And that was if the public even got their hands on those downloads. She loved Tetris on the NES, for when she wanted to “go ‘beyond’ the human limits in terms of ‘Response’ and ‘creativity.’” She loved Megaman 1, “for philosophical reasons that people do not understand.” For more standard reasons, she liked Little Samson and Adventures of Kirby.īy the time Empress was downloading Test Drive Unlimited 2, game cracking had coalesced into a “scene.” Warez groups (“warez” meaning software) were deep, deep underground, only communicating with the outside through text files, embellished with ASCII art, attached to games. “i think the main problem is that people ‘fail’ to see Video Games as the pinnacle and max potential of ‘art,’” she says.Įmpress says that as a child she was a “very strange girl who did not like the ‘Real World’ as much as other people seem to.” More than the average gamer, she says, she has always taken games seriously not just as a way to pass the time, but as places to go and be. Then came Denuvo, an anti-piracy juggernaut first introduced on FIFA 15 in 2014 and licensed and revalidated over 350 million times since. Since at least the late ’80s, in tight-knit groups with names like SKIDROW and FAiRLiGHT, “crackers,” mostly young men, competed to dismantle the software barriers protecting popular contemporary games.

But as long as video games have had copy protections, there have been people dedicated to cracking them wide open. From Red Dead Redemption 2 to Mortal Kombat 11, no one has liberated more high-profile games over the past year than Empress.Īlmost every modern game has DRM, which publishers deploy to prevent piracy and cheating. DRM crackers work to unlock those bits and bytes to achieve something closer to true ownership. Video game publishers-and ebook sellers and most other digital media hawkers-use DRM to retain control over your purchases.

In the seven years since that vision, Empress has become arguably the most powerful breaker of digital rights management software in the world. Turning deeper inward, she says, she soon entered “the ‘ZONE,’ which allows me to SEE MORE into everything.” The chains broke. As she focused, she began to see “what every number meant ‘universally,’’’ she says. It was anti-piracy software, she realized. Chains made up of numbers wrapped around the video game Dark Souls 2. If you ask Empress what got her started breaking DRM, she says it was a dream she had one night in 2014.

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