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A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)

The history of Italian software piracy from 1983 to 1993, retail shops & national distribution: how cracked games were sold as legitimate.

Software piracy is, naturally, a problem that has affected the industry ever since its early days: there have been dozens of articles dedicated to copy protection, the Atari vs Coleco suit and the immortal (and vague) concept of “abandonware”. Since the early Eighties, pirated games in Italy were being regularly sold, with many apparently “legit” retail shops having a pretty lucrative business on the side, making on-the-fly copies at the customers’ request. They were called napoletane(literally “from Napoli”): an umbrella term which identified a bunch of programmers who worked with newspaper kiosks and shops via specific agreements, masquerading behind various names like Alga Soft, F.S.N.

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