[HN Gopher] Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
___________________________________________________________________
Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
Author : abra0
Score : 247 points
Date : 2025-04-28 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mrwint.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mrwint.github.io)
| cinntaile wrote:
| I speedran through the whole article but this was a nice reverse
| engineering deep dive!
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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.
| chuckadams wrote:
| 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.
| g4zj wrote:
| Is this functionally different from a typical license key or
| activation key?
| Narew wrote:
| 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
| Narew wrote:
| here a example of it : (I only remember the first version)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question
| _...
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| 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.
| vladms wrote:
| 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.
| Ayesh wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| >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
| derwiki wrote:
| That jogs my memory, I think "The Island of Dr. Brain" had
| something similar
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| 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).
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| fazeirony wrote:
| 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!)
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| 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.
| mattkrause wrote:
| 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".
| Clepsydra wrote:
| I believe there was a shortcut to skip the questions on
| the PC. I think it was ctrl+alt+x.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Gah! Where were you in 1994 when that knowledge would
| have come in handy?!
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| 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.
| guappa wrote:
| 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.
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| g-b-r wrote:
| I personally didn't mind it, usually, for most games it was
| better to have the manual in front in any case
| lb1lf wrote:
| 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.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Hmm, I had bought a PC release of it at a newstand and it
| didn't have that protection
| int_19h wrote:
| 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.
| thijson wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| g-b-r wrote:
| A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these
| secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a
| faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the
| 1996 version.
| brazzy wrote:
| 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.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| 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.
| brazzy wrote:
| 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?
| Reason077 wrote:
| _" 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!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the
| warez scene.
| miek wrote:
| 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)
| RIMR wrote:
| 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.
| miek wrote:
| 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://w
| ww.latim...
| throwaway7894 wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| crtasm wrote:
| 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
| anal_reactor wrote:
| 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.
| Ayesh wrote:
| 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.
| miek wrote:
| Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I
| thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
| wyldfire wrote:
| 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)
| Ayesh wrote:
| Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion
| capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
| miek wrote:
| Wow, I just want to call attention to this for anyone
| scrolling through. If you loved the game, watch this
| video!!
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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
| cevn wrote:
| 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.
| wildzzz wrote:
| More like a rotoscoped bitmap animation than what we
| consider 3D motion capture now.
| ajkjk wrote:
| 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_o
| f...
| JeanMarcS wrote:
| 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
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| codesnik wrote:
| 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.
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| 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...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Apple ][ games like Ultima were famous for crashing 20 hours in
| if you didn't crack the hidden checks.
| fnord77 wrote:
| 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
| eej71 wrote:
| You could be thinking of gorgon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)
| dole wrote:
| 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.
| fnord77 wrote:
| 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)
| candl wrote:
| Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was
| surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| 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
| junga wrote:
| That must have been CloneCD then:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
| Delk wrote:
| 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
| watusername wrote:
| 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
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
| eej71 wrote:
| 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...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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?
| selcuka wrote:
| 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
| ferguess_k wrote:
| 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).
| flowrange wrote:
| 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.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| 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...
| mlinhares wrote:
| 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?
| homarp wrote:
| 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
| the_clarence wrote:
| 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
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's a bummer because it's a great game with a beautiful
| story around mental health.
| jordigh wrote:
| 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
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| 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.
| g-b-r wrote:
| 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)
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| 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.
| abra0 wrote:
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| 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_
| detaro wrote:
| it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon":
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-
| devel...
| saratogacx wrote:
| A few reasons 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.
| fipar wrote:
| 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.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Marvelous!
|
| _stands up and claps_
|
| Excellent!
|
| _Applause_
| brbcompiling wrote:
| 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?
| _sys49152 wrote:
| this explains why some of my games growing up just. didnt. work.
| no matter what.
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is one of those instances where putting titles in quotes
| helps comprehension:
|
| > Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"
| balou23 wrote:
| Ah, memories.
|
| I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a
| new speed skating record.
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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.
| pronik wrote:
| 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!
| pronik wrote:
| 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).
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