Tedium - Floppy Copy Classics 💾

(via The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History)

1. Microsoft Adventure

Era: Late ’70s

Platform: TRS-80

So, this was the program that started it all, and fittingly, it was sold by Microsoft, one of the most famous companies for copy-protection schemes. As Adventure was one of the first games sold primarily on a floppy disk—rather than cassette tapes—it was a groundbreaking in more ways than one. As The Digital Antiquarian noted in 2016:

It accomplished this feat by taking advantage of the capabilities of the floppy disk, becoming in the process the first major game to be released on disk only, as opposed to the cassettes that still dominated the industry. And to keep those disks from being copied, normally a trivially easy thing to do in comparison to copying a cassette, Microsoft applied one of the earliest notable instances of physical copy protection to the disk, a development novel enough to attract considerable attention in its own right in the trade press. Byte magazine, for instance, declared the game “a gold mine for the enthusiast and a nightmare for the software pirate.”

Eventually, it was cracked by a teen from Australia named Nick Andrew, who managed to work through the sector magic that Microsoft had implemented to prevent copying. Andrew noted it was kind of like an additional game for him. “I spent around 4 days straight playing the game until I had solved it, then another 2-3 days straight working out its copy protection mechanism so that I could copy it,” he wrote.

Guess that’s one way to increase replayability.

An example of a code wheel, shown with the Apple IIgs game Tunnels of Armageddon. (Blake Patterson/Flickr)

5. Looking up random phrases in the booklet, or using a code wheel

Era: ’80s-’90s

Platform: Various PC formats, more rarely in console games

One of the more effective copy protection techniques of its era didn’t even necessarily require cracking or additional coding, but instead required users to leverage something in the box from which they purchased the game.

MobyGames lists at least 211 separate games for different platforms used this technique, which obviously lost currency as the internet age began to pick up. Some of the best-known titles to use this tactic included Battle Chess, various King’s Quest games, and the original WarCraft.

A variant on this was the code wheel, which required users to decipher a code using an included paper device for decoding.

While obviously nowhere near enough to stop copy protection, it did help to slow it down to some degree, explaining why the technique was so widely used.

There is at least one known case of this kind of copy protection being used on a console game—StarTropics, the NES game, packaged a physical letter with the game that must be dipped into water to reveal a code that is required to complete the game. It’s widely believed that the technique was intended to discourage rentals of the game.

(Maxime Lorant/Wikimedia Commons)

8. GameCube Game Disc

Era: Early 2000s

Platform: Nintendo GameCube

Meanwhile, the Nintendo GameCube had slightly more luck with its proprietary optical format.

The platform, which relied on miniaturized variants of a traditional DVD optical disc, largely was able to avoid the fate of the GD-ROM format because of multiple modifications to the format, including the use of a “burst cutting area” that was used as a unique identifier for the discs. Datel, the makers of the Action Replay, found a way around this issue, but for the most part, users who wanted to use homebrew discs instead found themselves having to rely on mod chips or, later, SD cards to boot their games.

These days, copy protection is very much still around, despite controversy about it, and has become something of a moot point in many cases as the value of content has declined as a whole.

One of the most effective forms of copy protection, in the end, has proven to be the idea of activation—that is, phoning home to a server when you use a program—hugely popular applications such as Adobe’s Creative Cloud do it, as do many modern PC games. (Much to the chagrin of Steam Deck owners.) Because of activation, you have to constantly pay for content to continue to have access to it, and while it hasn’t necessarily killed piracy, it has done a lot to dampen some of its effects.

But even there, the technique has found its limits. Around the time of the Xbox One’s release, Microsoft had attempted to change its model to favor always-on internet access and digital downloads, while limiting the resale of physical games. But fan complaints about this change led Microsoft to change its approach, and to this day you can buy physical games if you want them.

There are ideological reasons to disagree with copy protection, and none of what I said here discourages you from disagreeing with it. I recommend checking out the work of Cory Doctorow if you need a starting point. That said, the best copy protection, the one you’re likely to live with, will always be the least intrusive—if it makes your life easier and gives you additional choice, you’ll live with it.

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