It was back in the mid 80s with the Sinclair Spectrum, there was a market in my home city where you could get copied tapes for a quid each when the retail games were about the £8/9 mark, also there was a program I bought from an ad in the back of one of the mags called 007spy that would slowdown the difficult to copy hyperload games and make them easy to tape. Still recall me and my pal tossing a coin in the software shop to see who would get the original tape or the case from 'Bored of the Rings'. I agree what others have said about emulators, the early days of mame were great fun seeing which games had been added with each release, also the time when ultrahle came out and I got into nintendo games, I bought the wii/3ds/wiiu and many games just on the back of seeing Mario64 and Zeldaoot.