Indeed. I haven't been into the warez scene in a long time. But if you look at any pre-db, Razor 1911 is still prolific. The thing that astounds me is that there are still so many groups, topsites, categories, etc. in this age of near ubiquitous surveillance.
For 10 bux a month you can get good quality music from nearly all artists on spotify. For 5 more, so can your whole household. Steam, and the steep discounts offered to the patient, has made PC gaming quite a cheap hobby (once you've bought the hardware, anyway). Yet, these people are still releasing games, music, apps, etc.
Just a lot of dedication to keep the scene going that long.
Some of "the scene" actually do it for archival reasons and aren't very big on piracy itself. Cracks are about preserving games playable long after their makers go out of business. The same goes for private servers.
Yeah I'd be interested in more about the teams but this was really about the ansi artists so fair enough.
The other names I remember from all those 1.44mb ace/rar files were class, hybrid, radium and DoD. Class was the one that had my favourite intros with amazing chiptunes.
