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PLEASE, FATHER, HOW DID THEY COMBAT BAD GAMES PIRACY BACK IN THE DAY?

23/6/2016

36 Comments

 
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You don't hear as much about games piracy as you used to. It's still a thing, probably, but the industry certainly doesn't bang on about it as much as it did back in the 80s and 90s. Back then, we were informed that the scale of piracy was such that it added 50p to the price of every game, and that software pirates were worse than murderers. 

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.
JET SET WILLY - a code card
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Matthew Smith's follow-up to Manic Miner - the iconic Jet Set Willy - was one of the first games to come with a crude form of copyright protection.

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.
PRINCE OF PERSIA - code hidden in manual
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Other games utilised the Willy method (ha ha), occasionally concealing the code within the words of a hefty manual - such as here, in the original Prince of Persia. To copy the code along with the game, pirates would need to copy the entire text of the literature, which would've potentially overwhelmed them with photocopier "fumes".
ZAK MCKRAKEN AND THE ALIEN MINDBENDERS - in-game visa security system
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LucasArts' Zak McKracken attempted to make its code-inputting system part of the "fun" of the game; whenever its characters travelled around the world, they were required to input a "Visa Code", which could be found in a bundled "Exit Visa Security System" booklet. The text was printed on deep red paper, which made it both difficult to read, and impossible to photocopy.

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.
LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS - scratch n' sniff
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Text adventure specialists Infocom came up with a novel way of combatting piracy: stuffing a load of extras in their boxes, which were essentially impossible to pirate. Saucy romp Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with a scratch n' sniff card, featuring scents such as chocolate, pizza and "weird bum smell".
HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY - feelies
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Infocom's extras were known as "feelies", and became ever more extravagant. The game version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy included "peril-sensitive sunglasses", fluff, and "no tea". Other games included clues printed in the manual using invisible ink, which were only revealed when scrubbed with a "special" pen. 
ELITE - Lenslok
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One of the most notorious methods of copy protection was Lenslok. A number of games utilised the system - most famously Elite - which came in the form of a plastic device containing a prism.

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.
ELITE - The Dark Wheel novella
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Elite had another method of combating piracy - luring players to it by including a sci-fi novella, The Dark Wheel, written by noted sci-fi and fantasy author Robert Holdstock. And speaking of wheels...
THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND - Code wheel
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Several games came with code wheels - including The Secret of Monkey Island, Pool of Radiance, and Zool. We could insult your intelligence by explaining what a code wheel is, but it'll save us all a lot of time and unnecessary effort if we just move on. 
ROBOCOP 3 - A disk defender dongle
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Other games shipped bits of actual hardware with the games, such as this "special dongle", which shipped with Ocean's Robocop 3, and plugged into the Amiga's mouse port. Famously, many of the dongles didn't work at all - rendering the game unplayable - and it proved to be relatively easy for dirty pirates to "crack it".
NINTENDO FAMICOM DISK SYSTEM - Logo lock system
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Nintendo's Japan-only Famicom Disk System (an add-on for the NES/Famicom) used another method entirely to combat piracy - its games shipped on custom floppy disks, which featured a raised Nintendo logo. It acted as a sort of key; any disks inserted in the system which didn't have the Nintendo logo would cause the device to burst into flames (not work).
F.A.S.T. - horrible comic strips
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Formed in 1984, the Federation Against Software Theft tried to appeal to the morals of gamers in the 80s, by running a series of patronising comic strips in games magazines. The above features a horrible boy called John, who probably went on holiday with his dog Silver to his Aunt Meg's farm in the countryside, and grew up to be a Neo-Nazi.
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
CAN YOU MAKE IT THROUGH THIS GALLERY OF SEASIDE ARCADES WITHOUT GETTING DEPRESSED?
12 VIDEO GAME MUSICAL ODDITIES
A SELECTED HISTORY OF ISOMETRIC GRAPHICS


36 Comments
Lorfarius
23/6/2016 11:14:41 am

Did FAST actually pay out the £1000? It was rife everywhere when I was in school but I never heard of anyone ever getting such a huge reward. Back then a grand was like a million pounds!

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Gordon Palsy
23/6/2016 11:16:07 am

I'm pretty damned nostalgic about this era, thanks for the nice post Mr B.

Oh the days of loading up Championship Manager 93, which prompted you to enter a score as displayed on page X

Usually took about 5 minutes of inputting 2-1 until it'd let me in. A fundamentally flawed method which made concession to a realistic scoreline, so you'd come up trumps sooner rather than later as long as you were persistent.

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Gordon Palsy
23/6/2016 11:21:26 am

And as if anyone cares, just thought of another reason why this copy protection was flawed. It was just a barrier to entry, if they'd have dropped this copy protection method during gameplay, it'd be a whole lot more effective.

The best (most effective) ones were ones that halted gameplay, or messed with the gameplay so it was unwinnable. See: Earthbound, where the pirated game would be significantly harder, and would freeze if you managed to actually make it through to the end, deleting your save file in the process. Genius.

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Chris
23/6/2016 12:37:28 pm

When landing on a planet in Frontier: Elite 2, the intergalactic law enforcement agency would randomly stop you and check your credentials (ask for a word from the manual). ISTR it would still let you play on if you got it wrong, but you'd be stopped again and more often. I don't know what happened if you continually put the wrong codes in (I actually had a legit copy), possibly you'd end up with a massive in-game fine, or have your ship confiscated or something.

Chris
23/6/2016 12:32:45 pm

Worms on the Amiga came with a code booklet, geniusly printed in black ink on black paper thus impossible to photocopy (and only slightly less impossible to read).

I had another copied game which asked for words from the manual. There were so few words it picked that I managed to make a list of most of them, and occasionally a bug meant it would ask for the word on "page 0, line 0, word 0" which was easily responded to by pressing Enter. I forget what the game was, but I think it may have been an obscure football one from my football-obsessed Amiga owning friend.

The Gremlin football management game which I think was called Premier Manager came with a code wheel. My legally dubious version was copied from the aforementioned friend, and after a bit of an arts and crafts session I soon had my very own code wheel. (I must still have it somewhere, I'll have to have a look as it was possibly the best thing I've ever created, I should have submitted it as my Design & Technology GCSE project)

On the Speccy, I had a +3 with a Multiface, so it was easy to snapshot games after typing the codes in...

Wait... you're not collecting these details and passing them on to F.A.S.T., are you?

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Kelvin Green link
23/6/2016 08:04:38 pm

That black-on-black code booklet was also bundled with Alien Breed 3D. Team 17 must have been going through a phase.

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RG
23/6/2016 12:52:40 pm

Much more recently, but such a great idea: Game Dev Tycoon let you play the pirated game for a while until your in game dev went bust as people started pirating your games. People with pirated copies actually emailed the real dev to ask how to stop people pirating. Sweet irony...

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Grumpyrocker
23/6/2016 01:06:58 pm

Had quite a few games with these.
1, Jet Set Willy - anyone else find that the red and purple on the key card looked exactly the same under artificial light? Made putting the code in really tricky if without daylight.
2, Their Finest Hour (Lucasarts/AtariST) - had one of those key wheel things. Annoyingly you had to input this after taking off and loading the screen for this took absolutely ages, then ages to load back into the mission.
3, Carrier Command (AtariST) used a word from the manual. Clearly they didn't bother using many different words from the manual and so it was usually worth guessing "Walrus" (the name of the tanks) and usually by 3 goes you were in.

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Starbuck
23/6/2016 10:22:10 pm

Hey Grumps, that JSW thing drove me mad. Made me think I was red/purple colour blind...

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minty link
28/6/2016 12:39:23 pm

I just manually copied the JSW codes onto a sheet of paper but replaced the colours with the relevant numbers instead. Took about half an hour and could easily be photocopied.

When JSW2 came out, I had my dad take photo's of the codes as there were several pages this time. That worked perfectly, still have the photographs somewhere.

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Walter Peck
23/6/2016 01:20:47 pm

Not actual piracy protection, but me and my cousins used to frequently try and fail to get past the "Prove you're an adult" quiz at the start of Leisure Suit Larry :(

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Oliver Wright
27/8/2017 05:48:14 pm

I think the manual said you could skip that by pressing Alt-X. So whilst not exactly an anti-piracy measure, it does make the game more annoying for those who pirated it.

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Tinker's Cuss
23/6/2016 01:22:42 pm

I think the last game I bought that came with physical copy protection was Uplink by Introversion, a matt black card with glossy black codes on it, proper git to read.

The cleverest one I've seen though was for Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation, though it's part puzzle too; at one point in the game you needed to put in a Codec frequency to be able to progress any further, the only hint you're given being "it's on the back of the CD case".

Operation Flashpoint used a clever system which progressively made the game worse, making weapons less accurate, messing with vehicle controls and whatnot. I think eventually you turned into a seagull or something. I'm sure there's a life lesson there somewhere...

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Walter Peck
23/6/2016 02:48:58 pm

In Game Dev Tycoon your company goes out of business due to rampant piracy if you're playing a pirated copy.

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Alexisms
23/6/2016 02:59:59 pm

Someone has already posted about that above.

Walter Peck
23/6/2016 03:53:57 pm

This the biggest yet of my many humiliations :(

Trevor Cod
23/6/2016 08:33:37 pm

Giddy Up!!!

That Metal Gear Solid CD case thing had me stuck for days and I had a legit copy. I spent hours looking around the game trying to find a pocksy CD case. I became convinced the game was bugged and re-started the whole game a couple of times.
The anger. The anger...

Tinker's Cuss
24/6/2016 07:54:30 am

Yup, it didn't help that Snake had recently found a CD in the game, I think I spent an hour or two going to every location trying to get the bloody thing to interact with everything. When I eventually picked up the game box to see if I'd missed anything in the manual and caught sight of the Codec screenshot... cleverbloodybastards!

Hamptonoid
25/6/2016 02:59:36 pm

Oh man, I was duped by that too...and it took me ages to figure out the controller swap...

Alexisms
23/6/2016 02:02:19 pm

Of course Jet Set Willy's best form of protection was that even if you'd bought it you couldn't finish it :-P
And retro numpties moan about patches today...

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minty link
28/6/2016 12:42:29 pm

Are you talking about "the attic bug" or "The banyan tree". I thought the attic bug didn't entirely make the game impossible but it just meant that the screens had to be completed in a particular order?

The Banyan Tree screen, whilst very difficult, is possible to complete as I've done it myself (without the poke to remove the solid block!)

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Nick the Gent link
23/6/2016 03:27:32 pm

Cheers for this Biff. I had completely forgotten about that second level in Prince of Persia, and picking out the right potion - those were precious seconds wasted in a game with a 60 minute time limit!

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Oliver Wright
27/8/2017 05:51:32 pm

I remember a cracked version of Prince of Persia where they changed the 'drink the potion with the first letter of...' message to one that just said (for example) 'drink the potion with the letter A'. Pirates got a free game and a far less annoying experience than those who paid for it!

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Omniro
23/6/2016 03:36:50 pm

Ah yes good old F.A.S.T, instilling the virtues of Nazi Germany into school kids across the land. I believe they later developed into UKIP.

I remember having a physical dongle that I think plugged into the printer or serial port of my Amiga in order to play "B.A.T. II – The Koshan Conspiracy." But it's hardly surprising piracy was so rampant in those times as the games were often way overpriced.

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ChorltonWheelie
23/6/2016 04:47:33 pm

I bought Serious Sam 3 but pasted a cracked .exe over the original (after beating the game) to see if I could beat the anti-pirate Invincible Scorpion.
I couldn't...fun trying for a bit though.

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Dr Kank
23/6/2016 04:49:42 pm

The Atari version of Jet Set Willy was the best - no copy protection and a soundtrack by Rob Hubbard.

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Chinnyhill10
23/6/2016 08:24:14 pm

But who was going to copy that crap?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P3d-8OdIsA

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xot
23/6/2016 06:13:17 pm

Leaderboard golf for Atari used a dongle that plugged into a joystick port. It was easier to build a dongle than find a cracked copy.

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Kelvin Green link
23/6/2016 08:07:24 pm

I remember that the pirate wheel wasn't required when you played Monkey Island in SCUMM VM. I don't know if that's still the case.

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Chinnyhill10
23/6/2016 08:23:24 pm

The Robocop 3 dongle was cracked even before Ocean officially had the games on the shelf.

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Virtuoso
31/7/2019 09:38:29 pm

This is true, but the dongle was never intended to prevent the game from being cracked. It was intended to stop the "casual" game copier just copying the discs using X-Copy etc. The Ocean employees that worked on RoboCop 3 have stated this. They knew that the game would be easily cracked by any professional cracker

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23Daves link
23/6/2016 08:31:03 pm

Oh God, I used to have the Level 9 Jewels of Darkness graphic adventure trilogy which came with that Lenslok system. It worked perfectly OK for me, but being a disorganised and untidy teenage boy, obviously I lost the bloody thing and that rendered all the games completely unplayable after a certain point.

I think it finally turned up again down the back of a cupboard long after my Commodore 64 had been consigned to the attic. Took me awhile to even remember what it was.

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timmypoos
23/6/2016 09:29:35 pm

The delicious EA and Spore, nobjockeys.

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Starbuck
23/6/2016 10:33:56 pm

The Lenslock was a horrible thing.

But worst of all were the mucho sensitive"turbo loader" tape systems, which rendered many home copies (and genuine originals) installable, crashing at the very end of the LOAD. And that.

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Craggar
24/6/2016 01:22:15 pm

I remember Humans on the amiga gave a page number and you had to pick the corresponding sprite on screen that for the one in the corner of the page. I just drew a bunch of stick-man representations on a piece of paper that served as my codex. What a crappy time to be a game developer... What a monster I was.

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Riqis0
27/8/2017 09:24:52 pm

For lemmings in PC there was a "enter large number at x,y" from included table check. Guy I worked with analysed the sequence to derive the mathematical formula.
Believe it was tie fighter on PC that had the "enter word from manual" protection. Loading the large data file in a hex editor and changing the list of words to have a 0x00 as first character allowed for enter to work for all values.

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