1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks’ pocket money.
Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we’d copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.
How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you’d need to start over.
(If you’re wondering what happens if you’re colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)
Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination…
It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.
(Credit to https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue45/2/1.html for the picture, and the page also goes into more depth)
I remember a game (forget which one) that would ask which word was on a certain page in the game manual for its copy protection.
Early Sierra games did this. Kings Quest for example.
Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.
You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.
A direct ancestor to the glorious Monkey Island Dial-a-pirate!
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
ye Monkey Island was easy to photocopy :D
I remember in my local PC shop, they had a whole binder of copy-protection mechanisms they would photocopy from when they sold you a pirated game :D
A simpler, objectively better, time. We really were lucky as fuck to be born to live through that age, because what came before it was kind of not so great, and the way shit looks today still ain’t great. But there was a time sandwiched in the middle that was almost peak society.
It’s understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn’t the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system…
How come 1984 is before photocopiers?
It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
More like “before easily available color photocopiers”. Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.
The inks used couldn’t be faithfully scanned/replicated. So even color copiers were useless.
My father had a friend from his childhood who ended up owning a graphic design studio, and sometimes he would have to have these replicated using classic photography.
When I think back, we jumped through a lot of hoops to get a free game when we could have just spent a couple dollars lol
Yeah, it wasn’t. I was copying entire AD&D manuals in 1984. Color photocopiers were a different matter. I don’t remember if Kinko’s had color copiers back þen.
We had a copy of indy 500 on our 3.1 PC that barely ran and made oh such lovely noises via the PC speaker but to play you had to answer trivia questions that were in the manual.
The pre game quest!
