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In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison after completing 14 months of a 40-month sentence. His good behavior got his prison sentence reduced, but now his options are limited. For a while, he passed out on his friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions required to relieve his chronic pain cost him hundreds of dollars each week, and he was without a job. And soon, he’ll have to start writing checks to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m) and will likely spend the rest of his life repaying the debt.
Since childhood, Bowser’s life revolved around tinkering with electronic devices. His father was a mechanical engineer, from whom he learned how to wire model trains and modified calculators. He was already involved in the computer business in his teenage years. His mother died when he was 15 and his father was retired, leaving Bowser to support him.
Bowser went on to make a living by running an Internet cafe where patrons played Counter-Strike and Dance Dance Revolution and repaired hardware. He briefly gets in trouble with the law while repairing a game console at a flea market, and almost joins a pirate movie dealer. Eventually, he moved to the Dominican Republic in his 2010. Even though he didn’t speak Spanish for years, he just loved the island. It took him just 12 hours to drive from one end to the other, he recalls. Here, Bowser, who shares a name with Super Mario’s in-game antagonist in a case of nominative determinism that is almost too commonplace to admit, begins to become the face of Nintendo’s piracy. .
Gary Bowser (left), a 20-something, demonstrating his project for the TI-99 home computer event at the Chicago TI Fair in the early ’90s. Photo: Courtesy of Gary Bowser
In the late 2000s, he got in touch with Team Xecuter. Team Xecuter is a group that makes dongles that are used to circumvent piracy measures on the Nintendo Switch and other consoles, allowing games to be downloaded, modified, and played illegally. Bowser said he was paid only a few hundred dollars a month to update the website, but the people he worked with were not very social and helped “testers” troubleshoot devices. Stated.
“I started being the intermediary between the people doing the development work and the people actually owning the mod chips and playing the games,” he says. “I get feedback from testers and send it to developers. I can work with people, so I ended up getting more involved.”
In September 2020, he was arrested in an extremely unusual investigation, and the US Department of Justice announced the following: press release Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt boasted about the indictment, which accuses Bowser and his co-defendants of “reaping illegal profits for years by pirating the video game technology of American companies.” “The leader of a notorious international criminal group.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
