You never know what you might find when buying old retro games in bulk. Sometimes you get a bunch of mildewed junk. Sometimes you discover hidden gems. And sometimes you stumble upon strange bootlegs with totally unnecessary shoutouts to other people’s mums.
“Oh my god I got a bootleg of Tactics Ogre for GBA in a lot and it has a hacker demo screen on it,” RecD, a video game musical YouTuber, wrote on Twitter today. Instead of opening to Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis’ normal start menu, the game opened with “Greetings to Jeff’s mum AKA THE MILF.” After that the game went back to its normal niche strategy RPG opening.
Oh my god I got a bootleg of tactics ogre for GBA in a lot and it has a hacker demo screen on it pic.twitter.com/Gj9bHHu1BD
— Tom “RecD” Hart Jr. (@RecDTRH) July 13, 2021
RecD said it was just a still image and not accompanied by any music or moving graphics. Clearly whoever left it there (the screen’s logo refers to a now-defunct “Mode 7″ cracking group) felt the message spoke for itself.
The bootleg GBA cart came from a $US50 ($67) retro game haul on eBay that included Neo Geo Pocket Colour games like SNK vs. Capcom: The Match of the Millennium and Pac-Man, as well as Chip’s Challenge for the Atari Lynx, RecD told Kotaku. “I sorta figured this thing was an obvious bootleg and would probably be a basic ROM dump or dead, and didn’t even really factor it into the price I paid, so the splash screen when I booted it up was definitely a surprise.”
Cracked intros, or cracktros for short, were calling cards sometimes left behind by hackers cracking PC games or dumping console games to more easily shareable ROM files. Sort of like virtual tagging, they’re mostly a lost art now, although people have taken to archiving them for posterity. You can find more than a few videos of old cracktros on YouTube, although after a brief search there and elsewhere I couldn’t find any backstory for this particular one.
However, following RecD’s original tweet, someone else on Twitter shared a second screenshot of a related cracktro reportedly from bootlegged versions of Mega Man Battle Network 2. “Greetings to Jeff’s Mother I love you (non-sexually!),” it reads.
RecD, meanwhile, probably won’t bother much more with the bizarre relic. “Cheap GBA bootlegs of RPGs like this tend not to actually have a save battery installed or [have] components that break down, so it’d definitely be a sub-par experience vs. actually grabbing a real copy of Tactics Ogre on GBA if I’m ever inclined to play it,” he said. “In closing, here’s hoping Jeff and his mum are having a lovely day.”
Jeff, or your mum, if either of you are reading this, please sound off in the comments.
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