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A few weeks ago, Canadian Gary Bowser was released from a U.S. prison, after serving a sentence for his role in infamous hacking group Team-Xecuter. How the 54-year-old computer geek ended up there is a remarkable story that began way back in the early '80s. After telling his story, Gary hopes to find support for new and legal endeavors, ideally with a geek twist.
More than forty years ago in the early eighties, Texas Instruments home computers were all the rage.
The world wide web didn’t exist yet and most people interested in these new devices saw themselves as tinkerers or hackers.
These original ‘hackers’ tried to put the hardware to use in ways that others hadn’t envisaged. This was also the case for a Canadian teenager named Gary Bowser, who founded the company “Oasis Pensive Abacutors” (OPA) in March of 1985, a few months before the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America.
These Oasis Pensive Abacutors had absolutely nothing to do with the successful gaming console, but Bowser would later become one of Nintendo’s largest threats. Under the nickname GaryOPA, Bowser was affiliated with the infamous Team-Xecutor, a group that Nintendo claimed had caused millions of dollars in losses.
Decades after launching his first computer company, Gary was living in the Dominican Republic, serving as a webmaster and news writer for the hacking group Team-Xecuter. This job netted between $500 to $1,500 per month, but it also led to a 40-month prison sentence following his arrest in 2020. It was a heavy price to pay.
Today, the former hacker is a free man again, looking for a job and seeking support through a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to build back his life piece by piece.
To understand where Gary came from and for much-needed context, decades of important history must be unpacked. The background is by no means an excuse, but it does add a much-needed human element to the Bowser jokes and million-dollar headlines produced by the press in recent years.
After his release from prison, Nick Moses helped to connect us with Gary, who kindly agreed to tell his side of the story, in his own words. This isn’t a tale of a typical criminal career; GaryOPA gradually slid into the business, which was far from his dream job or passion.
Gary’s venture into the world of computers became serious in his early teens. As an early adopter of technology and electronics, he taught himself how to code. The TI-99 home computer, released by Texas Instruments in the early ’80s, offered a welcome playground.
“I started out building hardware and software for the Texas Instruments Home Computers,” Gary notes, pointing us to some examples of the products on his new website GaryOPA.com.
At the age of sixteen (1985), this hobby grew into a company, launched with help from an inheritance from his mother who had just passed away. The name of the company, Oasis Pensive Abacutors, also explains the GaryOPA nickname he still goes by today.
Oasis Pensive Abacutors was a term Gary came up with to describe his goal of building a thinking (pensive) abacus computer (abacutor). This all happened after his family left the desert of Arizona and moved to Canada, which explains the final oasis reference.
Gary’s company made hardware and software for other computer-minded people. This includes the BOOK-KEEPER software featured above. This program could be used to store a large volume of accounting data while supporting basic sorting and editing functions.
This initial business venture went relatively well and continued under the OPA flag for roughly a decade. In 1993, Gary eventually moved on to run another company, New & Improved Technologies (NIT), using his knowledge to build interactive kiosks.
NIT eventually came up with the ‘GMTA System‘ that, among other things, was able to replace traditional advertising posters with digital versions displayed on a plasma screen. That was revolutionary at the time, as the promo text below shows, and some of this technology remains in use today.
For a while, the startup was destined for a great future, but the timing was horrible. GMTA relied on its own operating system and was incompatible with Windows, which was already taking over. As a result, the government permanently suspended its funding and shareholders pulled out, eventually leading to NIT’s demise.
Gary didn’t stop tinkering with hard- and software after this setback. Computers remained his true passion and when the World Wide Web started to take off in 1998, he started the Ontario company “Gen-X Computers”; a PC building shop, Internet café, and gaming arcade in one.
This sounds like a geek’s dream job but the gaming element eventually opened the door to a darker side of technology that would dominate Gary’s life for the next two decades.
“It started with repairing gaming consoles, such as the Dreamcast, Xbox, and PS1, and then it was learning how to mod them,” Gary recalls. “On the computer side, I started learning about CD burners and such, it was a slow slide down the rabbit hole as they say.”
These activities were not limited to the offline world. By 2003, “GaryOPA” was a household name on various hacking-related gaming forums. First as a relative newbie, but it didn’t take long before he became the resident expert.
“Because of my advanced skills in designing hardware and coding on early computers, I quickly found out that working on modchips was basically just good old low-level coding. Soon after, I was building up my reputation on early scene sites including XboxHacker BBS, PSX-Scene, and Xbox-Scene.”
These sites, which are no longer around in their original form, also introduced Gary to various new contacts in the game hacking scene. That included XiaNaiX, the owner of PSX-Scene, who asked him to help manage and host the website.
At the end of the 2000s, the Canadian operated a thriving game and computer ‘repair’ business with multiple stores. The Internet café was still running as well and with one of the best Internet connections in Toronto, it became a good hosting location too.
While Gary enjoyed business success and his growing online reputation, he was suddenly introduced to the downsides. The Canadian authorities, likely tipped off by the gaming industry, started looking into the consoles and blank DVDs that passed through one of his stores. They suspected that it was hiding a massive modding operation.
It transpired that the store in question didn’t have any modded consoles or pirated games. However, pirated movies were sold as a side hustle at a flea market, where one of the investigators convinced an employee to sell a home arcade based on a modded Xbox.
The employee also agreed to sell two burned discs to the investigator. These homebrew discs were sold at the store, which implicated Gary, and these allegations were eventually brought before the court.
Fearing the worst, Gary and the employee committed to voluntary community service, even before a judgment was handed down. That paid off as the court agreed to issue a suspended sentence, while the company was allowed to continue doing business.
“I was not doing anything with pirated games, or modding consoles, just replacing Blu-ray lenses and DVD drives, re-balling, and replacing broken screens and cases on Nintendo DSs at the time,” Gary recalls.
Despite the reminder that there can be consequences for tinkering ‘too much’ with consoles, GaryOPA continued to lecture on the subject online. And when George Hotz, aka Geoh Source: Torrent Freak
