ANSI art, WAREZ, Keygen music and other old online art

[SilkSkull]

Remember loading up a keygen to authenticate your ill gotten software and hearing a beautiful fun tune? Maybe you are a bit older and used to pirate games during the WAREZ scene and you remember the ASCII art in the readme files or the ANSI art?
Maybe you are truly new school and find yourself humming the fitgirl song?

Piracy and the online world of software cracking and hacking has always made interesting art to the point where it felt of equal importance, I just wanna hear if anyone else has a love or experience with this style. Non piracy related art that fits this style of medium is also appreciated!!!

Some of my favorite ANSI art below:

[BlazingCobaltX]

Honestly I was terrified of these things. I thought the music autoplay was an indication that I had accidentally stumbled upon a virus. Until I discovered a mute button on most of these things.

So fond memories, not really. I mean, I am grateful that the keygens worked at all.

[fatgrrlz]

Linking this relevant Ahoy video.

Honestly I was terrified of these things. I thought the music autoplay was an indication that I had accidentally stumbled upon a virus. Until I discovered a mute button on most of these things...

I actually remember pulling up one, don't remember the game it was for but I DO remember my mom getting mad that I woke her up at 2:30 AM on a weeknight cause it started autoplaying at 100% volume lolol

[TheFrugalGamer]

Love the ANSI art! I was always too much of a coward to seek out those myself, but I've enjoyed looking back through as I've gotten older. A while back I found this collection on the Internet Archive that I keep meaning to go back through and listen to:

https://archive.org/details/essential-keygen-music

[SilkSkull]

Honestly I was terrified of these things. I thought the music autoplay was an indication that I had accidentally stumbled upon a virus. Until I discovered a mute button on most of these things.

So fond memories, not really. I mean, I am grateful that the keygens worked at all.

To be fair it usually isn't a great sign when your computer starts making noise that you didn't ask for xD

Love the ANSI art! I was always too much of a coward to seek out those myself, but I've enjoyed looking back through as I've gotten older. A while back I found this collection on the Internet Archive that I keep meaning to go back through and listen to:

https://archive.org/details/essential-keygen-music

Thank you for this! I gotta give this a listen!

Linking this relevant Ahoy video.

I actually remember pulling up one, don't remember the game it was for but I DO remember my mom getting mad that I woke her up at 2:30 AM on a weeknight cause it started autoplaying at 100% volume lolol

I love that video! I actually watched it shortly before this post lol

[Darmodej]

o i played a game with detailed art made entirely of colored symbols/backgrounds, kinda like ansi art but with custom glyphs a couple of days ago
ultima ratio regnum
sadly there isn't much to do as it's very unfinished

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

I loved them :D.

There is a musician, "Stevia Sphere", who does vapor wave inspired by old keygen music:
https://steviasphere.bandcamp.com/album/software-piracy

all of her music is licensed under CCA, so you can use them for your own projects as long as you give credits and release them under the same license.