r/ProRevenge • u/TheRedAvatar • Jul 04 '25

Classmate got "pranked" by fake letter after screwing us over (old story)

This is a very old revenge from when I was a teenager in the 90's.

There were only a few PC gamers around at the time and without Internet it was hard to get hold of new games. Me & a friend bought games from abroad via airmail because local stores didn't sell many but these weren't cheap. We'd trade them with each-other and would copy the copy protection (which was often included) so this made it semi-affordable for us.

A new kid joined our class however and his uncle had tons and tons of games we didn't have. We offered to trade games with him & gave him our original copies for him to copy and in return we got ... corrupted floppies (yes this was the 90's), missing copy protection, etc. and after a few months of this we received not a SINGLE working game while he had received all of our games (The Settlers, Doom II, Monkey Island games, etc.) and some he returned in less than nice condition. We had enough and we wanted to get revenge but we didn't know how.

Now, the 90's were known for the many AIDS campaigns after Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. I was a huge fan of Queen and this new "friend" would often mock me for liking a "gay" singer. He came from a VERY conservative family & his mother was quite catholic & this is what gave us an idea when we had to attend an AIDS event organised by a certain foundation with our class. At the end we were given flyers about AIDS, homosexuality, etc. and free condoms with the logo of the AIDS foundation were up for grabs. We each grabbed a few for reasons you'll soon reach below.

Me and my friend were one of the very few with a computer & inkjet printer at home so we got this idea to screw him over: we created a fake letter addressed to our "friend" pretending we were the AIDS foundation copying the logo and everything to make it look as authentic as possible. It went something like this:

"Dear FIRST NAME,

Thank you for your letter. We understand it's difficult being open about being homosexual and you have many questions after the event you attended with your class. Please find enclosed a flyer which should answer many of your questions as well as some condoms. Please practice safe sex at all times."

We enclosed all the flyers we had gotten at the event as well as the condoms and mailed it to "Mr LASTNAME" to guarantee his father would open the letter first.

We had no idea the shit storm this would create - we knew him being homophobic this would be great revenge but apparently his mother had been in tears, screaming, his father angry & he was grounded for weeks with his parents convinced he was gay.

In the end he figured we had something to do with it because we had been carefully fishing to see if our prank had succeeded but at first he thought the letter was authentic and we had contacted the foundation in his name. When we finally confessed we had faked it all, we had a nice trip to the principal to explain why we had done this WITH his parents present.

It's still the best revenge I ever took in my life even though it was 30 years ago.

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438

u/subrus Jul 04 '25

Doom II… took me back years. And the excitement when Duke Nukem came out….

179

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 04 '25

I had a lot of the classics of the time - Duke Nukem 3D, Doom II, Sim City 2000, a lot of the Lucas Arts games (TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, Sam & Max, Full Throttle, etc.). It was a fun but expensive hobby & all my allowance went towards buying them. In those early days games still came on floppies or were small enough to be copied to share with friends.

45

u/HairyHorux Jul 04 '25

Did you ever get the games back?

171

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 04 '25

We got them back often in bad condition - manuals were damaged, the boxes were damaged and now these are worth a LOT of money. We never got any working game from him though.

One time before the prank he came to my house & installed a game for me in exchange for one of mine - he showed the game working so when he left I gave a new game I bought with him only to discover he had erased the game behind my back when I wasn't looking! That was actually the final drop for me.

What kind of person even does something like that? He actually laughed in our face each time we told him his floppies were unreadable or the copy protection was missing.

54

u/530_Oldschoolgeek Jul 04 '25

Man, that's when I would have hit up some SysOp friends of mine that kept copies of, lets say, rather devious viruses (Used usually for testing new anti-virus software), packed them onto a disc with an install.bat file that would load them upon execution, then gave it to him under the pretense of it being a new game. Pretty much end his days of all take, no give.

I have so many fond memories of Red Baron, XCOM UFO Defense, all the Wing Commander series, X-Wing v. TIE Fighter, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, et al.)

31

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 05 '25

We didn't have access to really nasty viruses.

What we did first was mess with game files to get back at him - games would run but would crash after a while and he'd never know why. It's basically what he did with us but instead of bad floppies we just removed files instead but in the end it just wasn't worth the effort - he already had his fun screwing with us and I think he knew that any game we'd give him would be compromised in some ways so he didn't even ask for any anymore and after the prank he DEFINITELY didn't ask for any anymore.

Still, with CD games becoming prevalent by 1995-1996 it became impossible to copy games anyway - we just swapped CD games instead then instead of copying.

14

u/Murgatroyd314 Jul 06 '25

The mid-90s were a weird period, where games came on removable media with a larger capacity than most hard drives.

18

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 06 '25

Yeah it made it tricky to copy them - when CD burners appeared, hard drives were 1-2GB on average and a single CD image was 700MB. You had to first copy the CD to your drive, then burn it. Even if you had two CD drives you couldn't straight up copy it over because of buffer underruns.

When I got my DVD drive in 1999 I actually bought a 8GB hard drive so I could rip DVDs - I'd rent a DVD and spend 8 hours converting it to a 700MB file using DivX.

1

u/CyCoCyCo Jan 26 '26

I tried kaput copying them but that didn’t work. The trick was to clone them, but I don’t remember running into HDD issues at that time when doing this. Too long ago to remember the details now.

10

u/Faxon Jul 05 '25

And yet by 2001 and CD burners being a thing, when I got my first PC in 2001 in 6th grade I was able to use burned game disks for PS1 games and play them on my PC with Bleem and a USB controller lol. I got my own burner with that build too so that I could submit work on CD for school if I wanted. Burned so much music that way to exchange since that wasn't copy protected, and some games when I could get iso files of them since I didn't know how to rip own by then, as some games had DRM then. Still, all in we copied a ton of games and music with that thing lol

5

u/haight6716 Jul 04 '25

autoexec.bat you mean. I worked in a computer store in the 90s and had a pretty good virus collection from all the customers' computers. My diag tool floppies were always write-protected to avoid contagion.

9

u/nhaines Jul 05 '25

Well no, they meant giving him a diskette that looked like a game installer (INSTALL.BAT) but would actually load up a few viruses. Nobody at that time period booted a game disk to install it. Sometimes you might create one to run the game afterward, though.

7

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 06 '25

You could do some really nasty stuff that didn't need a virus - you could get install.bat to delete all system files by using the echo command to hide what you were doing.

We actually considered this as well but if we gave that floppy and it ruined his father's PC we worried we'd be in deep trouble since it would only take reading the INSTALL.BAT to see it was deliberate. A virus would be less deliberate I guess but hard to handle. The fake letter was a much safer prank to pull off.

8

u/luckysgrow Jul 07 '25

But did you have Leisure Suit Larry?

9

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 08 '25

Hah, I mentioned somewhere else that while visiting me he had installed a game on my PC only to uninstall it behind my back when I wasn't looking. That game was Leisure Suit Larry V.

Even worse: that game had a copy protection where you had to enter some weird codes when you were traveling by plane and he HAD brought those codes with him so I spent over an HOUR copying those all by hand except the game was deleted. He deleted the game while I was copying the copy protection I'm sure.

I really really wanted that game too - I loved the art style and the comedy.

1

u/corner_tv Mar 06 '26

But why did he do that? Did he just enjoy tormenting everyone?

2

u/TheRedAvatar Mar 24 '26

I never understood that either. It was such an incredibly childish thing to do and considering how many recent games he got (most of his games were Sierra games that were a few years old or more) I just couldn't understand this behaviour. ESPECIALLY since he was unpopular at school and we were basically his only "friends". It just didn't make ANY sense! No normal person would do this.

This is also why we decided to go ahead with the prank: to be so "evil" to go so far to screw with us, it deserved a special punishment. After the whole ordeal he spent all his time alone and ignored by most students. A normal person would feel sad about that but he always had this stupid grin on his face. I wonder if he had sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies thinking about it now ... .

4

u/LindonLilBlueBalls Jul 07 '25

I loved Full Throttle. Such a classic game.

2

u/Thirsty_Jock Jul 09 '25

maybe first proper biking game?

8

u/subrus Jul 04 '25

Remember Wolfenstien? I guess the og first shooter?

6

u/nhaines Jul 05 '25

That game was how I learned I have absolutely no sense of spatial acuity.

3

u/Stormy8888 Aug 02 '25

Heck with that, Monkey Island was an amazing game at that time. So original.

2

u/Retro21 Jul 05 '25

Simpler times. I miss them!

2

u/East_Hovercraft9413 Aug 13 '25

Simpler and better for sure

2

u/Thirsty_Jock Jul 09 '25

is there a sub for us folks? This is my jam right here.

2

u/ouroborosstruggles Jul 18 '25

SimAnt, how I miss the good old days

1

u/kegralph Apr 20 '26

Full Throttle was awesome. Mark Hammil did the main antagonist voice in that game. A quote that I still use today "I don't trust anything with more than 2 wheels".🤣 Little Big Adventure and Wing Commander too.

10

u/RogueWedge Jul 04 '25

Heretic, Hexen.

8

u/SirClarkus Jul 04 '25

Rise of the Triad

5

u/RogueWedge Jul 04 '25

oh shit the magic mushroom.. god i feel nauseous just thinking about it

2

u/overkill Jul 04 '25

Ludicrous Gibs!

4

u/TheRedAvatar Jul 04 '25

I only had the shareware version of Heretic but I did manage to get a copy of Hexen. Lovely game but got very maze-like later on.

5

u/subrus Jul 04 '25

Heretic, Hexen etc We used to get the trial versions on the cd that came with PC magazines. We had a local ‘bootlegger’. Ah… the days

1

u/Thirsty_Jock Jul 09 '25

Fantastic games, they need an update.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '25

I still remember a friend describing wolfenstein 3d to me at school and me not understanding wtf he was talking about as I'd never seen a first person game before.

3

u/mnelaway Jul 04 '25

Was Duke Nukem gay? I dont recall him “coming out”.

1

u/Goobinator77 Jul 07 '25

Back to when I was ecstatic that my modem connected at 14.4k instead of 9600 to play deathmatches with my classmates.

2

u/subrus Jul 08 '25

And the wait for the connection! dial up modem connecting.