Dungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same bit x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.

The check was random, hidden in graphics files, and this, combined with some obfuscation and some more copy protection, meant it took over a year for the game to get cracked. A record at the time.

The dev claimed that the time and effort spent on the protection scheme was worth it as it allowed the game to keep selling through typical sales channels for much longer than usual.

That's awesome, thanks for sharing

All of these oold copy protections were so annoying. Some would just give you a page number from the manual and ask for the fifth word. Some AD&D games came with a decoder wheel with elvish runes n shit (looking at your Pool of Radiance!). At least the decoder wheel was fun to throw around at your friends.

@digdilem At that time I had bought a computer game (I guess it was "Elite") that always asked me about the word in the manual on some specific page. I was so upset about that, that I patched the random generator so that it returned a fix value. Then I changed the prompt so that it told me, which word to enter.

It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that's assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn't take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.

It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn't understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I'd genuinely be suprised if they're even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they're losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can't stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven't actually stopped them).

My dad had some old games for his Amstrad computer that needed a Lenslok, to decode the characters displayed on the screen.

IIRC it didn't work very well at all.

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.

A direct ancestor to the glorious Monkey Island Dial-a-pirate!

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...

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.

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.

wow. Im old enough this could possibly be a thing for me but I barely had seen and touched computers. wizardy and oregon trail.

How come 1984 is before photocopiers?

The pre game quest!