The Story of Gary Bowser: Nintendo’s Archenemy Who Must Now Pay Them Millions
In April 2023, the gaming world was abuzz with the release of Gary Bowser, a 54-year-old programmer who had served 14 months of a 40-month sentence for his involvement in one of gaming’s most infamous piracy cases.
10 months on, and Bowser now faces huge damage repayment totalling $14.5 million, something that he’ll probably be paying the software giant for the rest of his life.
But how did the programmer end up in this situation and will Nintendo ever change their stance?
How Bowser broke the law
Since his teenage years, Bowser’s life had been intertwined with electronics, learning the ropes from his mechanical engineer father.
Running an internet cafe and repairing hardware led him to a stint fixing games consoles at flea markets, a role that saw him become embroiled with vendors selling pirated movies during the 1990s.
However, it wasn’t until a move to the Dominican Republic in 2010 where he became associated with Nintendo piracy. Bowser connected with Team Xecuter, a group producing dongles that bypassed anti-piracy measures on Nintendo Switch and other consoles.
The work was lucrative. Players were willing to pay handsome sums of money to the group in exchange for these benefits but, unfortunately for Bowser, it attracted the attention of US law officials.
In September 2020, the US Department of Justice labelled him and his co-defendants as leaders of a notorious international criminal group profiting from pirating video game technology. Bowser’s defence was that he was working as a mere updater of websites for a few hundred dollars a month, but it wasn’t enough to prevent legal action.
The lawsuit charged him with breaking important regulation. In the world of gaming, regulation is varied and wide-ranging: consumer protection law protects players from faulty gaming purchases and gaming licenses protect gamblers from bad operators or unfair no deposit casino bonuses, for example. However, in this case Bowser had broken the all-important Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which carries possible prison sentence punishments.
Bowser’s time in prison
Bowser ended up behind bars after being convicted of fraud over his connection to Team Xecuter. He incurred not just criminal charges but also a civil suit from Nintendo, culminating in an order to pay an eye-watering $14.5 million.
Changing location several times while in jail, he managed to contract COVID-19, a bout of illness that nearly killed him. A priest even visited at one point to deliver him his last rites, but Bowser managed to fight his way back to a full recovery.
After a sustained record of good behavior, Bowser managed to secure an early release in early 2023, just 14 months into a 40-month sentence. Yet, as part of the deal, he must now send Nintendo 20-30% of any leftover money after covering necessities like rent and bills.
Life after jail
Life post-release brought its own set of challenges. Securing housing after briefly staying on a friend’s couch, Bowser has a roof over his head despite financial constraints.
He started paying Nintendo what he could, acknowledging that it wouldn’t be much. A couple of hundred dollars remained after covering rent for food and essentials, prompting him to turn to food support services.
The months after release were bumpy, yet Bowser, with a history of both hardships and triumphs, remained optimistic. During his incarceration, he even earned a dollar an hour counselling fellow prisoners on suicide watch.
Physical therapy three times a week became a financial burden, making existing health issues worse, including elephantiasis in his left leg. Estranged from family, friends supported him with food and clothes. Bowser, looking to restart his life, set up a GoFundMe page for medical care, hoping for donations from sympathetic members of the public.
Job hunting, restricted by a legal history check, proved challenging. Despite this, Bowser, banned from modern gaming hardware tinkering, returned to his first love – retro hardware, particularly old-school Texas Instruments calculators.
Confident in his talent, Bowser reflected on his entrepreneurial past in an interview with local media this year, envisioning himself as an executive rather than a junior employee.
A curious connection emerged: he shared not only his surname with Mario’s reptilian foe but also, surprisingly, with Nintendo of America’s current president, Doug Bowser.
Speculating about a shared family tree, Bowser resignedly laughed at the irony of being, as he put it, “the first Bowser that’s ever been arrested.”
Deterrent to other rule-breakers
In a statement to the media following the lawsuit, Nintendo’s lawyer, Ajay Singh, underlined the impact of piracy on the company, stating, “It’s the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo, and it is the games that make the people smile.” This built the defence that condemned Gary Bowser to prison and a lifetime of repayments.
While the punishment seems harsh to some, it is believed Nintendo wanted to make an example of Bowser in a bid to put off other piracy experts from doing the same. Time will tell if their efforts prove to be successful.
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