This is during the era when the N64, PS1, SNES, Dreamcast or Sega Genesis were popular. Games back then were released physically via disc or cartridge, meaning distributors or publishers would’ve implemented anti-piracy (like Lenslok) measures onto physical copies but some knew how to tamper with anti-piracy if they have a computer using other sources of capturing data (floppy disks).
Also, games at the time were ‘simple’ to torrent but with a catch (dial up was still a thing at the time meaning downloads could take a while if you have a PC). Discs were more straight forward than “torrenting” cartridges (unless you have connections with the manufacturer on smuggling circuit boards). Like with movies, games that came on discs were “torrented” through CDs by using a PC.
Those were the days!
NES and SNES games fit on a 3.5" floppy disk, and there were piratey disk drive peripherals that you could insert into the cartridge slots on those systems. The peripheral had a cartridge slot on top, so you inserted the cartridge, copied the game to floppy, or floppies, and gave those to your friends, as they gave you their copies. You could rent game cartridges from video stores.
PS1 games you just installed a modchip and then you could play CD-R copies of game disks
PS2 they had the flip top cases, and “magic disc” that was a special disk printed with the “official authentication code” but then ran a program to stop the drive, allowing you to lift up the lid, then press a button to load whatever game was on the CD-R/DVD-R copy.
For PC Games there was the mighty GameCopyWorld that allowed you to patch games to bypass CD/DVD disc checks. If you had the right tools, you could make your own virtual CD, bypassing the risk of viruses from rando downloading.
Even before that, people could write fully working games by hand, and shareware was fully functional before it all became crippleware or nagware.
These days, you can’t play tic-tac-toe without the game connecting to a server, and forcing you to log in after watching 30 minutes of ads, and that’s after you’ve paid your monthly subscription fee.
GameCopyWorld is still around today and still being updated. Looks the same as it did decades ago.
My go-to method was to create a disc image of games from the local library and then use either DaemonTools’ copy protection emulation feature or a crack from that site. They had and still have a really good selection of the latest titles (nothing 18+ though, the equivalent of the American M-rating), although it’s almost entirely console games now due to mandatory online activation with most PC games.
I used Alcohol 120%, which was based off DaemonTools. Eventually I learned how to make my own “mini disc images” to load on my virtual CD drive, because some little bit on the CD was all the games installed on hard drive were checking for, with regards to copy protection.
I experimented with this as well, but since I was keeping full copies of the discs on my hard drives anyway, it was unnecessary in my case. I still have most of these disc images; now on my NAS.