Piracy

Echelon is a warez group which specializes in the release and distribution of console games, such as Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 ISO images.

Between September 4, 2000 to April 30, 2002, Echelons Dreamcast division released 188 game titles and 34 other various fixes, tutorials, trainers, and loaders, picking up where Kalisto left off.

In January 2001, Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to be discontinued by the end of the year; this was the end of Segas last foray into the home console business. Rampant piracy is often cited as one of the major reasons for the failure of the Dreamcast (but the validity of this claim is uncertain). This is because unlike other consoles, like the PlayStation 2, pirated Dreamcast games were capable of selfbooting like normal, retail purchased games. This ease of piracy, coupled with booming broadband internet usage to download game images, meant that the Dreamcast was one of the easiest systems to pirate. Echelon was single-handedly responsible for the bulk of pirated games released for the Dreamcast console platform.

In 2004, Echelon was named as a target of Operation Fastlink by the United States Department of Justice.

On December 19, 2001, Echelon released their first of several hundred PlayStation 2 titles: Final Fantasy X. As of 2006, Echelon continues to release games for the PS2 platform

Kalisto fue un grupo warez creado en 1998 el cuál se especializa en la liberación y distribución de imágenes ISO de PlayStation y PlayStation 2 también liberaron algunas de Dreamcast en el 2000.

The NES game StarTropics included a letter from the main characters uncle. To get past a certain point in the game, a player needed to dunk the letter in water to get a secret code. Players lost the letter or bought the game secondhand often enough that the code (747) was even printed in an issue of Nintendo Power.

Al no disponer de licencia de Nintendo, necesitaba conectarse a un juego original para funcionar.