Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."
No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!
Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)
To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today.
Fairlight was pretty problematic back in the 90's politically, they even did a fairly controversial nazi-themed demo. Definitely not the vibe they give off today.
Article for reference [0]. It's amazing how far people's baggage will follow them (though the impact here is probably minimal). Wild that a former Fairlight member became San Diego Republican Party Chairman.
It wasn't always that clear who the members were. Demos and cracks across several machine types were handled by separate people who didn't always know each other.
Especially Fairlight was a pretty loose group which many people were sort of affiliated with, and sometimes would release stuff under that name, and nobody really knew if they were officially members or not. There was a bit of drama as everyone didn't always get along.
Sorry for the lazy question, but would you be able to share some links or pointers to where these guys are active? I've been out of the loop for a few decades but enjoyed the scene when I was a teenager.
Nowadays though it's just Empress and everyone else, because Empress is the only one who cares enough to crack Denuvo, but only for selected games, and nothing recently.
Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door.
It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.
That isn't really the same situation. The 1981 "version" is a stealth game that is pretty much completely unrelated to the 1992 game except through name, inspiration and theme.
The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.
Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise
I loaded this up recently on Genesis and it actually blew my mind how smooth the animations were for the 'parkour', to find out it was all mo-capped and faithfully recreated into pixels. I had no idea people were doing this in the 80's.
This book [1], which is the creator's diaries from the time annotated with lots of memoir-ish details, is really really good and talks about how the motion capture came to be at length. It's also just a very enjoyable book, not to mention very physically beautiful.
I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message !
Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
Not mentioned in the article is Sid Meyer's Pirates! (the exclamation mark was part of the name, though I do get excited when talking about the game so I'd add it myself if it weren't).
This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
I always find official cracks* like this to be amusing and worrying at the same time. Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another example of this in the indie scene.
You can stop worrying, and move straight into... whatever it is on the spectrum from hangwringing to panic it is you are looking for, I offer no judgment here... because loss of source code and all build artifacts is the norm, not the exception. Completely normal. Unfortunate, but completely normal.
> Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].
Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.
Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.
People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
I have a vague memory of a "game-dev studio tycoon" sim game which, if you played the pirated version, would have your sales taper off super hard and you'd go bust because pirates. There was, however, an explicit nod to this happening and it was at least clear that the failure was making a point
1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game.
2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal.
3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again.
4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.
> Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy.
Yeah, I get that maybe it made the developer and/or publisher feel some kind of 'justice' was done, but it's ultimately bad for your brand to have any game out in the world that has subtly degraded performance. The players of pirated versions probably just assumed the company makes games that are buggy or with really bad difficulty scaling. Reducing piracy by making players not want your games doesn't seem like a winning long-term strategy.
Some publishers instead layered their piracy checks later in the game play or delayed stopping pirated play until some number of game events after detection. If they were concerned crackers would find an explicit error message, another option is to change game play in some other way like this game ended the luge race before the player finished. A legit game behavior at the wrong time is still harder to find than an error box or specific text.
> As it turns out, “FAB” stands for Fabrice Bellard, who next to being the original developer of widely used programs such as FFmpeg and QEMU, is also the creator of an executable compression utility called LZEXE, developed in 1990.
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun).
While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
> Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
In a lot of IP product categories, there are different classes of users who pirate. In the case of movies, a friend of mine who's a senior exec in a major Hollywood studio once told me they had data suggesting that of the three categories of audience: A) Never pay, only pirate, B) Only pay, never pirate, and C) Sometimes pay, sometimes pirate, the third category was probably larger than the first.
That would mean degrading your brand value among consumers of piracy, could negatively impact long-term sales.
One of the reasons Sony won in most third world countries, there was a lot of piracy for the multiple playstation devices and it was easy to access it. As those generations of gamers grew older and the country's economy improved, they didn't even consider xboxes as all their friends had sony consoles, why would you bother?
Gates: how piracy worked for me in China -
The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term
Kudos to the original author who took the time to dive into it. I highly admire people who can dive into some technical topics and have the patience to figure everything else. They are the kind of people I look up to.
BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).
Wow, write-up was eye-opening for me. My first computer was a 4K Radio Shack Color Computer based on the Motorola 6809 CPU. It had no hardware support for sprites, tiles, palette tricks or other neat graphics. But what it did have was probably the best 8-bit CPU of that era. Being the 'little brother' of the 68000, it had an orthogonal instruction set, indexed and indirect addressing modes, separate user and software stacks and several 16-bit registers. All this made writing relocatable, re-entrant, preemptive multi-tasking code easy and to me it as pretty much "just how assembler is written".
My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!
And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.
Amazing that GOG was so lazy that they didn't check to ensure their DRM removal was complete, before offering it for sale. Hopefully this will motivate them to do a proper fix.
I would not blame GOG for that if even the official 1996 bundle release made the same mistake. The description in the article sounds like it was never officially confirmed knowledge that the game would become unwinnable if cracked incompletely.
How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.
Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.
QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable.
Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.
I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA.
And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game.
This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort.
I hated the one on F-15 Strike Eagle II on the C64; game itself was great, but you needed to look up in the manual what colour deck crew vest was displayed on the screen prior to the game starting.
SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.
There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.
We just kept the manuals for our most frequently played games on our computer desk. I don’t remember it being particularly burdensome, especially compared to the copy protection many games employ today. Plus, several games were designed to rely upon the manuals as part of their game play, like the Carmen Sandiego series.
Still a problem in the console age. It was annoying as hell that I had Halo Wars 2 installed on my XBOX ONE but couldn't play it for the nine months that the disc was lost.
In practice there'd still be a limited number of possible questions, so people would just compile the answers in a file that was included in the pirated distribution. I remember plenty of DOS games that came with something like that.
The ones I remember had a red tinted window that would reveal the hidden word. If you tried to photocopy it using a black and white photocopier the words wouldn't be visible anymore. Now in hindsight, I guess you could have photocopied the whole wheel with some red mylar on top of it.
I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.
My least favorite was the protection typical on C-64 games that caused constant resets of the floppy drive, banging the head against the stop repeatedly. tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRRRAAAAAAP. I would crack games I owned (admittedly, most I did not own) just to keep them from eventually knocking my drive out of alignment. Loaded a lot faster too. Fast-Hack-Em FTW.
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual.
My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.
Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.
Microprose games had awesome manuals. Typically more than a hundred pages full of details going well beyond explaining the game itself. For example, in a flight simulator it had details on every plane in the game, the historical context of the missions, dogfighting techniques, etc...
The manual to Grand Prix 2 taught me more about car racing than any other bit of reading, video, or whatever media. It had so much about how to drive, how to use telemetry, etc.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…”
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
Besides not being a one time activation, it was not a "one key". The game would ask you for "N-th word on the M-th paragraph on P-th page", at each start for example. We are talking about an age where you would not have scanners or mobile phones with cameras.
We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.
And yeah, we were younger.
Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt
Yeah, I did put the time in for X-Wing back in the day. A friend made copies of his disks, and let me borrow the manual so that I could copy the relevant bits down into a notebook. Took a while, but I had lots of time so not a big deal.
Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.
I remember one of the later Wizardry games (I believe it was Return of Werdna) came with a pamphlet full of codes that was printed on very dark brown paper that made it very difficult to make legible photocopies.
It wasn't individual per install. Anyone with the game manual could find the word or code in the book. Some games asked for a random word from the manual on boot, so you couldn't just share the code, you needed to share the entire manual (or decompile or something to find all the words it is looking for).
And the manuals usually themselves had "copy protection". Many were printed in variations of dark colours, such that any easily accessible copier would just copy a black page.
this was the comment i was looking for! i remember those red pages and found them annoying on even legitimately purchased games (which is how copy protection has always been IME - makes it so legitimate purchasers of a game got annoyed and hence, got cracks for games to just not be as annoyed!)
I remember playing old french game "Metal Mutant", which on a level three or four asked something in french (it was probably asking for a code from manual) and if you answered wrong, it wouldn't exit the game, but it'd just silently disable all projectiles, making game unwinnable. I as a kid spent hours wandering around, thinking that I missed some clue. And game didn't have any saves, so after banging my head for a couple hours, I'd exit game frustrated, and in a month or two I had to start from scratch if I wanted to try to complete that level again.
At least some games in the Arma series have also used a copy protection that messes with gameplay if it judged the game to be pirated. I don't know if it used tricks to trip crackers, though -- Wikipedia mentions intentional errors on optical media that didn't get passed on by disc copy software.
I have a core memory of playing a cracked copy of an elder scrolls game that was unwinnable, and spending two hours playing with console commands in the game to get past the broken section. If I recall correctly, key dialogues were broken preventing story advancement.
This article actually solves one of the great mysteries of my life: how to beat that game.
I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.
Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.
Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.
I remember an old Apple ][ game that someone had copied from somewhere and it got passed around by us jr high school students.
It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.
Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy
Now that I started looking for it, I think it was Repton because I remember buildings.
I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old
For a modern example I had a bad time trying to play Celeste using the family sharing feature in Steam. The game would slow down the jumping making it impossible to advance. I don't know why it would deem it as an illegal copy, I just deleted it and never tried the game again.
That sounds... odd. Was Maddy involved with that game?
ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.
Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.
> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha
I couldn't play sim city because of that, the game would always throw insane natural disasters at me until I lost, I thought that was a very interesting way to mess with copies
Apparently 'The Terminator 2029' had such a trick in it. One of my friends in college was obsessed with the game and was frustrated about not being able to complete one of the levels due to a target being inaccessible. Eventually someone told him it was an intentional flaw introduced into copies that were pirated. Not sure if he ever bought the game so he could finish it.
I remember Pizza Tycoon having copy protection based on pizza recipes (for which I didn't have the recipe booklet, for usual reasons). In the early days of your pizzeria, people would only want the classics and if you couldn't make them, you struggled hard. Somehow, I've managed to power through (probably easy difficulty or something) and as soon as you build up connections to the mafia, people would gladly eat the most abhorrend pizzas the world has ever seen (I vividly remember an all-plum pizza I've created, it was beloved beyond any reason).
I remember both those games from when I was about 12 and I also remember being endlessly frustrated with the mechanics. I couldn't get controls in order, seemed to fail at almost every sport (for some reason, I remember high jump vividly). Since those games came with several dozen others on a very cheaply bought CD (if you know what I mean) then I guess I can finally have a redemption arc for my skills after three decades. Great stuff!
I remember playing a similar track & field game on the Apple ][ my dad bought us and getting so frustrated.
After reading this article I had a vague recollection that when booted up it would briefly display a "cracked by..." message,
and now I figure the game probably had a similar "copy protection" mechanism.
I wonder what kind of cool stuff you'd discover if you dug into the code of other classic DOS games from the 90s? Anyone ever try reverse engineering their childhood favorites?
"The “Razor1911” crack (1991)
Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."
No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!
And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the warez scene.
Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)
To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today.
Fairlight was pretty problematic back in the 90's politically, they even did a fairly controversial nazi-themed demo. Definitely not the vibe they give off today.
Article for reference [0]. It's amazing how far people's baggage will follow them (though the impact here is probably minimal). Wild that a former Fairlight member became San Diego Republican Party Chairman.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latim...
It wasn't always that clear who the members were. Demos and cracks across several machine types were handled by separate people who didn't always know each other.
Especially Fairlight was a pretty loose group which many people were sort of affiliated with, and sometimes would release stuff under that name, and nobody really knew if they were officially members or not. There was a bit of drama as everyone didn't always get along.
Sorry for the lazy question, but would you be able to share some links or pointers to where these guys are active? I've been out of the loop for a few decades but enjoyed the scene when I was a teenager.
On the demo part: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=158
One the crack side, I don't really follow much but you can find the occasional release, for example Red Dead Redemption.
https://predb.me/?group=razor1911 more active than I imagined, though it looks like most of them are basic steam DRM so no cracking work needed
Nowadays though it's just Empress and everyone else, because Empress is the only one who cares enough to crack Denuvo, but only for selected games, and nothing recently.
Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door.
It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.
Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
It's a bit like how most people think Wolfenstein started with the 3D version in 1992 and have never heard of the 1981 original.
That isn't really the same situation. The 1981 "version" is a stealth game that is pretty much completely unrelated to the 1992 game except through name, inspiration and theme.
The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.
Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise
I loaded this up recently on Genesis and it actually blew my mind how smooth the animations were for the 'parkour', to find out it was all mo-capped and faithfully recreated into pixels. I had no idea people were doing this in the 80's.
This book [1], which is the creator's diaries from the time annotated with lots of memoir-ish details, is really really good and talks about how the motion capture came to be at length. It's also just a very enjoyable book, not to mention very physically beautiful.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Making_of_Prince_of...
More like a rotoscoped bitmap animation than what we consider 3D motion capture now.
I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
Wow, I just want to call attention to this for anyone scrolling through. If you loved the game, watch this video!!
Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
A sort of shareware.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqnM-yyfPQ
Not mentioned in the article is Sid Meyer's Pirates! (the exclamation mark was part of the name, though I do get excited when talking about the game so I'd add it myself if it weren't).
This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
I always find official cracks* like this to be amusing and worrying at the same time. Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another example of this in the indie scene.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522
* Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games
You can stop worrying, and move straight into... whatever it is on the spectrum from hangwringing to panic it is you are looking for, I offer no judgment here... because loss of source code and all build artifacts is the norm, not the exception. Completely normal. Unfortunate, but completely normal.
> Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].
Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320
Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.
People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
I have a vague memory of a "game-dev studio tycoon" sim game which, if you played the pirated version, would have your sales taper off super hard and you'd go bust because pirates. There was, however, an explicit nod to this happening and it was at least clear that the failure was making a point
it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon": https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-devel...
A few reasons
> Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy.
Yeah, I get that maybe it made the developer and/or publisher feel some kind of 'justice' was done, but it's ultimately bad for your brand to have any game out in the world that has subtly degraded performance. The players of pirated versions probably just assumed the company makes games that are buggy or with really bad difficulty scaling. Reducing piracy by making players not want your games doesn't seem like a winning long-term strategy.
Some publishers instead layered their piracy checks later in the game play or delayed stopping pirated play until some number of game events after detection. If they were concerned crackers would find an explicit error message, another option is to change game play in some other way like this game ended the luge race before the player finished. A legit game behavior at the wrong time is still harder to find than an error box or specific text.
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> As it turns out, “FAB” stands for Fabrice Bellard, who next to being the original developer of widely used programs such as FFmpeg and QEMU, is also the creator of an executable compression utility called LZEXE, developed in 1990.
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
Even the commercial product PKLite by PKWARE (of PKZIP fame) was "inspired" by LZEXE [1]:
> If you look at the source code of the decompression engine of PKLITE, you'll notice that it looks like the one of LZEXE.
[1] https://bellard.org/lzexe.html
The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun).
While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
> Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
In a lot of IP product categories, there are different classes of users who pirate. In the case of movies, a friend of mine who's a senior exec in a major Hollywood studio once told me they had data suggesting that of the three categories of audience: A) Never pay, only pirate, B) Only pay, never pirate, and C) Sometimes pay, sometimes pirate, the third category was probably larger than the first.
That would mean degrading your brand value among consumers of piracy, could negatively impact long-term sales.
One of the reasons Sony won in most third world countries, there was a lot of piracy for the multiple playstation devices and it was easy to access it. As those generations of gamers grew older and the country's economy improved, they didn't even consider xboxes as all their friends had sony consoles, why would you bother?
https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/chi...
Gates: how piracy worked for me in China - The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term
Kudos to the original author who took the time to dive into it. I highly admire people who can dive into some technical topics and have the patience to figure everything else. They are the kind of people I look up to.
BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).
If you enjoy stuff like this - do read up on 4am's incredible efforts to preserve Apple ][ software. Just amazing.
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
Wow, write-up was eye-opening for me. My first computer was a 4K Radio Shack Color Computer based on the Motorola 6809 CPU. It had no hardware support for sprites, tiles, palette tricks or other neat graphics. But what it did have was probably the best 8-bit CPU of that era. Being the 'little brother' of the 68000, it had an orthogonal instruction set, indexed and indirect addressing modes, separate user and software stacks and several 16-bit registers. All this made writing relocatable, re-entrant, preemptive multi-tasking code easy and to me it as pretty much "just how assembler is written".
My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!
And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.
Amazing that GOG was so lazy that they didn't check to ensure their DRM removal was complete, before offering it for sale. Hopefully this will motivate them to do a proper fix.
I would not blame GOG for that if even the official 1996 bundle release made the same mistake. The description in the article sounds like it was never officially confirmed knowledge that the game would become unwinnable if cracked incompletely.
How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.
Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.
QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable.
Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.
I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA.
And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?
Perhaps they could have made it slightly more obvious, especially after some threshold or lifetime date.
I think it's a sensible approach to discourage piracy. Consider the irony when pirates of Game Dev Tycoon find their virtual games fail due to piracy: https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-p...
A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the 1996 version.
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game.
This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):
https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...
Apple ][ games like Ultima were famous for crashing 20 hours in if you didn't crack the hidden checks.
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort.
I also just really miss printed game manuals.
I hated the one on F-15 Strike Eagle II on the C64; game itself was great, but you needed to look up in the manual what colour deck crew vest was displayed on the screen prior to the game starting.
I played it on a B&W TV.
Hmm, I had bought a PC release of it at a newstand and it didn't have that protection
SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.
There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.
It was massively annoying even if you had bought the game though.
Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
We just kept the manuals for our most frequently played games on our computer desk. I don’t remember it being particularly burdensome, especially compared to the copy protection many games employ today. Plus, several games were designed to rely upon the manuals as part of their game play, like the Carmen Sandiego series.
Still a problem in the console age. It was annoying as hell that I had Halo Wars 2 installed on my XBOX ONE but couldn't play it for the nine months that the disc was lost.
I personally didn't mind it, usually, for most games it was better to have the manual in front in any case
In practice there'd still be a limited number of possible questions, so people would just compile the answers in a file that was included in the pirated distribution. I remember plenty of DOS games that came with something like that.
The ones I remember had a red tinted window that would reveal the hidden word. If you tried to photocopy it using a black and white photocopier the words wouldn't be visible anymore. Now in hindsight, I guess you could have photocopied the whole wheel with some red mylar on top of it.
I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.
My least favorite was the protection typical on C-64 games that caused constant resets of the floppy drive, banging the head against the stop repeatedly. tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRRRAAAAAAP. I would crack games I owned (admittedly, most I did not own) just to keep them from eventually knocking my drive out of alignment. Loaded a lot faster too. Fast-Hack-Em FTW.
Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual.
My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.
Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.
Microprose games had awesome manuals. Typically more than a hundred pages full of details going well beyond explaining the game itself. For example, in a flight simulator it had details on every plane in the game, the historical context of the missions, dogfighting techniques, etc...
It wouldn't be out of place in a library.
The manual to Grand Prix 2 taught me more about car racing than any other bit of reading, video, or whatever media. It had so much about how to drive, how to use telemetry, etc.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
What a delight that game and its manual were.
One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…”
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
I believe there was a shortcut to skip the questions on the PC. I think it was ctrl+alt+x.
Gah! Where were you in 1994 when that knowledge would have come in handy?!
Besides not being a one time activation, it was not a "one key". The game would ask you for "N-th word on the M-th paragraph on P-th page", at each start for example. We are talking about an age where you would not have scanners or mobile phones with cameras.
To the adult me, this sounds tedious and not really worth. But the teen myself, I'm sure I would totally do it even I have to solve some riddle.
>Not worth it
We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.
And yeah, we were younger.
Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt
Yeah, I did put the time in for X-Wing back in the day. A friend made copies of his disks, and let me borrow the manual so that I could copy the relevant bits down into a notebook. Took a while, but I had lots of time so not a big deal.
That jogs my memory, I think “The Island of Dr. Brain” had something similar
for example "flashback" ask you a writen code in the manual at the beginning of each level if my memory is good. So it's was not a one time activation
here a example of it : (I only remember the first version) https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_...
Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.
I remember one of the later Wizardry games (I believe it was Return of Werdna) came with a pamphlet full of codes that was printed on very dark brown paper that made it very difficult to make legible photocopies.
It wasn't individual per install. Anyone with the game manual could find the word or code in the book. Some games asked for a random word from the manual on boot, so you couldn't just share the code, you needed to share the entire manual (or decompile or something to find all the words it is looking for).
And the manuals usually themselves had "copy protection". Many were printed in variations of dark colours, such that any easily accessible copier would just copy a black page.
this was the comment i was looking for! i remember those red pages and found them annoying on even legitimately purchased games (which is how copy protection has always been IME - makes it so legitimate purchasers of a game got annoyed and hence, got cracks for games to just not be as annoyed!)
I remember playing old french game "Metal Mutant", which on a level three or four asked something in french (it was probably asking for a code from manual) and if you answered wrong, it wouldn't exit the game, but it'd just silently disable all projectiles, making game unwinnable. I as a kid spent hours wandering around, thinking that I missed some clue. And game didn't have any saves, so after banging my head for a couple hours, I'd exit game frustrated, and in a month or two I had to start from scratch if I wanted to try to complete that level again.
Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
At least some games in the Arma series have also used a copy protection that messes with gameplay if it judged the game to be pirated. I don't know if it used tricks to trip crackers, though -- Wikipedia mentions intentional errors on optical media that didn't get passed on by disc copy software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE
That one was quite famous. Also the CD came with some sub-channel data, that only one program was able to copy. It had sheep on it but forgot its name
That must have been CloneCD then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
I have a core memory of playing a cracked copy of an elder scrolls game that was unwinnable, and spending two hours playing with console commands in the game to get past the broken section. If I recall correctly, key dialogues were broken preventing story advancement.
Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
This article actually solves one of the great mysteries of my life: how to beat that game.
I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.
Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.
Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.
I remember an old Apple ][ game that someone had copied from somewhere and it got passed around by us jr high school students.
It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.
Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy
You could be thinking of gorgon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)
Now that I started looking for it, I think it was Repton because I remember buildings.
I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old
https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game)
I'd never heard of Gorgon but had to've run across Nasir's name at least once during my gaming years... and wow, what a pedigree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli
Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.
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For a modern example I had a bad time trying to play Celeste using the family sharing feature in Steam. The game would slow down the jumping making it impossible to advance. I don't know why it would deem it as an illegal copy, I just deleted it and never tried the game again.
That sounds... odd. Was Maddy involved with that game?
ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.
Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.
> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha
Given that they sell the game on itch.io, I really doubt they're going out of their way to enforce any crazy copy-protection.
That’s a bummer because it’s a great game with a beautiful story around mental health.
I couldn't play sim city because of that, the game would always throw insane natural disasters at me until I lost, I thought that was a very interesting way to mess with copies
This is one of those instances where putting titles in quotes helps comprehension:
> Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"
Apparently 'The Terminator 2029' had such a trick in it. One of my friends in college was obsessed with the game and was frustrated about not being able to complete one of the levels due to a target being inaccessible. Eventually someone told him it was an intentional flaw introduced into copies that were pirated. Not sure if he ever bought the game so he could finish it.
I remember Pizza Tycoon having copy protection based on pizza recipes (for which I didn't have the recipe booklet, for usual reasons). In the early days of your pizzeria, people would only want the classics and if you couldn't make them, you struggled hard. Somehow, I've managed to power through (probably easy difficulty or something) and as soon as you build up connections to the mafia, people would gladly eat the most abhorrend pizzas the world has ever seen (I vividly remember an all-plum pizza I've created, it was beloved beyond any reason).
I speedran through the whole article but this was a nice reverse engineering deep dive!
I remember both those games from when I was about 12 and I also remember being endlessly frustrated with the mechanics. I couldn't get controls in order, seemed to fail at almost every sport (for some reason, I remember high jump vividly). Since those games came with several dozen others on a very cheaply bought CD (if you know what I mean) then I guess I can finally have a redemption arc for my skills after three decades. Great stuff!
I remember playing a similar track & field game on the Apple ][ my dad bought us and getting so frustrated. After reading this article I had a vague recollection that when booted up it would briefly display a "cracked by..." message, and now I figure the game probably had a similar "copy protection" mechanism.
I wonder what kind of cool stuff you'd discover if you dug into the code of other classic DOS games from the 90s? Anyone ever try reverse engineering their childhood favorites?
God I thought I was an idiot, that game seemed so hard!!! I'm so glad to have read this xD
(back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)
Ah, memories.
I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.
this explains why some of my games growing up just. didnt. work. no matter what.
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Marvelous!
stands up and claps
Excellent!
Applause