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Beware of the Wraptor.

He'll take your paltry Xbox and "mod" it into a juiced-up megabeast. What once existed solely as a conduit for store-bought cartridges will become a port for pirating and storing all your fetishes - video games, music, movies, porn, whatever. If you're really tech savvy, the Wraptor might even help you turn your Xbox into a personal computer.

When the transformation is complete, the Wraptor will feel no shame.

"I think corporate America makes too much money, so I don't mind taking it out of their pockets," said the Wraptor, who is actually 25-year-old Travis Matteson, a former DJ at 96.5-FM "The Buzz" who moonlights as an Xbox "modder" - an underground tech geek who busts open Xboxes and jacks them up with chips that undermine the console's copyright protections. (He advertises his services on this message board.

"Our country is fucked up - corporations make too much money; middle man gets cut out; lower man gets really cut out," Matteson continued.

"I think what I do is make people happy."

Happy, yes ... but with a guilt-infused asterisk as nebulous as "The Matrix." Because the overwhelming majority of gamers who enlist the Wraptor's services are not only breaking their warranty - they're breaking the law.

But The Wraptor doesn't worry about getting caught. After all, he's just a small fish in a big pond.

"I read the news every night online making sure they're not cracking down on people," said Matteson, who estimated he's modded about 400 Xboxes. "If I start seeing people getting in trouble then I would probably stop."

Hot mods

Video game modders like Matteson can take comfort in the fact that video game companies have thus far devoted most of their intellectual property litigation towards the manufacturers and distributors - and not the installers or users - of mod chips.

These overseas companies - a small segment of which have already been shut down - are the enablers of the modder scene, which has grown from an underground hacker hobby into a burgeoning industry that skirts the fringes of still-muddy digital copyright laws.

"I definitely think it puts me a little at risk," Matteson said. "I don't actually copy any games or anything but I put in software for that ... Everybody knows it's probably illegal, but Microsoft hasn't pursued anything yet."

Among the perks of a modded system is that it lets gamers to play import games on their American consoles as well as "backups" of titles they already own. Gamers can also participate in an ever-evolving world of game customization. The experienced modder can endow Zelda with infinite lives, place Popeye into "Super Mario World" or even take the bikinis off the beach babes in "Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball."

But the most common reason people "mod out" their Xboxes - as even the most fervent digital copyright libertarian will admit - is for the mod chip's convenient other perk: the ability to bypass built-in copyright protections and rip pirated games straight to the hard drive.

And why stop at games when you can burn entire systems?

"You can have every Nintendo System ever made on there, Genesis, Neo-Geo ... basically everything that's old," said Matteson, referring to the "emulators" which simulate the operating functions of these now-defunct game systems. "If you have tons of porn or whatever ... you can stream it straight to your Xbox and watch it on your TV, which is really cool."

Undergrounded

For the amateur gamer who wants to mod out their system, there are a few options:

* Option 1: Find someone in the area who can do it.

* Option 2: Order a chip online and learn to do it yourself. Pray you don't screw up.

* Option 3: Get on the internet and peruse the forums of mod chip sites to find a modder with good feedback. Put your Xbox in the mail with a $50-$150 check and pray that it comes back.

According to Game Guy owner Brian Harris, the majority of people who try to mod their consoles probably end up doing irreparable damage to it.

"It's not like Joe Blow can go in there - it's precision soldering," said Harris, who politely refuses mod jobs on the grounds that they enable customers to bypass stores like his.

"If you can afford to buy a new system five times to figure out how to do it right, then yeah, cool, mod it."

Harris considers the modder scene to be a negligible subpopulation of the gamer community. He likens modders to "bottom-feeders" or "dumpster-divers" - people who will do anything to save a dollar.

"It's aimed at a segment of society that wouldn't buy a game anyway," he said. "America is a something-for-nothing society ... There's always going to be the free-lunch crew."

Besides the possible negative impact on stores like his, Harris resents the implications modding has on the viability of the gaming industry.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, the industry's trade group, worldwide piracy costs the US entertainment software industry more than $3 billion a year.

"The guys who pirate games ... they always squawk when games suck, but their piracy is causing games to suck because they're taking resources and revenues away from the companies," Harris said. "Xbox has like five good games anyway, so why not buy them?"

Mod-est mice

Hardcore gamer Dan Hoyt also stands firmly in the anti-mod camp. The KU junior estimates he spends about six hours a day playing games, but he's never considered modding any of his systems.

Hoyt says the downfalls of modding a system - such as decreasing the life span of the machine, installing games with possible viruses and risking legal trouble - largely outweigh the advantages.

"There's no reason to start downloading a bunch of games if I don't want them," he said. "Hastings has good games in the bargain bin that are a year old and like 20 or 30 dollars."

Another disadvantage, Hoyt says, is the fact that modding an Xbox will prevent you from playing Xbox Live, a subscription-based system that allows the user to play gamers all over the world via the internet. The Xbox Live technology is trained to search for mod chips and cuts off the connection if it finds one.

Without Xbox Live, "you're only going to experience half of 'Halo 2,' and that would be the less-fun half," said Hoyt, referring to the popular first-person shooter game.

But 25-year-old gamer Eric, a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute who withheld his last name, is a believer in the power of modding. Since he paid the Wraptor $100 to mod out his Xbox, it has become his all-in-one entertainment center.

Of course, most of the applications he uses it for are illegal.

"I'll rip games to it or share games with friends," said Eric, adding that he also stores illegally downloaded movies and television shows on his modded console. "I certainly don't feel guilty about it ... I feel the same about music downloads - if I want to support somebody I'll support somebody."

Toy tinkerers

For the time being, modded Xbox users like Eric are unlikely to face prosecution. Besides being hard to track down, individual users are less a target for video game companies than the actual chip manufacturers and distributors.

According to Wes Nihei, editor-at-large for Gamepro Magazine, companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo must first worry about each other before they can worry about mod chip users.

"I think at this point (the companies) obviously frown on it, but they're not actively making the effort to wipe out this practice," Nihei said. "It's much easier to get music illegally than video games."

If video game companies do start coming down hard on mod chip users, it's a good bet that the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be first in line to defend them. The San Francisco-based organization rallies for "dual use" technologies like mod chips, which can be used both legally and illegally.

EFF staff attorney Jason Schultz said he advocated a "personal responsibility line" that targeted the people involved in the illegal applications rather than the manufacturers enabling them.

"Oftentimes the greatest innovations in an industry will come from people tinkering with the technology that they buy," said Schultz, a Berkeley Law School grad who specializes in intellectual property and video game law. "This kind of freedom to mod and tinker is actually a driving force that we want to see flourish and not get crushed."

Mod-ern law

Schultz said there is a least a "significant" community of people using mod chips to customize games - a harmless endeavor that actually amps up interest in the games and can boost sales.

These people, Schultz says, aren't really the ones upsetting the video game companies. That honor belongs to the installers and manufacturers who are making big bucks off of the companies' intellectual property.

In the next few years, Schultz predicts, video game companies will emphasize technology over litigation as a means to combat modding. Already Microsoft has effectively kept modders from hijacking Xbox Live, and the company figures to try to perplex modders further with the release of its next-generation console this fall.

Besides, as anyone following the music industry's recent suing spree can attest, slapping down a bunch of lawsuits is surefire way to ensure that things "just get ugly," Schultz says.

If that does happen, it's a good bet it will be one game that desperately needs modification.

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