Shane Pitman, leader of the warez group Razor 1911: life after prison (2005)
I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn&#x27;t say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren&#x27;t on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to an FTP server and a cracker would go to work removing protections, it usually took hours or less, unless the protection was novel. They&#x27;d usually push a release without a lot of large assets (FMV, cutscene type stuff) to make releasing it faster, and follow up with a full release after it was all packaged up.<p>I saw lots of folks get arrested&#x2F;busted back in those times, and there was a key difference of outcomes for two groups: adults vs minors. Minors always got a slap on the wrist&#x2F;fine (I remember TKLP from was it... RoR? had to pay out $1200 to AT&amp;T for hacking a PBX... because he was 14 or so), and adults got sent to jail and had their lives ruined. I stopped being involved just before turning 18 and it was a very smart decision in retrospect.