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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

I do recall getting a cassette with a ton of games at the newspaper kiosk, and realizing only decades later those were all pirated titles, and wondering how that had happened.

This article finally made it click!

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For me it was decades later that I finally realized that Mario and Luigi were not in fact cheap rip-offs of Giana and Maria and it was the other way round.

The Great Giana Sisters also had Chris Huelsbeck do the music.

And, arguably, Giana wasn't a cheap rip off. It was clearly inspired by it, and a better game on a better platform.

It wasn't cheap but also it wasn't better either. The controls and physics are very stiff in Great Giana Sisters. To me it always felt more like a tech demo, though that could be said for a lot of games of the era.

The Great Giana Sisters was a legitimate game though—while the gameplay was obviously almost identical to Super Mario Bros, code wise it was technically very advanced as far as C64 games went. The way you phrased it seems like it was a bootleg version of the NES game.

But Nintendo was just as litigious back then, so the game didn't last long.

Literally every newspaper kiosk, convenience store, etc had racks of cassettes in half of mainland Europe (esp. Italy, Spain, Portugal) during the 80s and 90s. I use to relish trips to the mainland to stock up on the latest ZX Spectrum games.

Later on they were a good source for those pirated multi-game carts for consoles.

You say mainland Europe, were you on a smaller island somewhere?

Yes :) In the UK it's common to call the rest of Europe "mainland Europe" to separate it from Europe the Continent which includes the UK.

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