1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks’ pocket money.
Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we’d copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.
How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you’d need to start over.
(If you’re wondering what happens if you’re colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)
Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination…
It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.
Dungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same bit x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.
The check was random, hidden in graphics files, and this, combined with some obfuscation and some more copy protection, meant it took over a year for the game to get cracked. A record at the time.
The dev claimed that the time and effort spent on the protection scheme was worth it as it allowed the game to keep selling through typical sales channels for much longer than usual.
It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that’s assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn’t take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn’t understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I’d genuinely be suprised if they’re even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they’re losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can’t stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven’t actually stopped them).
All of these oold copy protections were so annoying. Some would just give you a page number from the manual and ask for the fifth word. Some AD&D games came with a decoder wheel with elvish runes n shit (looking at your Pool of Radiance!). At least the decoder wheel was fun to throw around at your friends.
@digdilem At that time I had bought a computer game (I guess it was “Elite”) that always asked me about the word in the manual on some specific page. I was so upset about that, that I patched the random generator so that it returned a fix value. Then I changed the prompt so that it told me, which word to enter.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
A simpler, objectively better, time. We really were lucky as fuck to be born to live through that age, because what came before it was kind of not so great, and the way shit looks today still ain’t great. But there was a time sandwiched in the middle that was almost peak society.
It’s understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn’t the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system…
Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.
You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.
We had a copy of indy 500 on our 3.1 PC that barely ran and made oh such lovely noises via the PC speaker but to play you had to answer trivia questions that were in the manual.
More like “before easily available color photocopiers”. Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.
The inks used couldn’t be faithfully scanned/replicated. So even color copiers were useless.
My father had a friend from his childhood who ended up owning a graphic design studio, and sometimes he would have to have these replicated using classic photography.
When I think back, we jumped through a lot of hoops to get a free game when we could have just spent a couple dollars lol
It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
Yeah, it wasn’t. I was copying entire AD&D manuals in 1984. Color photocopiers were a different matter. I don’t remember if Kinko’s had color copiers back þen.
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Dungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same bit x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.
The check was random, hidden in graphics files, and this, combined with some obfuscation and some more copy protection, meant it took over a year for the game to get cracked. A record at the time.
The dev claimed that the time and effort spent on the protection scheme was worth it as it allowed the game to keep selling through typical sales channels for much longer than usual.
That’s awesome, thanks for sharing
It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that’s assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn’t take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn’t understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I’d genuinely be suprised if they’re even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they’re losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can’t stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven’t actually stopped them).
All of these oold copy protections were so annoying. Some would just give you a page number from the manual and ask for the fifth word. Some AD&D games came with a decoder wheel with elvish runes n shit (looking at your Pool of Radiance!). At least the decoder wheel was fun to throw around at your friends.
@digdilem At that time I had bought a computer game (I guess it was “Elite”) that always asked me about the word in the manual on some specific page. I was so upset about that, that I patched the random generator so that it returned a fix value. Then I changed the prompt so that it told me, which word to enter.
A direct ancestor to the glorious Monkey Island Dial-a-pirate!
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
ye Monkey Island was easy to photocopy :D
I remember in my local PC shop, they had a whole binder of copy-protection mechanisms they would photocopy from when they sold you a pirated game :D
A simpler, objectively better, time. We really were lucky as fuck to be born to live through that age, because what came before it was kind of not so great, and the way shit looks today still ain’t great. But there was a time sandwiched in the middle that was almost peak society.
My dad had some old games for his Amstrad computer that needed a Lenslok, to decode the characters displayed on the screen.
IIRC it didn’t work very well at all.
Elite had this too!
I remember a game (forget which one) that would ask which word was on a certain page in the game manual for its copy protection.
This requires game developers to actually finish the game before they release it though, so unrealistic by today’s standards.
Early Sierra games did this. Kings Quest for example.
So did many Microprose simulators.
It’s understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn’t the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system…
Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.
You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.
We had a copy of indy 500 on our 3.1 PC that barely ran and made oh such lovely noises via the PC speaker but to play you had to answer trivia questions that were in the manual.
wow. Im old enough this could possibly be a thing for me but I barely had seen and touched computers. wizardy and oregon trail.
Attack-Axe-Swing!
Anyone remember Dan Patcher?
honestly alls I remember about wizardry was wizmaker and it being the time I learned about doing a hole punch to make a disk double sided sorta.
The pre game quest!
Games were that good back then.
How come 1984 is before photocopiers?
/Colour/ Photocopiers cost about the same as a new car back then, so whilst they existed, they weren’t exactly within access to schoolkids.
More like “before easily available color photocopiers”. Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.
The inks used couldn’t be faithfully scanned/replicated. So even color copiers were useless.
My father had a friend from his childhood who ended up owning a graphic design studio, and sometimes he would have to have these replicated using classic photography.
When I think back, we jumped through a lot of hoops to get a free game when we could have just spent a couple dollars lol
It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
Yeah, it wasn’t. I was copying entire AD&D manuals in 1984. Color photocopiers were a different matter. I don’t remember if Kinko’s had color copiers back þen.