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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
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.Yeah, I get that maybe it made the developer and/or publisher feel some kind of 'justice' was done, but it's ultimately bad for your brand to have any game out in the world that has subtly degraded performance. The players of pirated versions probably just assumed the company makes games that are buggy or with really bad difficulty scaling. Reducing piracy by making players not want your games doesn't seem like a winning long-term strategy.
Some publishers instead layered their piracy checks later in the game play or delayed stopping pirated play until some number of game events after detection. If they were concerned crackers would find an explicit error message, another option is to change game play in some other way like this game ended the luge race before the player finished. A legit game behavior at the wrong time is still harder to find than an error box or specific text.
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.
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...
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
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.
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).
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
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.
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.
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...
I also just really miss printed game manuals.
I played it on a B&W TV.
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 remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
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.
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
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://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.
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
> Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"
(back then I didn't even know what piracy was, it was just a game that someone gave me)
I broke the space key on my dads computer while trying to get a new speed skating record.
stands up and claps
Excellent!
Applause