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!
Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door.
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.
Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message !
Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
Not mentioned in the article is Sid Meyer's Pirates! (the exclamation mark was part of the name, though I do get excited when talking about the game so I'd add it myself if it weren't).
This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
I always find official cracks* like this to be amusing and worrying at the same time. Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
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.
You can stop worrying, and move straight into... whatever it is on the spectrum from hangwringing to panic it is you are looking for, I offer no judgment here... because loss of source code and all build artifacts is the norm, not the exception. Completely normal. Unfortunate, but completely normal.
> Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].
Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.
Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.
People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
> As it turns out, “FAB” stands for Fabrice Bellard, who next to being the original developer of widely used programs such as FFmpeg and QEMU, is also the creator of an executable compression utility called LZEXE, developed in 1990.
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun).
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...
One of the reasons Sony won in most third world countries, there was a lot of piracy for the multiple playstation devices and it was easy to access it. As those generations of gamers grew older and the country's economy improved, they didn't even consider xboxes as all their friends had sony consoles, why would you bother?
> Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
In a lot of IP product categories, there are different classes of users who pirate. In the case of movies, a friend of mine who's a senior exec in a major Hollywood studio once told me they had data suggesting that of the three categories of audience: A) Never pay, only pirate, B) Only pay, never pirate, and C) Sometimes pay, sometimes pirate, the third category was probably larger than the first.
That would mean degrading your brand value among consumers of piracy, could negatively impact long-term sales.
Kudos to the original author who took the time to dive into it. I highly admire people who can dive into some technical topics and have the patience to figure everything else. They are the kind of people I look up to.
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).
At least some games in the Arma series have also used a copy protection that messes with gameplay if it judged the game to be pirated. I don't know if it used tricks to trip crackers, though -- Wikipedia mentions intentional errors on optical media that didn't get passed on by disc copy software.
Amazing that GOG was so lazy that they didn't check to ensure their DRM removal was complete, before offering it for sale. Hopefully this will motivate them to do a proper fix.
I would not blame GOG for that if even the official 1996 bundle release made the same mistake. The description in the article sounds like it was never officially confirmed knowledge that the game would become unwinnable if cracked incompletely.
How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.
Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.
Chris Crawford wrote in his On Game Design about a trick like this, that he implemented in Patton Strikes Back. Plus some other tricks. He claims that he never found a cracked version that had fixed the secondary checks. The result was a crash just before winning the game.
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):
My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort.
I hated the one on F-15 Strike Eagle II on the C64; game itself was great, but you needed to look up in the manual what colour deck crew vest was displayed on the screen prior to the game starting.
SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.
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.
In practice there'd still be a limited number of possible questions, so people would just compile the answers in a file that was included in the pirated distribution. I remember plenty of DOS games that came with something like that.
The ones I remember had a red tinted window that would reveal the hidden word. If you tried to photocopy it using a black and white photocopier the words wouldn't be visible anymore. Now in hindsight, I guess you could have photocopied the whole wheel with some red mylar on top of it.
I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.
My least favorite was the protection typical on C-64 games that caused constant resets of the floppy drive, banging the head against the stop repeatedly. tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRRRAAAAAAP. I would crack games I owned (admittedly, most I did not own) just to keep them from eventually knocking my drive out of alignment. Loaded a lot faster too. Fast-Hack-Em FTW.
Wow, write-up was eye-opening for me. My first computer was a 4K Radio Shack Color Computer based on the Motorola 6809 CPU. It had no hardware support for sprites, tiles, palette tricks or other neat graphics. But what it did have was probably the best 8-bit CPU of that era. Being the 'little brother' of the 68000, it had an orthogonal instruction set, indexed and indirect addressing modes, separate user and software stacks and several 16-bit registers. All this made writing relocatable, re-entrant, preemptive multi-tasking code easy and to me it as pretty much "just how assembler is written".
My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!
And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.
I remember playing old french game "Metal Mutant", which on a level three or four asked something in french (it was probably asking for a code from manual) and if you answered wrong, it wouldn't exit the game, but it'd just silently disable all projectiles, making game unwinnable. I as a kid spent hours wandering around, thinking that I missed some clue. And game didn't have any saves, so after banging my head for a couple hours, I'd exit game frustrated, and in a month or two I had to start from scratch if I wanted to try to complete that level again.
I have a core memory of playing a cracked copy of an elder scrolls game that was unwinnable, and spending two hours playing with console commands in the game to get past the broken section. If I recall correctly, key dialogues were broken preventing story advancement.
This article actually solves one of the great mysteries of my life: how to beat that game.
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.
I remember an old Apple ][ game that someone had copied from somewhere and it got passed around by us jr high school students.
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
For a modern example I had a bad time trying to play Celeste using the family sharing feature in Steam. The game would slow down the jumping making it impossible to advance. I don't know why it would deem it as an illegal copy, I just deleted it and never tried the game again.
That sounds... odd. Was Maddy involved with that game?
ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.
Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.
> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha
I couldn't play sim city because of that, the game would always throw insane natural disasters at me until I lost, I thought that was a very interesting way to mess with copies
Apparently 'The Terminator 2029' had such a trick in it. One of my friends in college was obsessed with the game and was frustrated about not being able to complete one of the levels due to a target being inaccessible. Eventually someone told him it was an intentional flaw introduced into copies that were pirated. Not sure if he ever bought the game so he could finish it.
I remember Pizza Tycoon having copy protection based on pizza recipes (for which I didn't have the recipe booklet, for usual reasons). In the early days of your pizzeria, people would only want the classics and if you couldn't make them, you struggled hard. Somehow, I've managed to power through (probably easy difficulty or something) and as soon as you build up connections to the mafia, people would gladly eat the most abhorrend pizzas the world has ever seen (I vividly remember an all-plum pizza I've created, it was beloved beyond any reason).
I remember both those games from when I was about 12 and I also remember being endlessly frustrated with the mechanics. I couldn't get controls in order, seemed to fail at almost every sport (for some reason, I remember high jump vividly). Since those games came with several dozen others on a very cheaply bought CD (if you know what I mean) then I guess I can finally have a redemption arc for my skills after three decades. Great stuff!
I remember playing a similar track & field game on the Apple ][ my dad bought us and getting so frustrated.
After reading this article I had a vague recollection that when booted up it would briefly display a "cracked by..." message,
and now I figure the game probably had a similar "copy protection" mechanism.
I wonder what kind of cool stuff you'd discover if you dug into the code of other classic DOS games from the 90s? Anyone ever try reverse engineering their childhood favorites?
Reason077|10 months ago
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!
GuB-42|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
Ayesh|10 months ago
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.
miek|10 months ago
JeanMarcS|10 months ago
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
A sort of shareware.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWqnM-yyfPQ
fipar|10 months ago
This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
watusername|10 months ago
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
jerf|10 months ago
mschuster91|10 months ago
This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].
Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320
skocznymroczny|10 months ago
People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
abra0|10 months ago
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
mschuster91|10 months ago
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
selcuka|10 months ago
> If you look at the source code of the decompression engine of PKLITE, you'll notice that it looks like the one of LZEXE.
[1] https://bellard.org/lzexe.html
tgsovlerkhgsel|10 months ago
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...
mlinhares|10 months ago
mrandish|10 months ago
In a lot of IP product categories, there are different classes of users who pirate. In the case of movies, a friend of mine who's a senior exec in a major Hollywood studio once told me they had data suggesting that of the three categories of audience: A) Never pay, only pirate, B) Only pay, never pirate, and C) Sometimes pay, sometimes pirate, the third category was probably larger than the first.
That would mean degrading your brand value among consumers of piracy, could negatively impact long-term sales.
ferguess_k|10 months ago
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).
eej71|10 months ago
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
candl|10 months ago
p0w3n3d|10 months ago
Delk|10 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE
paulryanrogers|10 months ago
brazzy|10 months ago
How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.
Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.
g-b-r|10 months ago
2mlWQbCK|10 months ago
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...
PaulHoule|10 months ago
_mlbt|10 months ago
I also just really miss printed game manuals.
lb1lf|10 months ago
I played it on a B&W TV.
llm_nerd|10 months ago
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.
guappa|10 months ago
Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
int_19h|10 months ago
thijson|10 months ago
I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.
chuckadams|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
g4zj|10 months ago
mrandish|10 months ago
My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!
And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.
codesnik|10 months ago
bitmasher9|10 months ago
Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
flowrange|10 months ago
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.
fnord77|10 months ago
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
eej71|10 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)
tsunoo|10 months ago
[deleted]
hiccuphippo|10 months ago
jordigh|10 months ago
ExOK is generally pretty tolerant of mods, re-distribution, fangames, and even reverse-engineering their code. I'm really surprised they would deliberately make the game awful to play even for pirates.
Edit: Just asked Noel on Discord. Celeste shouldn't be doing anything like that.
> The game doesn't have anything like that in it. The steam version makes sure steam is running before the game starts, but that's it. The itch version literally has nothing in it. [...] Yeah, we don't do anything to go out of our way to stop piracy. People have also decompiled and modded this game in pretty much every way imaginable (which I think is awesome!) so if there was anything like that it'd be very noticeable haha
caminanteblanco|10 months ago
barbazoo|10 months ago
the_clarence|10 months ago
Mountain_Skies|10 months ago
pimlottc|10 months ago
> Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"
cinntaile|10 months ago
pronik|10 months ago
pronik|10 months ago
cratermoon|10 months ago
brbcompiling|10 months ago
g-b-r|10 months ago
(back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)
balou23|10 months ago
I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.
_sys49152|10 months ago
tsunoo|10 months ago
[deleted]
fastusdt|10 months ago
[deleted]
p0w3n3d|10 months ago
stands up and claps
Excellent!
Applause