I also just really miss printed game manuals.
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.
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
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.
It wouldn't be out of place in a library.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
What a delight that game and its manual were.
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.
Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
I played it on a B&W TV.
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!
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.
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.
Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
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...
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
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
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
> If you look at the source code of the decompression engine of PKLITE, you'll notice that it looks like the one of LZEXE.
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).
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.
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...
cinntaile•2h ago