Wasn't Fireworks paid? How would a random teen create a game in it?
Create an Adobe (or, back then, Macromedia - memory is a bit hazy there) account, download the trial of whatever you wanted, download a keygen off of eDonkey or Pirate Bay, run the keygen in some VM so it would not dump some virus on your actual machine, blacklist a boatload of Adobe/Macromedia domains, done.
Many school computers also had Macromedia installed, which is how I got into animation and my first forays into web development.
lol.
You just downloaded a cracked version from whatever torrent site showed up on google or yahoo search and it 'just worked'. No account creation. No VMs. No Blacklisting. :)