01:07:33.300 --> 01:07:37.260
You’re not welcome anymore in the country. I was like, well,

01:07:37.260 --> 01:07:41.280
I want to talk to the Canadian government. They said, no, you can talk to them when you land. So,

01:07:41.280 --> 01:07:46.560
I got on the plane. It was one of the first airplanes after the Covid lockdowns ended,

01:07:46.560 --> 01:07:54.480
so it was just packed with people. There was an unbelievable amount of people on the plane.

01:07:54.480 --> 01:07:59.040
It flies and gets to New Jersey, and it has to land in New Jersey,

01:07:59.040 --> 01:08:04.080
refuel again, and then it would take back off and go to Toronto.

01:08:04.080 --> 01:08:11.340
But after 9/11, any time an airplane lands in America, everybody has to get off,

01:08:11.340 --> 01:08:17.100
scan their passport before they can get back on the airplane. Before 9/11 you would just

01:08:17.100 --> 01:08:23.160
sit in the terminal in what they call a transit area. You didn’t actually enter the country.

01:08:23.160 --> 01:08:30.240
Of course, the moment I scan my passport in New Jersey, that’s when the indictment showed up

01:08:30.240 --> 01:08:36.600
and I got taken to secondary inspection. From there, I was told I was actually

01:08:36.600 --> 01:08:44.400
gonna be arrested. They drove me to the Essex County Jail which was a nearby jail. The FBI

01:08:44.400 --> 01:08:48.960
drove me there. They said, you’re gonna stay here overnight and then we’re gonna take you

01:08:48.960 --> 01:08:55.860
to where your case is. I still don’t know what I’m being arrested for or what — anything about.

01:08:55.860 --> 01:09:04.320
October 2nd came. I got read my rights by a judge over the telephone

01:09:04.320 --> 01:09:09.780
when I was in county jail, and that’s when I found out I had thirteen different charges

01:09:09.780 --> 01:09:17.540
on me with money laundering, wire fraud, and bypassing technology measures and all that.

01:09:17.540 --> 01:09:22.680
JACK: They take him to jail. He stays there for five weeks. They take him to another jail;

01:09:22.680 --> 01:09:27.600
he stays there for three weeks. He finally sees the judge and they ask him, hey, are you guilty or

01:09:27.600 --> 01:09:33.780
not, Gary? He’s like, these charges are crazy. I’m not guilty. Now, at this point, the prosecuters

01:09:33.780 --> 01:09:39.180
have to gather more evidence on him. Gary’s name on Max Console Forum was simply GaryOPA,

01:09:39.180 --> 01:09:43.960
and that name was easily linked to his company that sold Texas Instrument Parts in 1984. So, it

01:09:43.960 --> 01:09:49.440
was very easy to figure out who Gary was. He made no attempt at hiding what his real name was. So,

01:09:49.440 --> 01:09:54.780
when Nintendo wanted to come after Team Xecuter for the SX Pro stuff, they came right after Gary.

01:09:54.780 --> 01:10:00.420
But he wasn’t the only one caught up in this. Let me read the title to you of the FBI press release.

01:10:00.420 --> 01:10:07.380
Two members of notorious video game piracy group, Team Xecuter, are in custody.

01:10:07.380 --> 01:10:10.320
The other that was arrested was MAXiMiLiEN.

01:10:10.320 --> 01:10:16.800
He was arrested while on vacation in Tanzania, but he somehow convinced the police there that

01:10:16.800 --> 01:10:22.680
his arrest was illegal, and guess what? The Tanzanian police agreed and they let him go.

01:10:22.680 --> 01:10:27.420
Quickly, he called a friend who had a plane in South Africa, and they flew the plane to him, and

01:10:27.420 --> 01:10:32.460
he hopped on it and flew back to France. While on the plane, he posted a picture on Instagram saying

01:10:32.460 --> 01:10:38.100
that he’s flying alone on a ten-person private jet. But when you have to go, you have to go.

01:10:38.100 --> 01:10:44.220
Apparently he’s untouchable in France by US authorities. The FBI cannot seem to get him

01:10:44.220 --> 01:10:49.500
arrested or extradited there, but they were able to freeze some of his bank accounts and

01:10:49.500 --> 01:10:55.080
cryptocurrency accounts that were within the FBI’s reach. There was a third person listed

01:10:55.080 --> 01:11:00.360
on this indictment, too, a Chinese guy named Chen. My guess is that he was overseeing the

01:11:00.360 --> 01:11:05.460
production of the chips in China, but since he’s in China, he’s unreachable by the FBI,

01:11:05.460 --> 01:11:12.660
so he was never detained or arrested. Six months go by for Gary, sitting in a prison in Seattle.

01:11:12.660 --> 01:11:20.460
GARY: Then come April, I get more paperwork. I ended up getting sued

01:11:20.460 --> 01:11:29.400
civically by Nintendo on an actual lawsuit. By then, I actually had lawyers working for me.

01:11:29.400 --> 01:11:35.280
So, then we had them worry about the civic lawsuit and the criminal lawsuit,

01:11:35.280 --> 01:11:39.300
a criminal charge and a civic lawsuit. So, they had the two going back and forth.

01:11:39.300 --> 01:11:43.980
JACK: Nintendo was trying to sue Gary for intellectual property infringement

01:11:43.980 --> 01:11:48.660
and wanted him to pay them $10 million in damages.

01:11:48.660 --> 01:11:55.680
GARY: How that — comes up with that figure is — going back to Nintendo, their experts testified

01:11:55.680 --> 01:12:03.720
that they estimated around 500,000 licenses were sold, and their experts testified that

01:12:03.720 --> 01:12:12.840
their studies show that when a system is hacked, that people buy 2.41 less games.

01:12:12.840 --> 01:12:18.480
So, there’s, let’s say the top ten games; Zelda, Mario Kart, Super Mario,

01:12:18.480 --> 01:12:25.620
stuff like that. Well, those top ten games — 2.41 less sales. So, when a system is hacked,

01:12:25.620 --> 01:12:31.440
someone will buy maybe only seven games or eight games, not the full ten games.

01:12:31.440 --> 01:12:40.920
So, they take the 500,000 times the 2.41 times the value of the game, $59.99; comes to around

01:12:40.920 --> 01:12:49.260
$72 million. There is then three people on the indictment; me, the guy in China, and Max,

01:12:49.260 --> 01:12:57.600
so my share of it, being approximately one-third — let’s just round it off to $10 million, which is

01:12:57.600 --> 01:13:03.000
usually the max that you can get in Washington state, anyway, for a civic lawsuit.

01:13:03.000 --> 01:13:05.820
JACK: Did you try to fight that and say, actually,

01:13:05.820 --> 01:13:09.180
I think that’s disproportional of what I was actually involved with?

01:13:09.180 --> 01:13:15.720
GARY: Yes, I looked at it, about fighting it; I discussed that with my lawyer. It’s like, well,

01:13:15.720 --> 01:13:22.080
let’s fight their studies. Let’s fight their estimates. Basically, the reply back would be,

01:13:22.080 --> 01:13:29.580
well, we’re only giving you a bare minimum of 500,000. There’s probably more licenses sold,

01:13:29.580 --> 01:13:34.920
and we’re just talking about the Switch. We’re not talking about the Gateway 3DS. We’re not talking

01:13:34.920 --> 01:13:42.360
about the Classic 2 Magic. We’re not talking about all the other devices. We’re just talking

01:13:42.360 --> 01:13:49.860
about one thing that got done. Now, you want to fight that? Then we’ll add in the millions

01:13:49.860 --> 01:13:57.660
of Gateway 3DS devices were sold. We’ll add in all the Classic 2 Magic devices were sold. That figure

01:13:57.660 --> 01:14:06.560
will then multiply into, well, it could have been into $100 million, $200 million, maybe more.

01:14:06.560 --> 01:14:10.770
JACK: So, with that information, you said, okay, fine.

01:14:10.770 --> 01:14:15.600
GARY: Yeah. Yeah, fine; we’ll just cap it at $10 million. Forget about it.

01:14:15.600 --> 01:14:21.180
JACK: [MUSIC]

01:14:21.180 --> 01:14:27.480
So, Gary owes Nintendo ten million bucks. He’s in his fifties now,

01:14:27.480 --> 01:14:32.820
and his only job he’s ever had for the last twelve years is gone. So, it’s just impossible

01:14:32.820 --> 01:14:38.580
to pay this back. He’d have to make over $500,000 a year for the rest of his life to pay this off.

01:14:38.580 --> 01:14:44.460
GARY: Once that was settled, the key was to settle the civic one first, and then it was

01:14:44.460 --> 01:14:51.660
a lot easier to work on the criminal side. By then, the FBI was — they knew they couldn’t

01:14:51.660 --> 01:14:59.820
get their co-defendants into the country. Other victims were not coming forward. PlayStation,

01:14:59.820 --> 01:15:05.940
Sony didn’t care about the True Blues. Sega, of course, didn’t care about the True Blues.

01:15:05.940 --> 01:15:15.060
There was only Nintendo left as a victim, and ESA, also representing some of the other

01:15:15.060 --> 01:15:19.920
smaller software developers that may have got affected, they were the only two victims left.

01:15:19.920 --> 01:15:23.880
JACK: This is interesting. So, the FBI went to the — to Sony and said,

01:15:23.880 --> 01:15:30.360
hey, we caught the guy who was selling pirated video games. You want to be part

01:15:30.360 --> 01:15:34.560
of this lawsuit? They said, no, we don’t want anything to do with it. That’s really crazy.

01:15:34.560 --> 01:15:39.960
GARY: But they weren’t interested. The PS1 was a failure on their part,

01:15:39.960 --> 01:15:44.280
anyway. It was being sold for $19.99. It was a disaster.

01:15:44.280 --> 01:15:46.440
JACK: The PS1 Mini.

01:15:46.440 --> 01:15:54.120
GARY: Yeah, the PS1 Mini. So, they were not really interested in flying lawyers down and presenting

01:15:54.120 --> 01:15:59.280
evidence. The only people that were interested, in the end, was Nintendo and the ESA. They were the

01:15:59.280 --> 01:16:04.580
only two people that showed up in February for sentencing and victim impact statements.

01:16:04.580 --> 01:16:11.960
JACK: Okay. So, the DMCA laws were on your plate.

01:16:11.960 --> 01:16:18.300
GARY: Yeah, that was the only thing I couldn’t get rid of. If I hadn’t collected any money at all,

01:16:18.300 --> 01:16:26.100
I might have been able to get away with that. But it still was

01:16:26.100 --> 01:16:30.840
the hard part of getting around it. Nothing I could do about it. I was — already spent a

01:16:30.840 --> 01:16:36.900
couple years in jail by now anyway, so, what can I do? I wasn’t — couldn’t get that time back.

01:16:36.900 --> 01:16:40.200
JACK: So you pleaded guilty to those charges?

01:16:40.200 --> 01:16:46.680
GARY: Those charges, ‘cause I knew the maximum the judge could give me was five years. The government

01:16:46.680 --> 01:16:53.700
went into the sentencing hearing on February with that, saying he needs to get the full max of five

01:16:53.700 --> 01:17:02.220
years. But my lawyer fought it back with saying, well, he went through a hard time with Covid.

01:17:02.220 --> 01:17:10.860
Because of that, the probation people recommended forty months. My lawyer was trying to go for

01:17:10.860 --> 01:17:15.900
twenty months, basically time served, but then the judge turned around and said, well, I can’t

01:17:15.900 --> 01:17:24.960
just give him time served because I have to send a message that people that do this crime will face

01:17:24.960 --> 01:17:30.780
hard time, and I’m gonna agree with the probation and say forty months.

01:17:30.780 --> 01:17:37.740
JACK: On top of the forty months, the judge also demanded that he pay $4.5 million in restitution,

01:17:37.740 --> 01:17:44.940
which adding it all up, he’s gotta pay $14.5 million and spend three years in prison for

01:17:44.940 --> 01:17:51.780
what he did. I don’t like that the judge said out loud that he wanted to make an example of Gary.

01:17:51.780 --> 01:17:57.300
Does that kind of thing really work, to pick one guy you caught and give him a brutal punishment

01:17:57.300 --> 01:18:02.520
just because you can’t catch the other people that were doing it? I don’t know. Based on what

01:18:02.520 --> 01:18:06.720
I’m hearing here, $10 million is already too much of a punishment for what he did,

01:18:06.720 --> 01:18:13.320
and now a judge is saying, no, no, no, that’s not enough; you need to pay an extra $4.5 million more

01:18:13.320 --> 01:18:20.700
and go to prison for three years on top of that. Is this sentence fair or is it cruel?

01:18:20.700 --> 01:18:24.480
If the judge is saying things like let’s make an example of this guy and gives him

01:18:24.480 --> 01:18:30.780
more punishment than he deserves, then isn’t that the definition of unusual punishment?

01:18:30.780 --> 01:18:36.780
Now, Gary is not a US citizen. He’s a Canadian, so theoretically, if he’s not living in the US, he

01:18:36.780 --> 01:18:41.280
doesn’t have to make payments towards his federal crime. But Nintendo does not want him to slip out

01:18:41.280 --> 01:18:47.520
of paying them, so they put into the civil case that one, his wages will be garnished. That is,

01:18:47.520 --> 01:18:53.400
anywhere from 10% to 30% of every paycheck he earns goes automatically to Nintendo, and two,

01:18:53.400 --> 01:18:59.040
that this is enforceable by law in any country that Nintendo has an office in, which they do

01:18:59.040 --> 01:19:05.520
have an office in Canada, and three, he cannot declare bankruptcy to have his civil fine removed

01:19:05.520 --> 01:19:11.100
from his debt. While Gary was in prison, he already started making payments towards all this.

01:19:11.100 --> 01:19:17.940
GARY: Yeah, that’s correct. When I was in prison, once I got sentenced, I was able to get a job in

01:19:17.940 --> 01:19:25.020
prison. I was working in the education department in a library and stuff. It wasn’t paying much. It

01:19:25.020 --> 01:19:34.320
was paying $12 to $25 a month, but some of that percentage had to go towards my $4.5 million.

01:19:34.320 --> 01:19:40.260
The reason that had to be done no matter what was if I refused to do that while I was in prison,

01:19:40.260 --> 01:19:47.760
then the prison could turn around and refuse to give me my good time or my First

01:19:47.760 --> 01:19:48.345
Step Act credit. Because it’s a non-violent crime, I qualify for what they call First Step Act,

01:19:48.345 --> 01:19:48.442
which was a law that got passed in 2018 or 2019 by Trump. One of the last things he did was that

01:19:48.442 --> 01:19:48.545
people in prison that haven’t committed a violent crime or — there was like, sixty-eight different

01:19:48.545 --> 01:19:51.300
crimes that didn’t qualify, but I qualified for that ‘cause it wasn’t a violent crime and there

01:19:51.300 --> 01:19:58.740
was no actual victim as a person, a human being; just a company. For every month I spent in jail,

01:19:58.740 --> 01:20:06.480
I could get between ten to fifteen days off. So, that was able — because of that and my good time,

01:20:06.480 --> 01:20:09.000
I was able to get out after thirty months,

01:20:09.000 --> 01:20:16.620
getting released in March instead of waiting until July or sometime of — in 2024. I didn’t

01:20:16.620 --> 01:20:19.828
have to do the whole forty months. I got thirty — ten months off in total.

01:20:19.828 --> 01:20:25.320
JACK: This worked in his favor. He got out early in March 2023, but since he wasn’t a US citizen,

01:20:25.320 --> 01:20:30.540
he was detained immediately by ICE and spent two months in an ICE facility before being

01:20:30.540 --> 01:20:35.160
flown to Toronto. While that’s where he lived for a long time, he didn’t have a place to go,

01:20:35.160 --> 01:20:38.220
but luckily for him he was able to find a friend who could put him up

01:20:38.220 --> 01:20:42.060
on his couch until he can get back on his feet. Gary has some health problems now,

01:20:42.060 --> 01:20:46.500
so it’s physically hard for him to get on his feet, actually. While in prison he got

01:20:46.500 --> 01:20:51.540
interested about being a freight broker and is hoping that he can get trained up on that and get

01:20:51.540 --> 01:20:57.120
a job in that. He hopes that someday he’ll also return to the Dominican Republic, too, and he’s

01:20:57.120 --> 01:21:02.160
just trying to rebuild his life from scratch. He’s really, really, really, just starting at nothing,

01:21:02.160 --> 01:21:08.400
slowly trying to make little progress every day towards having a stable life again.

01:21:08.400 --> 01:21:15.180
For MAXiMiLiEN, he’s still out there in the wind, but not particularly on the run. He’s living very

01:21:15.180 --> 01:21:19.860
comfortably in France, and he posts pictures to Instagram all the time; where he’s going

01:21:19.860 --> 01:21:24.420
on trips to the beach and different French landmarks, and these photos appear like he’s

01:21:24.420 --> 01:21:31.020
living a luxurious life. But he does seem to be confined to only stay in France. He knows that the

01:21:31.020 --> 01:21:36.780
FBI is looking for him and he’s just waiting for things to cool down. I have a theory about him,

01:21:36.780 --> 01:21:40.680
though. It’s just a wild idea, but during his hay day when he was making the most amount of

01:21:40.680 --> 01:21:45.660
money through Team Xecuter is when Bitcoin rose the highest, and he did have some cryptocurrency

01:21:45.660 --> 01:21:50.760
accounts. In fact, in one article I read, his crypto assets were frozen, but it wasn’t clear

01:21:50.760 --> 01:21:57.120
exactly which wallet or what accounts. My theory and opinion is that he probably had some extra

01:21:57.120 --> 01:22:02.640
cryptocurrency stored somewhere that didn’t get frozen, and it rose mightily during this time,

01:22:02.640 --> 01:22:07.440
and he just cashed out at the right time which is giving him a nice, comfortable life.

01:22:07.440 --> 01:22:11.460
But that’s just my theory. He might have other business ventures that he’s working on, too,

01:22:11.460 --> 01:22:17.580
but for now he’s just trying to lay low until the heat is off him, and who knows what his next

01:22:17.580 --> 01:22:22.860
idea is after this. I doubt he’ll be so brazen though, because if he has to go to prison again,

01:22:22.860 --> 01:22:27.240
it’s gonna be very different than when he had to go to prison in the nineties when he was younger.

01:22:27.240 --> 01:22:34.020
I’ll keep my eye out for him and see where he ends up in a few years. How is Nintendo doing

01:22:34.020 --> 01:22:39.300
on this fine summer’s day, you may ask? Okay, well, I was curious too, and since they’re a

01:22:39.300 --> 01:22:44.760
publicly-trading company, they share their profits openly for anyone to see. Their profits for the

01:22:44.760 --> 01:22:53.280
last year was $3 billion. $3 billion just in profit. Nintendo seems to be doing fantastic,

01:22:53.280 --> 01:22:59.880
but they continue to wage war against their own players all the time. In the last few years,

01:22:59.880 --> 01:23:05.760
Nintendo has been trying to put a stop to people playing in Super Smash Bros. Melee tournaments.

01:23:05.760 --> 01:23:11.700
First of all, this is a game that’s twenty years old. It was for the GameCube, but people are still

01:23:11.700 --> 01:23:18.000
really into it. But Nintendo doesn’t like that players are staging tournaments to play Super

01:23:18.000 --> 01:23:22.800
Smash Bros. Melee, and have sent cease and desist letters and even threatened more legal

01:23:22.800 --> 01:23:29.760
action unless tournaments get canceled. They think that what they’re doing is protecting their brand,

01:23:29.760 --> 01:23:33.540
but it’s one of those situations that’s like, cut off your nose to spite your

01:23:33.540 --> 01:23:39.900
face sort of thing. The more they fight with their own players, the worse their brand gets.

01:23:39.900 --> 01:23:46.320
One of my favorite childhood memories ever was getting a Nintendo for my birthday and

01:23:46.320 --> 01:23:51.420
opening it up and playing it with my friends during my whole birthday party. Decades later,

01:23:51.420 --> 01:23:56.040
I still remember which friends were there at that party, what games we played, who was good at it.

01:23:56.040 --> 01:24:00.780
Pick any other birthday I had as a kid and I can’t tell you a thing about it, where it was or who was

01:24:00.780 --> 01:24:08.580
there, but this one I remember because Nintendo brought so much joy to me as a child that day.

01:24:08.580 --> 01:24:15.720
But now that I’m older, I can see now that Nintendo has a lot of growing to do still.

01:24:15.720 --> 01:24:24.360
(OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC]

01:24:24.360 --> 01:24:32.460
A big thank-you to Gary Bowser for coming on the show and sharing this story with us. Gary has set

01:24:32.460 --> 01:24:36.660
up a GoFundMe to help him get back on his feet. You could find a link to that and so much more in

01:24:36.660 --> 01:24:41.460
the show notes. If you liked this episode, I have two more suggestions you really should listen to;

01:24:41.460 --> 01:24:46.920
Episode 92 is called The Pirate Bay, and it’s one of the most popular episodes on this show,

01:24:46.920 --> 01:24:52.680
and it may just make you think differently about piracy, and Episode 45 is called Xbox Underground,

01:24:52.680 --> 01:24:58.560
another very popular one, and it’s about video game hacking, but the story that is around it

01:24:58.560 --> 01:25:03.060
is so crazy that you just won’t believe it’s true. So, go check those episodes out if you

01:25:03.060 --> 01:25:08.100
haven’t already. This show is made by me, the swanky tank, Jack Rhysider, editing help this

01:25:08.100 --> 01:25:12.120
episode by the fashionable assassin, Tristan Ledger, Proximity Sound recorded this interview

01:25:12.120 --> 01:25:16.560
with Gary and did the mixing for this episode. Our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster

01:25:16.560 --> 01:25:21.780
Cylinder. I played Minecraft for the first time the other day. Want to know what I think about it?

01:25:21.780 --> 01:25:27.060
It’s a blockbuster and it’s groundbreaking. This is Darknet Diaries.