And at the center of this underground economy sat a perpetual white whale:
If you were a PC gamer in the early 2010s, you remember the specific, dry-mouthed anxiety of the "size limit." High-speed internet was not a universal standard, and hard drives were measured in gigabytes, not terabytes. In this era of digital scarcity, a specific subculture of gaming thrived: the cult of the "Highly Compressed Repack." And at the center of this underground economy