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The hacker whose involvement with anti-piracy software ended in a jail sentence has emerged from prison struggling to make rent as he starts paying his fine. ‘It could be worse,’ he says.
In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced his time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
Since he was a child, Bowser’s life has revolved around tinkering with electronics. His dad was a mechanical engineer, and he learned from him how to wire up model trains and mod calculators. As a teenager he already had a computer business: his mother died when he was 15, his father had retired and Bowser supported him.
Bowser would go on to run an internet cafe, where patrons played Counter-Strike and Dance Dance Revolution, and repair hardware for a living. He got briefly caught up with the law during a stint fixing games consoles at flea markets, which nearly implicated him alongside vendors who sold pirated movies. Eventually he moved to the Dominican Republic in 2010. He spoke no Spanish for years, but he loved the place anyway: you could drive from one end to the other in just 12 hours, he recalls. It was here that Bowser – who, in a case of nominative determinism that feels almost too trite to acknowledge, shares a name with Super Mario’s in-game antagonist – started becoming the face of Nintendo piracy.
www.theguardian.com
In April 2023, a 54-year-old programmer named Gary Bowser was released from prison having served 14 months of a 40-month sentence. Good behaviour reduced his time behind bars, but now his options are limited. For a while he was crashing on a friend’s couch in Toronto. The weekly physical therapy sessions, which he needs to ease chronic pain, were costing hundreds of dollars every week, and he didn’t have a job. And soon, he would need to start sending cheques to Nintendo. Bowser owes the makers of Super Mario $14.5m (£11.5m), and he’s probably going to spend the rest of his life paying it back.
Since he was a child, Bowser’s life has revolved around tinkering with electronics. His dad was a mechanical engineer, and he learned from him how to wire up model trains and mod calculators. As a teenager he already had a computer business: his mother died when he was 15, his father had retired and Bowser supported him.
Bowser would go on to run an internet cafe, where patrons played Counter-Strike and Dance Dance Revolution, and repair hardware for a living. He got briefly caught up with the law during a stint fixing games consoles at flea markets, which nearly implicated him alongside vendors who sold pirated movies. Eventually he moved to the Dominican Republic in 2010. He spoke no Spanish for years, but he loved the place anyway: you could drive from one end to the other in just 12 hours, he recalls. It was here that Bowser – who, in a case of nominative determinism that feels almost too trite to acknowledge, shares a name with Super Mario’s in-game antagonist – started becoming the face of Nintendo piracy.
The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case
The hacker whose involvement with anti-piracy software ended in a jail sentence has emerged from prison struggling to make rent as he starts paying his fine. ‘It could be worse,’ he says
