Fighting game piracy, a brief history

GamesRadar ran a very amusing story recently, diving into the history of copy prevention and finding some particularly inventive or annoying means to do so.

In the days before rapid distribution of illegal copies via the Internet, game piracy, of course, existed too. Who doesn’t remember the bloke in the schoolyard that “knew someone who knew someone” that could provide you with the newest games like Doom, Command and Conquer or Day of the Tentacle?

So, how did studios try to counter that basic urge of its customers to play their games for free? I strongly suggest reading the GamesRadar article. Here are a few of the highlights.

In the 1980s, one means to prevent piracy was the Lenslok. A special prism was shipped with the game. Upon starting it, a garbled two-letter code appeared on screen. Using the prism, it became readable and the correct code could be entered. This system suffered from scalability issues on larger and smaller TVs, however, and proved very easy to hack with basic coding knowledge.

LucasArt’s classic The Secret of Monkey Island came with Dial-a-Pirate. The game came with a code wheel with numeric codes and faces of different pirates. When the pirate face appeared on the screen, the code had to be entered, along with the date. This allowed the game to be played.

With the 2001 shooter Operation Flashpoint, copy protection yielded playable copies that became increasingly hard. Over time, damage done by the player would lower dramatically while enemies would become indestructible super heroes. The player’s health and damage resistance became lower and lower, rendering the game impossible to complete.

A recent attempt to have people buy games rather than copying was in Batman’s Arkham Asylum. Like Flashpoint, the copied game would work properly, bar one function: Batman’s glider. This makes the copy playable, but impossible to complete. When a frustrated gamer complained about it on a forum, one of the studio’s reps uttered the immortal words: “It’s not a bug in the game code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”

4 March 2010