Echelon (warez)

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Echelon ASCII art logo designed by Rotox of ART.

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

Between September 4, 2000 to April 30, 2002, Echelon's Dreamcast division released 188 game titles and 34 other various fixes, tutorials, trainers, and loaders.

In January 2001, Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to be discontinued by the end of the year; this was the end of Sega's 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.

On December 19, 2001, Echelon released Final Fantasy X as their first of several hundred PlayStation 2 titles. As of 2007, Echelon continues to release games for the PS2 platform [1].

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