10 ms·

Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

267 points by abra0 1y ago

paulryanrogers 1y ago
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.
- g-b-r 1y ago
  A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the 1996 version.
- brazzy 1y ago
  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.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable. Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.
    - brazzy 1y ago
      I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA. And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?
      - paulryanrogers 1y ago
        Perhaps they could have made it slightly more obvious, especially after some threshold or lifetime date. I think it's a sensible approach to discourage piracy. Consider the irony when pirates of Game Dev Tycoon find their virtual games fail due to piracy: https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-pirate-the-game-to-unwittingly-fail-from-piracy https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-p...
fastusdt 1y ago
[dead]
cinntaile 1y ago
I speedran through the whole article but this was a nice reverse engineering deep dive!
_mlbt 1y ago
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 also just really miss printed game manuals.
- chuckadams 1y ago
  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.
- g4zj 1y ago
  Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?
  - Narew 1y ago
    for example "flashback" ask you a writen code in the manual at the beginning of each level if my memory is good. So it's was not a one time activation
    - Narew 1y ago
      here a example of it : (I only remember the first version) https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_about_copy_protection_in_flashback_the/?rdt=41700 https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_...
  - _mlbt 1y ago
    Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.
Mountain_Skies 1y ago
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.
Reason077 1y ago
"The “Razor1911” crack (1991) 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 1y ago
  And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the warez scene.
  - miek 1y ago
    Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)
    - RIMR 1y ago
      To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today. 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.
      - miek 1y ago
        Article for reference [0]. It's amazing how far people's baggage will follow them (though the impact here is probably minimal). Wild that a former Fairlight member became San Diego Republican Party Chairman. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-24/old-video-shows-local-gop-head-with-images-of-hitler https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latim...
      - xorcist 1y ago
Ayesh 1y ago
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.
- miek 1y ago
  Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
  - wyldfire 1y ago
    I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
    - Ayesh 1y ago
      Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4 https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
      - miek 1y ago
        Wow, I just want to call attention to this for anyone scrolling through. If you loved the game, watch this video!!
  - jhbadger 1y ago
    It's a bit like how most people think Wolfenstein started with the 3D version in 1992 and have never heard of the 1981 original.
bitmasher9 1y ago
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. Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
codesnik 1y ago
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.
2mlWQbCK 1y ago
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): https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume-6/copy-protection-methods.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Apple ][ games like Ultima were famous for crashing 20 hours in if you didn't crack the hidden checks.
candl 1y ago
Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago
  That one was quite famous. Also the CD came with some sub-channel data, that only one program was able to copy. It had sheep on it but forgot its name
  - junga 1y ago
    That must have been CloneCD then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
- Delk 1y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE
fnord77 1y ago
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
- tsunoo 1y ago
  [dead]
- eej71 1y ago
  You could be thinking of gorgon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)
  - dole 1y ago
    I'd never heard of Gorgon but had to've run across Nasir's name at least once during my gaming years... and wow, what a pedigree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.
  - fnord77 1y ago
    Now that I started looking for it, I think it was Repton because I remember buildings. I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game)
watusername 1y ago
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. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522 * Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320
- jerf 1y ago
  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.
eej71 1y ago
If you enjoy stuff like this - do read up on 4am's incredible efforts to preserve Apple ][ software. Just amazing. https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cracker-the-secrets-of-4am/ https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
tsunoo 1y ago
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mschuster91 1y ago
> 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?
- selcuka 1y ago
  Even the commercial product PKLite by PKWARE (of PKZIP fame) was "inspired" by LZEXE [1]: > 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 https://bellard.org/lzexe.html
ferguess_k 1y ago
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).
flowrange 1y ago
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
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...
- mlinhares 1y ago
  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?
  - homarp 1y ago
    https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/china/gates-how-piracy-worked-for-me-in-china-8xrk7x0h65d?region=global https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/chi... Gates: how piracy worked for me in China - The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term
- mrandish 1y ago
  > 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.
the_clarence 1y ago
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
hiccuphippo 1y ago
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.
- barbazoo 1y ago
  That’s a bummer because it’s a great game with a beautiful story around mental health.
- jordigh 1y ago
  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
- caminanteblanco 1y ago
  Given that they sell the game on itch.io, I really doubt they're going out of their way to enforce any crazy copy-protection.
g-b-r 1y ago
God I thought I was an idiot, that game seemed so hard!!! I'm so glad to have read this xD (back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)
skocznymroczny 1y ago
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.
- abra0 1y ago
  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.
  - computerthings 1y ago
    [dead]
  - Ntrails 1y ago
    I have a vague memory of a "game-dev studio tycoon" sim game which, if you played the pirated version, would have your sales taper off super hard and you'd go bust because pirates. There was, however, an explicit nod to this happening and it was at least clear that the failure was making a point
    - detaro 1y ago
      it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon": https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-developers-give-pirates-a-taste-of-their-own-medicine/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-devel...
  - saratogacx 1y ago
    A few reasons 1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game. 2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal. 3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again. 4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.
fipar 1y ago
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.
p0w3n3d 1y ago
Marvelous! stands up and claps Excellent! Applause
brbcompiling 1y ago
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?
_sys49152 1y ago
this explains why some of my games growing up just. didnt. work. no matter what.
pimlottc 1y ago
This is one of those instances where putting titles in quotes helps comprehension: > Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"
balou23 1y ago
Ah, memories. I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.
cratermoon 1y ago
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.
pronik 1y ago
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!
pronik 1y ago
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).
mrandish 1y ago
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.

267 points by abra0 1y ago

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.

g-b-r 1y ago
A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the 1996 version.
brazzy 1y ago
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.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable. Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.
  - brazzy 1y ago
    I very much doubt that GOG makes enough on such old titles to justify thorough QA. And I absolutely fault the developera for it, because it's a stupid, counterproductive thing to do - if nobody knows it happens because the game is pirated, it will just get a reputation for being buggy and deter honest buyers just as much as pirates. So why do it? To secretly "get back" at the pirates?
    - paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Perhaps they could have made it slightly more obvious, especially after some threshold or lifetime date. I think it's a sensible approach to discourage piracy. Consider the irony when pirates of Game Dev Tycoon find their virtual games fail due to piracy: https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-pirate-the-game-to-unwittingly-fail-from-piracy https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-p...

fastusdt 1y ago

[dead]

cinntaile 1y ago

I speedran through the whole article but this was a nice reverse engineering deep dive!

_mlbt 1y ago

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 also just really miss printed game manuals.

chuckadams 1y ago
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.
g4zj 1y ago
Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?
- Narew 1y ago
  for example "flashback" ask you a writen code in the manual at the beginning of each level if my memory is good. So it's was not a one time activation
  - Narew 1y ago
    here a example of it : (I only remember the first version) https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_about_copy_protection_in_flashback_the/?rdt=41700 https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_...
- _mlbt 1y ago
  Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.

Mountain_Skies 1y ago

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.

Reason077 1y ago

"The “Razor1911” crack (1991) 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 1y ago
And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the warez scene.
- miek 1y ago
  Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)
  - RIMR 1y ago
    To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today. 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.
    - miek 1y ago
      Article for reference [0]. It's amazing how far people's baggage will follow them (though the impact here is probably minimal). Wild that a former Fairlight member became San Diego Republican Party Chairman. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-24/old-video-shows-local-gop-head-with-images-of-hitler https://web.archive.org/web/20240406015231/https://www.latim...
    - xorcist 1y ago

Ayesh 1y ago

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.

miek 1y ago
Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
- wyldfire 1y ago
  I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
  - Ayesh 1y ago
    Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4 https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
    - miek 1y ago
      Wow, I just want to call attention to this for anyone scrolling through. If you loved the game, watch this video!!
- jhbadger 1y ago
  It's a bit like how most people think Wolfenstein started with the 3D version in 1992 and have never heard of the 1981 original.

bitmasher9 1y ago

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. Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.

codesnik 1y ago

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.

2mlWQbCK 1y ago

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): https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/jcgd-volume-6/copy-protection-methods.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

PaulHoule 1y ago
Apple ][ games like Ultima were famous for crashing 20 hours in if you didn't crack the hidden checks.

candl 1y ago

Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.

p0w3n3d 1y ago
That one was quite famous. Also the CD came with some sub-channel data, that only one program was able to copy. It had sheep on it but forgot its name
- junga 1y ago
  That must have been CloneCD then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
Delk 1y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

fnord77 1y ago

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

tsunoo 1y ago
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eej71 1y ago
You could be thinking of gorgon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)
- dole 1y ago
  I'd never heard of Gorgon but had to've run across Nasir's name at least once during my gaming years... and wow, what a pedigree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.
- fnord77 1y ago
  Now that I started looking for it, I think it was Repton because I remember buildings. I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game)

watusername 1y ago

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. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522 * Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games

mschuster91 1y ago
> 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43197320
jerf 1y ago
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.

eej71 1y ago

If you enjoy stuff like this - do read up on 4am's incredible efforts to preserve Apple ][ software. Just amazing. https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cracker-the-secrets-of-4am/ https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...

tsunoo 1y ago

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mschuster91 1y ago

> 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?

selcuka 1y ago
Even the commercial product PKLite by PKWARE (of PKZIP fame) was "inspired" by LZEXE [1]: > 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 https://bellard.org/lzexe.html

ferguess_k 1y ago

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).

flowrange 1y ago

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.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

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...

mlinhares 1y ago
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?
- homarp 1y ago
  https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/china/gates-how-piracy-worked-for-me-in-china-8xrk7x0h65d?region=global https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/asia-travel/chi... Gates: how piracy worked for me in China - The Microsoft chairman says that bootlegged software is creating a demand for his legitimate products in the longer term
mrandish 1y ago
> 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.

the_clarence 1y ago

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

hiccuphippo 1y ago

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.

barbazoo 1y ago
That’s a bummer because it’s a great game with a beautiful story around mental health.
jordigh 1y ago
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
caminanteblanco 1y ago
Given that they sell the game on itch.io, I really doubt they're going out of their way to enforce any crazy copy-protection.

g-b-r 1y ago

God I thought I was an idiot, that game seemed so hard!!! I'm so glad to have read this xD (back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)

skocznymroczny 1y ago

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.

abra0 1y ago
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.
- computerthings 1y ago
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- Ntrails 1y ago
  I have a vague memory of a "game-dev studio tycoon" sim game which, if you played the pirated version, would have your sales taper off super hard and you'd go bust because pirates. There was, however, an explicit nod to this happening and it was at least clear that the failure was making a point
  - detaro 1y ago
    it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon": https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-developers-give-pirates-a-taste-of-their-own-medicine/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-devel...
- saratogacx 1y ago
  A few reasons 1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game. 2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal. 3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again. 4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.

fipar 1y ago

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.

p0w3n3d 1y ago

Marvelous! stands up and claps Excellent! Applause

brbcompiling 1y ago

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?

_sys49152 1y ago

this explains why some of my games growing up just. didnt. work. no matter what.

pimlottc 1y ago

This is one of those instances where putting titles in quotes helps comprehension: > Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"

balou23 1y ago

Ah, memories. I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.

cratermoon 1y ago

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.

pronik 1y ago

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!

pronik 1y ago

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).

mrandish 1y ago

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.