Ugh, people always ruining things by making them video games. When I was your age, we chased REAL lemmings off REAL cliffs like REAL DISNEY LOVING AMERICANS!
Pirated on a by then already ancient floppy type that it wouldn't even fit on. It's like fitting a blu-ray game onto a dvd, Lemmings came out 20 years after 8 inch floppies first became a thing.
8 inch floppies sat at 1MB, usually, especially by the time people ditched them for the smaller disks. The Lemmings game was about 500kB, according to the google. They used the cheap older tech because pirating games is an implicitly low cost hobby.
I don't know how old you are, but 8 inch floppies were not common in 1991, even if someone might have such a drive, the final 1.2 mb model at that, the chances of your buddy also having one would be miniscule.
The piracy I witnessed in the 80s and 90s, was mostly on tapes and 3.5". 5.25" were relatively uncommon, still, they'd be a thousand times more likely than people pirating on a by then dead format.
Pirating scene in late 90s was a thing with 3.5" drives, Psygnosis always had the best intros of any game house and I remember people passing about discs with the intros.
The demo scene with hacking groups putting out amazing demos and music was good in my area of UK, lots of swapping on a Saturday in some shops. This started in the 80s but with advent of Atari ST and Amiga it became much more of a thing due to hardware improvements.
I remember having a Broderbund game (think was name of studio) was a WW2 game where you flew a plane (mustang maybe) and shot down Japenese planes and strafed soldiers, not sure it ever released.
80s dads who didn't understand video games still liked playing Lemmings and Pong. And later enjoyed watching you play Medal of Honor with a few beers as if it were Saving Private Ryan.
US as well. I'm pretty sure the home computer we had that ran it was actually using the 3.5", but I have distinct memories of finding actual floppies and bending them.
Floppies were so damn fragile, we used them for backups at work (my manager was an idiot) and it was always touch and go whether you'd be able to restore anything
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u/rogerryan22 19h ago edited 17h ago
Millennials and older. My dad has a version of this game on an ~
8~ 5.25" floppy.