Games and software for PC where commonly cracked and shared among my friends and I back in those days. We started a 8 person Quake II clan with one legit copy of the game.

It wasn't common at all for consoles outside of emulation which wasn't as polished or ubiquitous as it is now. I remember spending hours trying to get a Super Nintendo emulator to run a Chrono Trigger rom correctly. We heard about custom mod chips for Playstation that you let you play Japanese games and copied games but we thought it was elite hacker shit and never bothered.