In the video game world, you don’t hear many stories about people being arrested for various “video game crimes.” After all, it’s video games, and there aren’t that many crimes that you could be arrested for. Then again, we know a former CEO of a certain recently merged company who probably deserved to be arrested for certain things, but we’ll let that slide for now. We all know about pirating in gaming and how many companies seek to stop it. But in the case of Gary Bowser, unrelated to the Bowser in the picture above, his arrest was big news.
So, who is Gary Bowser? He was part of a pirating ring called Team Xecuter that would help gamers pirate games so they didn’t have to pay for them. Now, specifically, Bowser wasn’t the one who did the pirating himself, nor was he the guy who helped develop the tech that would let the crew pirate the games. According to The Guardian, he was the guy who helped “maintain the websites” where people could get pirated titles, and he would also list the games that would be available soon for people to get for free.
When he was arrested in 2020, it was considered a “huge victory” for the US government and for Nintendo, even making statements about the arrest and how it was a “big blow” to the piracy market. However, due to the global pandemic, Bowser kept getting shifted around in jail due to getting sick, and he wasn’t sentenced until April 2022. He would later spend 14 months in prison, getting out for good behavior, but that wasn’t the end of his penalties against Nintendo.
He owes them $14.5 million between criminal and civil suits they lobbied against him. Despite his “pirating ways,” he’s not made of money. As a result, he has had to find a job, which hasn’t been easy, and he must pay a good chunk of his paycheck every month to try and chip away at his debt. As The Guardian fairly notes, he will likely be paying them for the rest of his life.
For the record, we’re not making fun of him, and it’s clear to Bowser that Nintendo wanted to “make an example” of him so that other pirating people would “get wise” and stop their illegal acts. But as they say, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Or, as he would put it:
“I must be the first Bowser that’s ever been arrested.”
