Consequently, publishers experimented with ways to make life difficult for these social degenerates, coming up with ingenious and increasingly desperate solutions. Here are just a few of them.
A card featuring 180 coloured codes was included; after loading, players were confronted with a screen requiring them to pluck the correct code from the grid.
Astonishingly, Your Computer magazine published a letter in its June 1984 issue, which showed a way to get around it, by using a "poke". That's like Hello! magazine printing an article about the best way to garrotte Peter Andre.
Failure to input the correct code would lead to your character's arrest, and a lengthy lecture about the evils of computer game piracy: "I hope you ROT!" said the arresting officer, memorably. Which seemed a bit much.
At the start of a game, a two-letter code was displayed, but would be scrambled into vertical bands. The code could only be read by first calibrating the screen to account for its size, and then viewing it through the prism. Lenslok was ultimately discontinued, when some games shipped with faulty prisms, leading to the widespread gnashing of teeth.