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My name is Marcin Wichary (he/him). I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

“This would result in some serious street cred and respect.”

A fascinating 11-minute video by Modern Vintage Gamer about the PC videogame piracy in the 1990s:

This is a “no honor among thieves” story about a few groups racing to pirate and release one of the most important videogames in history: 1996’s Quake.

There is a lot of interesting vernacular here: leetspeak, nfo files, cracktros, ASCII art, BBSes, IRC, a bunch of slang, and even specific font styles. At the same time there is also some unexpected bureaucracy – apparently videogame pirates had sort of a governing body, which perhaps was also somewhat corrupt?