Comment by tj-teej - Hacker Neue

tj-teej Sep 5, 2023 parent

Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers.

I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game!

I remember being so sad that I couldn't play anymore because I didn't have the manual but in retrospect I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy

bri3d Sep 5, 2023

Yes, this was a common copy protection in old games!

There's a big list on mobygames here: https://www.mobygames.com/group/9360/games-with-manual-looku...

AbraKdabra Sep 5, 2023

GTA IV has something similar, if you play a cracked copy eventually the camera starts to wobble and it makes it impossible to play, and it makes it look like a bug. I remember thousands of players asking in the forums why their camera was shaking without knowing they're telling everyone they had a pirated game. Hilarious move from Rockstar.

For those wondering, yes it happened to me, it was absolutely infuriating like "man this fucking game is full of bugs", lol.

jamaicahest Sep 6, 2023

The original Settlers 1 game, released in 1993, had ingenious copy protection built in. It had multiple levels of copy protection, that would activate, if the copy protection was attempted circumvented, i.e. cracked. It would not let you complete levels due to some characters missing/never appearing and the likes, if you used a cracked version of the game. Much like you describe with GTA IV, users thought this was a buggy game, while in reality it was a buggy crack.

AdmiralAsshat Sep 5, 2023

It was common as well to use these things called Code Wheels:

https://archive.org/details/code-wheels

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel

pimlottc Sep 5, 2023

> https://archive.org/details/code-wheels

Oh dang, these are fun, I remember the classic Monkey Island "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel [3]

FYI you can use these without downloading the whole collection:

- Under Download Options, click "SHOW ALL" to see the list of files [1]

- Find the zip file for the game you want and click "View Contents" [2]

- Click the "HTM" file listed [3]

Kudos to the kind soul who took the extra effort to package them as single-file self-contained html docs!

1: https://archive.org/download/code-wheels

2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...

3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...

rsstack Sep 5, 2023

Sim Earth had the same thing! It would ask you a question like "How many moons does Saturn have?" and the manual had some fact sheets at the end with all the numbers. Wikipedia was not around yet, and their fact sheets having slightly different numbers than encyclopedias due to different sources and publish date (moon counts change often, and measurements in meters for anything astronomical have randomness due to imprecisions).

milesvp Sep 5, 2023

I remember when I was young getting a game from my older sister's college boyfriend. Gave me the game on disks, and also a photocopied manual just for this same purpose. Used to be super common for games to use these kinds of checks for anti piracy. I thought it was super funny though, because the game was pretty old, and I was confused why this guy didn't know how to find a cracked version of the game to avoid having to pull out a 60 page manual just to play.

szatkus Sep 5, 2023

This was even more confusing for me, because the versions of those games I played were usually already cracked and accepted any input. So I was wondering what's the point.

spelunker Sep 5, 2023

I remember doing this for the original X-COM: UFO Defense. Actually I wonder how the Steam versions of these games work? Do they just include a PDF of the original manual?

xxs Sep 5, 2023

>I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy

Totally, and exceptionally common. It was popular in the '80 and the early '90.

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