Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

Custom Search

Copy Protection

"It has SecuROM protection and it limits you to three installations, so enjoy your $55 rental. If it even works."
—"The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena in 5 seconds" by The Spoony One

Even from the early days, the ease of making a perfect copy of software was a concern for gamemakers. Nintendo's experience with the Japanese disc-based 8-bit system went so badly due to unlicensed copying (called "Piracy" to make it sound extra special evil) that the company shied away from discs even long after all the other consoles had abandoned cartridges.

So from a fairly early time, gamemakers employed a variety of mechanisms to prevent unlicensed copying. These tended to either be prone to locking a player out of playing a legal copy (which the software makers didn't care so much about), being trivial to circumvent (which they did), or being so annoying that players chose to play something else.

One early method, called "key disc" protection, required that the game access its original disc during loading — metadata not normally preserved when a disk was duplicated was required to play the game. This was prone to failure, made games unplayable on newer machines (as this out-of-band data could not always be found by new hardware), and prevented the player from using a (perfectly legal) personal "backup" copy. Given that floppy disks had a typically short operational lifespan, this also had bad effects for long-term survival. Even a few CD-ROM based games used this method, intentionally introducing errors to the disk, then refusing to run if the error-correction mechanism did less work than expected.

The most expensive early system was to require that a piece of specialized hardware be attached to the machine, but this was hardly ever used outside of server-grade software. Some modern productivity software (in the $500+ range) uses a USB dongle key with decoding information built-in.

A more reliable (but also more intrusive) method was to require some piece of information from the game's manual to play. This could (intrusively) require the player to look up a code (or look up "the third word on page seven of the manual"), or, much better, solve a puzzle using clues from the Feelies. Some very early games even used this to save disk space by putting most of the expository text in hardcopy, sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book (complete with "red herring" exposition to discourage you from peeking at parts you aren't supposed to read yet).

The simpler forms of this could be beaten with a photocopier. A few games tried to make this, too, infeasible. The Carmen Sandiego games, for instance, could request information from anywhere within the almanac-sized book that came with the game. SimCity's copy protection codes were untypeable symbols and printed in black on a dark red page to thwart photocopying. Games like Railroad Tycoon or Indianapolis 500 require the player to identify a 2-8-0 Consolidation or Johnny Rutherford's 1976 winning McLaren Offenhauser, although this is trivial to a trainspotter or someone with an eye for detail. Old Disney games often came with a two-layer card stock disk, with the bottom layer having various words printed on it and the top layer having sections with cutouts; the game could then ask you to turn one section of the disk until you saw a certain word, and then read off the word displayed on another section, supplying at least the number of possible keys as your average combination lock.
With the rise of the CD-ROM and the fall of printed manuals, this sort of copy protection faded away. For the years until CD duplication became cheap, the medium itself was considered good enough copy protection.

The internet was probably the final nail in the coffin for most of these schemes, with all the secret codes now being accessible with just a few mouse clicks. Even in times when DOS (or Win 95 exclusive DOS mode, for that matter) didn't allow the player to switch and look at a solution in a plain text file, it still could be printed, or easily bypassed via DOS multitask extensions and programs like Game Wizard.

But now, things have come full circle again. Much software now uses internet-based copy protection, which players without a permanent connection might find annoying. Games with an on-line component can implement such a mechanism "for free" within their own authentication structure. Of course, in the event that the company goes under, no one will ever be able to play their games ever again. But the companies don't care so much about that. In fact, some rather like that they can simply turn off the activation server for Mega Quest 2005 and thereby force all their users to buy Mega Quest 2006.

Modern games simply fail to run if not authenticated. Earlier games tended to let you play a small part of the game, or play at a massive disadvantage, even if copy protection failed. In SimCity, failing the copy protection would cause a non-stop stream of disasters to strike your city, making the game all but unplayable. (This sort of thing may have been intended, though, as another protection against people breaking the copy protection, since there was a chance someone idly examining the game before distributing it illegally might not have realized it had copy protection at all.)

In theory, the only way to have fine-grained control over what end-users can or cannot do with software is to physically separate it from them via a client/server arrangement. In this setup, the client only serves as a front-end — sending player input to the server and outputting streaming audio and video from the server. With a competent IT staff, infringement all but ceases to exist, yet each player is at the mercy of the server's uptime and bandwidth requirements for streaming audio and video. With servers being overloaded and game companies bombing on a regular basis, this ends up being one of the least reliable systems in terms of gameplay and game longevity.

It is worth noting that no system has ever been implemented which has entirely prevented unauthorized copying. Not a single one. Copy protection has only ever managed to slow digital piracy, and to prevent certain legitimate uses. It seems that copy protection will remain as long as piracy exists, and piracy will exist in spite of the protection as long as games exist to be pirated.

See also Digital Piracy Is Evil.

Examples

  • Particularly before the advent of CDs and DVDs, console systems traditionally used media that could not be easily obtained or created - if at all - by the public:
  • Eight-bit to 32-bit consoles including the Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, (Super) Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64 used proprietary cartridges that were relatively expensive. But by the time of the Game Boy Advance, third parties introduced compatible cartridges for playing homemade GBA games (which could also be used for pirated games, wink wink nudge nudge).
  • The Sega Dreamcast could use a proprietary disc format called GD-ROM, which was a more densely packed (1GB) version of the CD; the system could load games off CDs, too, though, and many games could be fit on a standard CD or the game itself compressed to fit.
    • It wasn't meant to be able to load games off of CDs, they just screwed up royally while implementing the code for "multimedia enhanced CDs" in their music CD player firmware. The result: a no-mod-required method of playing copied discs.
      • Technically, Dreamcast piracy wasn't quite as simple as copying the GD-ROM, which regular PC drives could not read. Dreamcast piracy involved first ripping the GD-ROM using special hardware (often the Dreamcast itself via hardware plugged into the modem slot), then some tricky work involving a boot track and multiple burn sessions for the CD-R. Once created, though, that CD-R could be easily copied and used on any Dreamcast.
  • The Sony PlayStation read a tracking pattern pressed onto the lead-in of official CDs, which cannot be reproduced normally. The PlayStation 2 uses a similar system. They will both refuse to read any disc that doesn't have a valid pattern.
    • Sony also tried to combat piracy for the PS1 by making the discs' undersides black, causing them to be transparent only to the infrared laser used in CD drives, and more difficult to copy correctly since at the time of the console's release, consumers could not buy CD-Rs like this. Unfortunately for Sony, pretty soon blank discs with black undersides became available, and this part of their copy-protection scheme failed.
  • The Nintendo Gamecube uses a proprietary 8cm DVD based on the miniDVD.
    • Contrary to popular belief, discs for game consoles do not spin in reverse. But Gamecube and Wii discs do use a slight variant of the DVD sector-level encoding. Unfortunately for Nintendo, Wii pirates disregarded the physical aspects of the copy protection and instead decided to attack the console's firmware, which had quite a few holes.
  • Several Level 9 games used a method called "Lenslok". Using a graphical pattern, a passphrase was rendered unreadable. A color filter provided with the game, similar to those in the Milton Bradley Jeopardy! games, could be placed against the screen to render the text legible, but this failed with exceptionally small or large monitors.
  • The Carmen Sandiego games each shipped with a large tome: a world almanac, a history book or Fodor's guide, from which information could be requested.
    • Given that the purpose of the games were to get kids interested in using an almanac, this was not being done strictly in the name of enforcing terrible copy protection.
  • Metal Gear Solid had a character, early in the game, who "forgot" a vital communication frequency and mention that "it's on the back of the CD case," referring to one of the images on the back of the game's plastic case.
    • A particularly ironic example, because you had a CD case in your in-game inventory. Many, many gamers tried to figure out how they were supposed to look at the back of that case. When they couldn't figure out the solution to the "puzzle", they said "Guide Dang It!" and turned to GameFAQs. The remake The Twin Snakes eliminated this particular problem by having the character say that the code is on the back of "the package", since there's no package item.
    • ...and this change prompted problems for those who had never played the original, because "package" is just as vague, as there's no package item in the inventory either. Saying "game case" would've eliminated all confusion.
    • And of course, this puzzle was unsolvable without a FAQ if you just happened to be renting the game, given that most rental places don't include the cover art (Some did include the frequency in the packaging)...
      • ...unless you simply enlisted the aid of a family member nice enough to run down to the rental store, write down the frequency on the back of the case still on display, and run back, getting an asthma attack along the way from running so fast.
      • Supposedly, one of the versions (TTS I think) had Colonel Campbell give you the frequency if you called him enough times.
    • Unless there's some Word Of God confirming this, the really ironic thing is that this probably isn't Copy Protection, just Hideo Kojima's crazyness and the series' penchant for taking the fourth wall and executing it against a wall via firing squad at work.
  • The NES Metal Gear also had some rooms that couldn't be completed without the game manual. That is, unless you used a certain bug to skip parts of the game...
  • Metal Gear 2 used "tap codes" at certain points in the game, and the Colonel would instruct you to look at the manual for information on how to interpret tap codes. This was a frequency you needed to continue, and while brute-forcing it was possible, it was far more annoying than brute-forcing Meryl's frequency in the sequel due to the MSX's criminal slowdown and Snake's insistence on starting every conversation with "THIS IS SOLID SNAKE. YOUR REPLY, PLEASE...". Even more annoyingly, the version that shipped with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (the first release of the game in English) did not come with tap codes in the manual. Konami eventually provided a downloadable online manual with the tap code chart in.
  • The Licensed Game Star Trek 5 included a Klingon dictionary in its manual, which had to be used to advance past certain points.
  • Infocom tended to be among the cleverest in their integration of copy protection: for the most part, the game was simply unwinnable without the clues which the Feelies provided.
    • One notable example is from Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The copy protection feelie was the map through the obligatory maze. Considering that the maze was pretty much instantly deadly if you didn't do the right things in the right places, this was rather irritating when the map invariably got lost.
    • A curious bit of copy protection was in Infocom's only romance game: Plundered Hearts. The feelies in the game consist of facsimiles of the heroine's starting equipment, one of which is a banknote. The note shows the game's villain posing dramatically... but would you believe he's showing the solution to a puzzle? Grab his hat, try to grab the book he's carrying and press on the same part of the globe where he is and presto! Secret door!
  • Valve Software's Steam is its online download and updating system, used to distribute Valve's games, first-party mods and some select other titles they have contracted in. Many players complained that, after buying a boxed retail copy of Half Life 2, they were required to use Steam to authenticate, and before a certain patch made it less necessary, had to connect to the Internet every time they wished to play the single-player game.
    • To be fair, Valve has announced (but not contractually) that if they are in danger of going under, the last update sent out for the games on the Steam platform will include something so that they won't have to contact Steam servers in order to play the games. How this is going to work with TF2 and its unlockables is another story entirely.
      • Theoretically, they could spread some cute lite-Steam server ("now your server is 127.0.0.1"). Whether they would really bother to do it in emergency is another question entirely.
    • Steam also avoids a common issue with copy protection software - the inability to install a single copy of a game on multiple computers.
    • Unfortunately, since every CD Key worked once, it was not uncommon to buy a copy in the store and then find that someone had already used the CD Key that was supposedly only accessible by opening the box.
  • Recently, copy protection has resulted in controversy because some gamers and journalists have complained that copy protection systems can make some games unplayable and can even make the computer unusable. For example, the copy protection software known as "StarForce" was boycotted by some gamers due to these issues. Some of StarForce's nastier side-effects included reduced system security due to the way the copy-protection driver was implemented, causing CD-ROM drives to step down into a form of data access that caused undue wear and tear on the drive, and BSODs (and not of the heroic kind either). It should be noted, however, that many of these issues are unlikely to be experienced by average gamers. For example, some copy-protection software works by checking the serial number of the computer's hardware, so that changing the hardware can confuse the copy-protection system into thinking you have just copied it to a different computer. While gaming journalists routinely swap out their hardware so they can test games on different computer configurations, most gamers are unlikely to be changing hardware enough for this to be a problem. Of course, this doesn't make these problems any less serious — it just illustrates why companies can afford not to care.
    • Galactic Civilizations 2 by Stardock Systems features "No CD copy protection"; once you install the game, you never have to verify it again. They felt that ease of use was worth the increased risk. The trick is that Stardock provides lots of free patches and content updates; If they find out your copy is being pirated, you don't get those anymore. StarForce, mentioned above, was so impressed by this system that they posted a link to a webpage where one could download pirated versions of ''Galactic Civilizations 2''. The backlash from gamers was so intense that they quickly removed the link.
    • Speaking of Starforce, they've updated their copy protection nowdays—so if you buy a game with the old Starforce, like Second Sight, you need to download a patch off the company's web site in order to play the game.
    • The launch of Bio Shock was screwed up, plain and simple, when the single-player offline game shipped with SecuROM Copy Protection that allowed installation twice, ever, before the customer had to contact support. In its wake came crashing authentication servers, the customer support of the publisher and of its parent company each referring people to the other, said support demanding photos of the CD and the manual, people in smaller countries being asked to phone the same support - i.e., to make international calls in a foreign language, PR representatives assuaging the public by falsely stating that properly uninstalling the game would give the right to another installation, finding out that installing on another account or making what SecuROM deems to be a significant hardware change counts, the protection disrupting other programs if they look like the sort that might be used for cracking, the demo coming with SecuROM - without activation - when it acknowledgedly has no reason to do so, and halitosis. It would've been nice to tell about the limit beforehand, too. Others are cool with that and just dislike having unannounced, nonconsensual, unremovable data on their computers. Some parts of SecuROM don't like being told to leave.
      • All of this extra security didn't stop a pirated version of the game appearing three weeks after the game was released.
      • And ever better yet, Spore, which also used SecuROM, was cracked a good 4-5 days before release. Cue blazing infernos on the Internet.
      • Copy protection systems like SecuROM actually increased piracy. Gamers who would otherwise have been perfectly happy to play on a legitimate copy downloaded Bioshock for free because trying to navigate the copy protection was just that much hassle.
    • The Starforce copy protection on Cold Fear was so bad that it locked up a large percentage of legitimate copies, and Ubisoft had to distribute a scene no-cd crack for paying customers to be able to play the game. They released their own no-cd patch later, but it was essentially the same as the scene patch.
    • Likewise, the Starforce copy protection on legitimate copies of Rogue Trooper is absurdly prone to false positives, but the publishers/developers never bothered to fix the problem because not enough people bought the game for them to care anyway.
  • Mortal Kombat: Armageddon had copy protection which caused the game to boot up and then go into Cabela's Big Game Hunter.
    • Which would be infinitely more enjoyable than Mortal Kombat: Armageddon.
  • The original Monkey Island used a code wheel called "Dial-a-Pirate", where on loading the game the user had to rotate the wheel to match the upper and lower halves of a series of pirate faces and then return the given date revealed by the wheel. Monkey Island 2 used a similar "Mix'n Mojo" code wheel, which involved lining up reagents in a voodoo spell.
    • And, of course, there are the old SSI Gold Box Games (Pool of Radiance, etc) and their Translation Wheels.
  • Some games like Mech Warrior, Warcraft and Marathon had special, network-client-only "spawn" installations that you could make many or an unlimited number of on other machines from just one copy and run without the disks (sometimes full versions and/or demos would automatically run in "spawn" mode when you don't pass the copy protection). These needed a full installation on another machine to act as a server, and would sometimes connect only to servers run by the full install from the same copy. Similarly, Diablo II allowed you to install a "multiplayer Version" with which you could play online, without the cd, but disabled the single-player segment of the game.
  • Nintendo got in on the act when it released Star Tropics for the NES: At a later point in the game, it asks for a code that you can get by dipping the included map in water. Needless to say, this was a major inconvenience for people who rented the game or bought it used.
    • When the game was released on Nintendo Wii Virtual Console, the letter is included in digital form with an image of a letter and a bucket of water at the bottom. When the player clicks on one of the images, the letter dips into the bucket and the code is revealed.
  • Wizardry II had a small booklet of "spells" composed of four-letter nonsense words. The player at times had to consult this booklet and enter the third word of a spell. Unfortunately, the booklet was black text on dark red paper, making it difficult even for those with proper eyesight to read.
  • Similarly, in the original Bard's Tales games, the actual spells you cast in the game used magic words that you had to type in to cast them, present only in the manual and never given in the game (you would see only the 'thematic' name of the spell in-game, not the magic word used to order your characters to cast it.) This made playing the game without the manual extremely difficult. Most ports of the games made the spells selectable by menu, eliminating this issue.
    • Also in the original Bard's Tale, whenever you leveled up, the Review Board would ask you to name a street in the city. The map that came with the game had the streets misspelled - the Grand Plaza was labeled "GRAN PLAZ", and Hawk Scabard was labeled "HAWK SCABBARD". You had to use the map's spelling to pass; if you didn't have the map, you could never get past first level.
  • Introversion Software's Uplink went one further, featuring a code table printed in glossy black ink on black card, which could generally only be read where the light reflected off the ink.
    • Although the game was released in the 21st century, when the Internet had, as mentioned, rendered such elements utterly useless as any sort of protection. The game makers themselves admit it was more designed to be a nostalgic nod to old-school games. The complete lack of effective copyright protection (which is also the case for more up-to-date schemes) did not prevent the game from bringing in massive profits for the company.
    • Introversion Software may have subverted it when they posted a PDF containing the entire table ON THEIR SITE, saying it was not intended as a means of copy protection.
    • One of the intros of Introversion game Darwinia is a parody of cracktros. It was so convincing that the game's release was delayed by a day because Valve staff panicked because they thought it was real.
  • Microsoft Reader's activation scheme lets you read the same book on five machines. The problem is that it doesn't realize when you have reformatted the drive or gotten rid of the machine. So when you run out your activations, you're screwed. Luckily, the encryption is easy to break.
    • Apple has something similar going on. You have to 'authorize' a new machine in order to use the iTunes Store, or play your downloaded tracks, or... something. Whatever it is, you only get five of them - and if you didn't hit 'deauthorize' before that old hard drive died, that's your own fault.
      • Authorization is required to play music/movies from the iTunes Store. If you run out of activations you can deactivate all machines via the iTunes Store. Still annoying, but if you forget one machine you aren't hosed.
  • Many of Sierra's point-and-click adventure games had copy protection in their manuals, meaning that those who used illegal copies of the game (or who just plain lost their manual) couldn't progress any further.
    • Police Quest(VGA): The combination to the main character's locker, which you needed to get into to retrieve his uniform, was the score of a football game reported on in the fake newspaper included with the game.
      • And also inputing violation codes while putting an arrested man in jail.
    • Quest For Glory IV: In order to get potions from Dr. Cranium, the player needed to help him remember the "formula" for various elements that went into the potions. Interestingly, the copy protection may not seem to matter since it's "just potions"; however, one of the puzzles required to beat the game requires a potion, meaning that without the manual you can effectively do everything execpt beat the game.
    • Kings Quest III: A very large part of the game revolved around copying lengthy, exact instructions for magical spells from the game manual. Getting the instructions wrong would end the game with a bad ending.
      • Also, a certain line of the Kings Quest collection, which included games I-VI, had a misprint in it, leading to a player most likely getting the spell wrong until they noticed that this manual decided to rhyme "thither" with "thither" (Instead of "hither")
    • Kings Quest IV: Before starting, the game would ask you for a certain word in the manual (for example, the fourth word in the second paragraph on page 3)
    • Kings Quest V: Randomly during the game, you have to cast a spell from Crispin's (dead) wand to get past mundane parts. To cast the spell, you would have to look up the symbol on Page X of the manual. Entering the wrong code made the game unwinnable.
    • Kings Quest VI came with a "Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles", which contained the key to getting past a certain part of the game. Without it (or a friend to tell you the clues) you'd be stuck.
    • Leisure Suit Larry originally didn't have copy protection, but age protection - to play the game, you had to answer a question that you'd have to be fairly old to know the answer to. (Presumably.) See for yourself. The VGA remake added actual copy protection questions based on the included Feelies.
    • Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist requires that you look up recipes in the enclosed "home health manual" and create the prescriptions to solve certain puzzles. Only problem is, when the game was re-released in the Sierra Originals version, only a truncated version of the manual was included in the CD booklet, and one of the required recipes was left out entirely. Oops! Al Lowe, the game creator, has since put the entire doc on his website .
    • Codename: ICEMAN: The game begins as the main character is on vacation in Tahiti. A nearby volleyball player drowns in the surf and the player must rescue him and perform CPR. Obnoxiously, the game didn't tell you that it wanted you to look in the manual and type off the instructions verbatim.
    • Robin Hood: Conquests of the Longbow featured a number of puzzles which involved having to consult the papers which came with the game. On the plus side, reading through these provided papers allowed you to learn about everything from medieval heraldry, to a secret "hand code", which used letters assigned to different parts of a hand to spell out words, to the purported magical properties of gemstones and trees. There were also dire consequences if you failed.
      • Failing the hand knowledge test would mean Robin would strike out with Maid Marian (no!), and the Green Man would turn Robin into a tree FOREVER.
      • Not knowing your gemstones, the password to get into the warrior-monks' monastery, would mean one of them would staff Robin Hood into the waters of the fen.
      • Not knowing which tree was which would lead to the Sheriffs' mens' periodic sweeps through Sherwood catching and hanging Robin. (If you did know, the spirits of the trees would turn you into a plant, long enough for the soldiers to walk by.) You also needed to make some ivy grow high and strong enough to climb.
      • Failing the heraldry test would mean you couldn't deliver the money to ransom King Richard. So instead of him triumphantly rescuing Robin Hood from hanging, the Lionheart would rot in jail, and Robin would hang. Aw.
    • Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail also used this system - you had to look in the manual to solve various riddles throughout the game (but you learned some interesting mythology in the process).
    • Not an adventure game, but The Even More Incredible Machine required you to look into the instruction manual to input a code on a randomly decided page each time you opened it. However, during the game's intro, if you clicked to get past it at just the right time (specifically, when it switches from the second screen back to the first) it would almost always request the code on the first page of the book, requiring you to remember only one code.
    • Space Quest V has the codes you need to enter to get to the various planets in the manual. Since you need to keep entering the codes throughout the game, it's borderline Copy Protection Overkill.
    • In Space Quest I VGA , to get the cartridge, you had to enter the symbols from the manual corresponding to the term the dying scientist told you into the library computer. A second copy protection code was used for the coordinates of the Deltaur near the end of the game. Definitely copy protection overkill.
    • Space Quest IV had its copy protection when you first enter the timepod, and you have to use the Space Piston Magazine included with the game to solve the code.
    • Space Quest 6 had the datacorder puzzle, which you needed the Popular Janitronics magazine which came with the game to solve. Unfortunately, the 2006 re-released ''Space Quest Collection'' didn't include it.
    • In Leisure Suit Larry II, you have to insert the correct phone number of a woman and in Police Quest II, you have to identify the last name of the person on the mugshot before playing the game.
  • The original Star Control required players to answer questions with the help of a copy of Professor Zorg's Guide to Alien Etiquette. Star Control II had the Starmap Trivia Quiz.
    • Star Control II has since been released on all major PC platforms as an Open Source version, called "The Ur-Quan Masters." Thus, it is now an aversion of the trope.
      • If you count "Aversion of the trope" as "assuming the player does, in fact, either have the starmap on hand or memorized and saying 'screw it' to quizzing them on such", yeah. The problem is that the specifics of the port induced a couple missing lines of dialogue that are not only covered in the original DOS version but are also only otherwise noted on the map. Aversion it ain't.
  • Starflight II asked you to look up a code on a code wheel every time you left the starbase. If you entered it wrong you could still play the game, but a few hours in, your starship would be pulled over by the Space Police. The accused you of software theft and gave you one more chance to enter the right code; failing caused them to blow up your ship.
  • The SNES game Earth Bound had a mechanism that could detect whether the game was running from a copied cartridge or being booted from a cartridge-copying device. If the protection was cracked, a checksum mechanism would detect the change and, the game spawned many more enemies than usual in an attempt to discourage further playing. If the player persevered through this or cracked this second layer, however, an even nastier surprise awaited: the game would freeze during the final boss fight... and when you reset, you would find all your saves deleted! Don't copy that floppy cartridge!
    • They missed a trick with that copy protection there. Given that the final boss in this case is ,everyone's favourite, the ever-friendly face of Giygas, they could have made it so that the game freezes as a result of his first 'You Cannot Grasp The True Form' attack (he would hit you, the player, with something so incomprehensibly powerful that your savegames are killed). If you recall, you type in your full name when the game begins, so it would have been possible. It would have been a nifty case of juxtaposition as well, to boot! Given that this boss battle is one when with the characters praying to anyone who will listen for help, it is you, the player who answers the call and delivers the final series of crippling blows that defeat Giygas once and for all. Sadly, the game freezes directly after the introductory conversation ends and directly before you're given back control of the battle menu, so you don't actually get to trade any blows before the freeze occurs.
      • It's fascinating stuff, you know. [1] :)
    • These copy protection schemes sometimes trigger on legit cartridges, likely due to wear and tear over time. Although unrelated to copy protection, the same wear and tear can cause the game to run entirely in black and white as well.
    • The NES game originally titled EarthBound (known as Mother in Japan and EarthBound Zero by the fans) had similar copy protection, but it's less cruel in its implementation; instead of making the game impossible and scrubbing your save games at the end, it just stops the game at certain points to pop up a screen of text saying that the game is an unauthorized copy and will not continue.
    • Several Capcom games also employed similar mechanisms as copy protection: if they detected a pirate copy, they generally made some early boss unbeatable by giving them infinite health. Known examples include Mega Man X and Demon's Crest.
    • Another example would be the Megadrive game Puggsy, which would, several levels in, try to access the cart's SRAM (battery backup save memory). If it succeeded, it threw up a message telling you to stop playing this silly copy and buy the game. Puggsy doesn't have on-cart save, but copiers and emulators enable it by default.
  • The Nintendo DS with a lot of recent titles has been adding varying copy protection methods, which all have been defeated by use of simple cheat codes (some flashcarts can also bypass the protection automatically, as this fella can testify with the latest firmware for the CycloDS).
    • Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: Ring Of Fates (awfully long title) also detected pirated copies. This caused the game to end after a while, with a "Thanks for playing!" message, which certainly confused many pirates. Why not have a "Stop playing this game now, you dirty pirate!" message?
    • Chrono Trigger allowed you to play until you first traveled back in time, which then stuck you in an eternal loop in the warp sequence.
    • Other games that included protection: Dragon Quest V, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars and other major titles.
  • Recently, controversy surrounding the copy protection of the PC version of Mass Effect sprang up. Here's the short version: You're only allowed three activations on a single computer until you have to buy another copy. You don't get back an activation and changing your hardware settings takes one up.
    • There was also going to be a validation process that checked up on you every 10 days or the game would not run, but the immense backlash caused that to be abandoned and the developers will only implement the three-install limit. How thoughtful!
  • Starship sim sequel Elite: Frontier had an interesting version of this. Periodically, the player would be challenged by the in-game Space Police, and asked to find (for example) the fifth letter in the third word in line 17 on page 158 of his spaceship's manual. Three wrong responses in a row and the police would assume you'd stolen the ship and lock you up - producing a Non Standard Game Over in which the death screen showed the player character dying of old age in prison!
  • In the classic adventure game adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Marcus would ask Indy to translate some symbols for him, which would need to be looked up in the manual. Failing to do so would let the game continue as normal - until a crucial point where Indy, at Donovan's place, would fail to translate a tablet concerning the Holy Grail (Indy mistakenly translates it as "Holy Grain"), prompting Donovan to say "Seems you're just an illegitimate copy of the man I thought you were."
  • Operation Flashpoint is notable for being the first game to use the "FADE" copyright system, which slowly degraded the quality of gameplay (for example, decreasing the accuracy of the player's weapons) if piracy was detected. Same applies for Armed Assault, its spiritual successor.
    • The best copy protection for ARMA was of course the fact that it didn't run under vista.
    • ...or so they say. No illegal player has ever found this mythical "FADE", and according to pirates who reverse-engineered the game, the system does not exist in the first place. Of course, it doesn't help that both games are so bug-ridden that it's hard to tell intentional misbehavior from unintentional.
    • FADE absolutely exists on ARMA 2. I can personally attest to that. Your accuracy slowly gets worse until you literally can't shoot the side of a barn, it impedes your movement, blurs your screen, and it eventually turns you into an animal. Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDKguXtrSxU.
  • Day of the Tentacle required the players to configure a machine based on an image printed on a certain page of the manual. Thing is, similar images were printed on every page, and the player needed a certain number in-game to look it up. Ironically, you can now download the manual for free from several sites.
    • This copy protection apparently only exists on the floppy disk version; it's nowhere to be seen on the CD version. DOTT's predecessor, Maniac Mansion, also had copy protection as an in-game puzzle, but the version available for play within DOTT omits it by making it impossible to close the steel security door, which remains open throughout the game.
  • The Ultima games were particularly prone to this, forcing players to look up the Feelies for information from "Beyond the Portal" before being granted the right to save, leave the starting town, and so on.
  • An early-'90s Spider-Man computer game asked the player several trivia questions before starting. The answers were supposed to be looked up in the manual, but they were also available in any of the Spidey comics of the time.
  • As mentioned above, the original Railroad Tycoon had you identify a railway engine at the start of the game. If you chose the wrong name, the game would confiscate all but two of your trains and make you unable to run more normally (though - perhaps due to a bug - clicking at the bottom of the train list actually allows you to view the lost train and buy it back by replacing its engine).
    • F-19 Stealth Fighter did something similar: if you failed to identify the plane the game showed you, the game forced you to go on a "training mission" with preset equipment instead of allowing you to choose your mission, plane or ammunition.
    • Microprose were well known for this. Sid Meier's Pirates! (the original '80s version) allowed you to start the game even if you failed the manual-based question. However, winning the "intro duel" was extremely difficult. Still, even if you lost, you could still continue playing the game from a difficult starting point.
      • In fact, it didn't matter if you DID win. This trooper got to be so good at the fighting that I did win. I still got shoved into the leaky boat with a crew of 8.
      • Equally, even if you lost the normally trivial starting fight, you still got to sail with your full big starting ship.
      • Finally, if you did get put into the leaky boat, then: Instead of a normal decent-sized ship and crew, with the various nations starting as neutral or one step above (your own), everyone was hunting you as a nasty person. If you lost a battle, then instead of being in jail for a bit, then released and continuing, you would rot to death the first time. And yes, I had the real thing and manual, I just wanted to see what it was like.
      • Just how hard was that battle? About the equivalent of starting a ship battle with several hundred to 1 against you. But the battles were odd — if you started with two or more people, and got knocked down to one, a single hit would end it. If you started with one, then it wasn't that bad — you were badly outclassed at first, but with defensive play and only striking when the enemy left an opening (attack patterns were predictable), you actually could improve your "morale" until you didn't die from a mistake, and could actually win.
  • The aforementioned Sim City copy protection sheet actually could be copied, if you had a copy machine that could be adjusted properly.
  • At first glance, the computer game Master of Orion used a simple "What spaceship is this?" manual copy protection. However, if the game executable was modified to remove the protection altogether, the game would detect the alteration of its code and become so difficult as to be virtually unplayable!
  • Darkstar One featured an extra protection. In improperly cracked versions, the star map would "shiver" making it hard as hell to read or select anything. And the price of items & upgrades would be multiplied by 100. Or reduce the sale price of everthing to 0, making it impossible to make money, and getting the player stuck in the first system.
  • Many old arcade games have "suicide batteries" that are believed to be used for this purpose. When the battery runs out, the game's graphics glitch, the sound goes away, or the game itself stops working.
  • The old Gold Box Dungeons And Dragons computer games by SSI requires the use of the included a thick manual not only to log into the game ("In the manual section on page 45, paragraph 2, line 10 - what is word 6?"), but also to understand the plot (you have to refer to the journal part). In the brilliant move by the company for it's Anniversary set, they included the spin wheels for some of the games' copy-protection, but forgot to put in the manuals for Gateway and Treasure of the Savage Frontieer, rendering those two games unplayable.
  • Unintentional example: * Deus Ex had a scene transition triggered by a certain audio clip. Pirated versions would often leave out much of the audio to save space, making the scene transition never take place, and making it impossible to continue the game.
  • The Battletech PC game, The Crescent Hawks' Inception, had two series of copy protection: one early on in the game, when you had to look up (or memorize) different Battlemech components to continue training at the Academy in your ersatz Doomed Hometown, and one very near the end, where you had to look up some stuff on a star chart in order to get your father's Phoenix Hawk Land-Air Mech (AKA VF-1J Veritech, but that's another trope). Woe betide you if you lost the star chart.
  • Lampshaded in the Fictional Video Game Only You Can Save Mankind, in the novel of the same name by Terry Pratchett:
    • "Someone in America or somewhere thought it was dead clever to make the game ask you little questions like "What's the first word on line 23 of page 19 of the manual" and then reset the machine if you didn't answer them right, so they'd obviously never heard of Wobbler's dad's office photocopier."
    • "Basically, there were two sides to the world. There was the entire computer games software industry engaged in a tremendous effort to stamp out piracy, and there was Wobbler. Currently, Wobbler was in front."
  • Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate My Babysitter required you to identify a random enemy by name before you could play it. The enemies were never identified in-game, requiring you to have an instruction manual on-hand.
  • Parodied in Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People: 8-Bit Is Enough. One puzzle involves Strong Bad opening the way to the world of the adventure game Peasant's Quest using a giant code wheel, to satisfy the voice of the "copy protector" who wants him to use the manual and special red cellophane glasses with said wheel in order to solve his "riddle" (a random trivia question). Strong Bad has neither, so he's forced to solve the problem in a slightly different fashion.
  • Inverted unintentionally in DJ MAX Portable Black Square, in which songs will skip when played via UMD due to memory management issues, but won't when played via an ISO on a memory stick.
  • In the first Civilization game, there would be two instances in the early parts of the game where you had to look up a civilization advance in the manual: you were shown a picture of a random one, then given a large set of multiple-choice answers of which two advances were its direct prerequisites. (The in-game justification was that "A usurper claims you are not the rightful king!") If you were wrong, you lost all the military units you had outside of your cities.
    • Ironically, all the advances were also documented in the in-game "Civopedia", and even if you didn't read that, the answers could often be worked out logically anyway.
  • Halo for the PC seemed to have some sort of copy protection in place; if the game was obtained illegally, players could still play the game normally without problems, but if they tried to play the online multiplayer, they wouldn't be connected and got a message saying the CD key is invalid.
    • Using CD Keys to prevent online play used to be quite common among PC Gaming, and it dates back as far as Star Craft.
      • And it seems to be coming back; several Games For Windows Live games do this. So does World in Conflict.
  • Lemmings 2 had a sly example; when installed off non-original floppies all would seem to proceed okay, but you wouldn't be able to advance past the first level for any of the tribes.
  • Myst III: Exile's copy protection system required you to insert Disc One at least once per run (either when starting a new game, or loading an old one), then pressed an error right into the disc that made that disc uncopyable.
  • Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3 uses DRM and counts your game installations. Also, for the first time of the history of Command And Conquer, two players can't even play in LAN mode with the same license (while before, the game using two C Ds allowed it). Curse you, EA!
    • Actually, you can't play C&C 3: Tiberium Wars in LAN mode with the same serial key either.
  • Some users complain that the 2008 Prince Of Persia on the PC will ping an unknown server every 75 seconds. The most common guess is that Ubi Soft is tracking your CD key and looking for duplicates.
    • The original Prince Of Persia also had manual-based copy protection which set several apparent vials of poison over which hovered several different letters; a variant of the "Page/Line/Word" index. Drinking the wrong one three times in a row would result in death; drinking the right one caused the door to the next level to open.
  • An annoying variation of this problem occurs with the Xbox360. The 360 has a removable hard drive and a variety of memory cards available, meaning there is a potential problem of people copying (paid) downloaded games and giving them for free to their friends. To remedy this, Microsoft decided that to play something you purchased, you must be signed in online with the purchasing account, or be playing the content on the machine that downloaded it in the first place. The problem with the second option is that Xbox hardware failures are notoriously common, meaning the only way to play your downloaded games from any other console is to be signed online. If you ever lose internet access after owning a replacement console, you were completely screwed out of everything you bought online, although (several years down the line...) they made a website to transfer the licenses to your new console without having to be signed into your gamertag online.
    • Actually, licenses were and are supposed to transfer the instant you get it back and do the 5-second "redownload" after getting your new machine. Most people didn't bother to do the quick redownload, though, believing "My internet will never fail!", and so wind up with broken stuff.
  • The Interactive Fiction game The Lurking Horror deserves special mention of its copy protection. Getting anywhere in the game required you to log into an in-game computer; the necessary information was included with the Feelies. However, while the password was clearly marked, the login was not (and, to complicate matters, was not on the same page as the password).
  • "Captain, I'm afraid you have made a terrible mistake. You failed to obtain a certain object you should have had from the start of your adventure. Since this object is not very expensive, you should go and obtain it before you venture any further."
  • The 1988 Microprose game Red Storm Rising would give you the profile view of a ship and ask you to identify it; all the requisite information was in the manual. Of course, if you're as big enough of a naval geek... guns in back, smokestack, missile pack, Krivak. Or you could just use Wikipedia nowadays.
  • This video (quoted in the page picture) gives a cheesy rap song about why people shouldn't use floppies to copy games, followed up by several developers that explain how games are made and how they won't make certain games anymore if more people copy their products instead of buying them since they feel less sales = people did not like product. The boy trying to copy doesn't see why the whole thing is a big deal, saying "everyone is doing it" and "one copy won't hurt them." The girl convinces the boy to change his ways by the video's end. Of course, things have not changed since then.
    • A sequel recently came out, and while it's musically more advanced (this editor thinks it has a nice beat), the message is still not as clear as the creators intended. Case in point: this YouTube comment and this Retro Thing article, the latter providing an excellent analysis of the video.
  • Maxis' The Sims 3 has recently been leaked on line several weeks early, giving many players a sneak peek at the game's functionality. EA caught wind of this pretty quickly, saying that the leaked version was missing half the game's content and was glitched to hell, and instead of hunting down every single person who's downloaded the game and preventing them from accessing the game altogether, has settled on telling them they're running an unauthorized version and pleading them to buy the full version to get extra content. Which is surprisingly fair, considering this is EA we're talking about here.
    • In actual fact, the retail copies of the game are missing this same half of the game's content as well, in the form of an extra city that is offered as a download upon registering the game. It should be noted however, that the common leaked version is apparently 17 builds behind the retail version, as found by reading information about the first patch for the game, which for some reason this information was already uploaded to EA's servers.
    • Also, thanks to the SecuROM situation, EA decided to scale back this games' copy protection to the traditional CD check and serial number that the earlier games used.
  • The Journeyman Project, at three points in the game, asks you to enter a code from the "Temporal Protectorate Handbook" (aka manual). Unfortuantely, if you got this game bundled with a new computer, it most likely didn't come with the manual, and unless you were clever and looked up the codes on the Internet, you would have to brute-force the code to continue.
  • All these modern examples pale in comparison to a form of copy protection employed by several publishers during the Commodore 64 era. To make a long story short, data would be written on a part of the disk that normally wasn't meant to be accessed, and the drive head would be forced to slide further inward than it was meant to, repeatedly knocking against the spindle until a sensor forced it to stop. Over time, this caused the head to be knocked out of alignment, requiring physical maintenance to reset to its proper position and be at all usable. Commodore eventually released a drive whose head could align naturally to this position without knocking, but this was late in the 64's life cycle, so these drives are fairly rare.
  • The Island of Dr. Brain forced you to consult the manual, called the Encyclo-Almanac-Tionary-Ography, to input the coordinates necessary for finding his island. This counted as the first puzzle in the game, and you receive a gold plaque just for completing it.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon, if you are playing a cracked copy, has Zoe the Fairy appearing at the latter part of Sunrise Spring telling you that your copy is hacked and may be an illegal copy, which will lead you to experience "problems" you would not experience on a legal copy. [2]
  • Vette: If you fail to answer the question correctly, the game allows you to play, but with severely crippled gameplay(eg can't go above 80 mph), and after a certain time, it ends with the message "you are driving a stolen Vette".
  • In the Macintosh World Builder game Enchanted Scepters, if you're playing a pirated copy, the game will randomly teleport you to the Arena, where you have to fight a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and will probably die. It also displays the message "The pirates laugh 'Har, har, har!'".
  • Rogue: If you're playing a pirate copy, the monsters do six times more damage than normal, and when you die (as you almost certainly will before the third level), the tombstone says "Rest in Peace: Software Pirate, killed by Copy Protection Mafia".
  • DJMAX Trilogy comes with a USB dongle that must be plugged into your computer to run the game.
  • Titan Quest has "mysterious" crashes on bootleg copies due to properly working sneaky Copy Protection, which of course caused a lot of bad press and consequently dropped sales more surely than "pirates" could do on their own.
    • The conclusion: any Copy Protection not working explicitly is self-defeating. Most people won't bother to investigate on their own why this or that software happened to be buggy or crappy, ever. So unless users can openly admit what they tried and compare, this buries the reputation of an original, not a bootleg copy — they haven't any separate reputations if no one mentions them.
  • On the Amiga, there was a game The Killing Game Show. This game was broken and copied early in its life, but the original protected disk would alter the system timing during bootup. The broken copy did not alter the timing, resulting in a game that became Unwinnable without removing the "timer". (It is not known if any cracked version ever fixed this.)
  • The German game Drakensang (Das Schwarze Auge/ Black Eye) had at least three instances of copy protection and you were punished for then buying the original because you had to start anew, as the problems were saved in the savegames (there was supposed to be a patch for that, but I don't know if it ever got made). First you have to go to a NPC that doesn't spawn. This can be corrected by using an SQL editor. Then there is a vital door, that's just not clickable. And last but not least there is supposed to be a door that usually leads to another vital part of the game, but in case of a pirates version leads into a cell with no exit. And no, nobody ever said anything about this beforehand, leading to a mass of "buy the game already" and almost as much "I already OWN it" :=)
  • The diskette version of System Shock stored more data on disk number one then normal copying tools would allow it to hold; attempting a basic clone would fail. Still quite easy to copy once you worked it out.
  • Origin's Strike Commander came with instructions to copy the disks and put them in the cupboard in case something happened to your originals.
    • Another Origin property, the Wing Commander series, required for the first few games information included in the feelies or manual to start playing the game. When they were reworked for the Kilrathi Saga collection, the check was eliminated.
  • The Dreamcast game Ooga Booga had an interesting copy protection mechanism: If it detected that you were playing a burned copy, instead of starting the game it would show an in-game pirate character that would dance when you pressed any button on the controller. The group who released the pirated ISO left this in, but made it continue to the actual game when the player pressed Start.
  • The PC version of Batman Arkham Asylum has one of these in the form of a deliberate glitch which disables Batman's cape glide ability, rendering the game Unwinnable. The developers say this.
    "It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
    • Now that the (legit) PC version is out, however, it quickly turned out that the publishers have apparently forgot to take out these delibrate bugs for legit retail releases, and thus the PC port would very likely to go the way of Titan Quest. Oops.
  • The upcoming Star Craft II will not have localized multiplayer, in a effort to create "A more social gaming experience", or somesuch.
  • The Dragon Ball video game trilogy known as "Legacy of Goku" (And the spiritual sequel, GT: Transformation) had its form of copy protection wherein a message popped up at a certain point saying "this game cannot be played on this hardware" and wouldn't go away, should it detect that it isn't a legit copy (Although there are rumours of some retail copies having this problem as well). Perhaps stupid is the fact that later versions of the emulator Visual Boy Advance decided to emulate this form of copy protection, making playing the games on that emulator extremely difficult.
  • The Amiga game Elvira: Mistress of the Dark had you hunting for six keys hidden in the castle, and one was hidden in a dark passage, requiring you to have Elvira cook up "Glowing Pride" to find it. However, you couldn't find any recipes inside the game; all of them were in the manual. In other words, you could play most of the game on a pirate version, but to complete it you needed the original version. (At least, until the Internet was invented.)
  • Not strictly Copy Protection, but more like incredibly failtastic programming: Capcom's Megaman Battle Network 4: Blue Moon has issues the Red Sun version doesn't exhibit which make the game virtually unplayable on anything except the original Gameboy Advance hardware. One unavoidable section of the game causes the entire game to lock up (black screen with music) if you open the menu or encounter enemies. Additionally, attempting to use any Navi chip except Roll freezes the game. This makes the Blue Moon version of the game unplayable on the GBA SP or the DS. The irony: using save states, you can complete the game on an emulator. (But it's such a godawful game in the first place, why would you even want to?)
  • Some games on the original Play Station, such as Legend Of Dragoon and Vandal Hearts 2, would detect if you had a mod-chip (which lets you play imported or copied games) in your system, and then the game would not play and a message to call a place to report the problem would come up on screen. What it boiled down to was that people who had mod chips and COULD pirate the games but DIDN'T could not play the games they bought legitimately. It was probably in an attempt to get people to abandon their mod chip consoles, guess what they abandoned instead?
  • Robot Odyssey, an Electrical-Engineering-based adventure game by the Learning Company utilized copy protection by checking the 5.25" disk for a "flaky bit". If the bit was not found, the player's ability to solder connections in the robots of the main game was disabled, rendering the game unwinnable. However, the copy protection was never disclosed in the manual and the flaky bit had a tendency to "settle" over time, meaning that many users found their legitimate games impossible to play past the third level.
  • On certain emulators Hamtaro Ham-Ham Heartbreak would not go past the character-naming screen.
  • La Abadía del Crimen a 1987 adventure game by Spanish publisher Opera Soft based on Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose required the player to assist to daily matins. In the original game, a recorded version of Ave María would play during these sequences. However, if the game detected a pirate copy was running, the song would be replaced by an echoing voice saying "Pirata, Pirata, Pirata" and locking up the computer.

Console WarsVideo Game CultureDaddy System
new edits
forum
page history
edit page
view source
discuss
Creative Commons License
This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.