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Reason077
GuB-42
And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the warez scene.
miek
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
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.
throwaway7894
Sorry for the lazy question, but would you be able to share some links or pointers to where these guys are active? I've been out of the loop for a few decades but enjoyed the scene when I was a teenager.
GuB-42
On the demo part: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=158
One the crack side, I don't really follow much but you can find the occasional release, for example Red Dead Redemption.
anal_reactor
Nowadays though it's just Empress and everyone else, because Empress is the only one who cares enough to crack Denuvo, but only for selected games, and nothing recently.
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Ayesh
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
Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
jhbadger
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.
shkkmo
That isn't really the same situation. The 1981 "version" is a stealth game that is pretty much completely unrelated to the 1992 game except through name, inspiration and theme.
The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.
Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise
cevn
I loaded this up recently on Genesis and it actually blew my mind how smooth the animations were for the 'parkour', to find out it was all mo-capped and faithfully recreated into pixels. I had no idea people were doing this in the 80's.
ajkjk
This book [1], which is the creator's diaries from the time annotated with lots of memoir-ish details, is really really good and talks about how the motion capture came to be at length. It's also just a very enjoyable book, not to mention very physically beautiful.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Making_of_Prince_of...
wildzzz
More like a rotoscoped bitmap animation than what we consider 3D motion capture now.
wyldfire
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
Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
JeanMarcS
Well, in the 80's I had an Amstrad CPC, and there was a game named "Le passager du temps" ("Passenger of time") [1]. It was a text adventure game with some graphism in it. The goal was to explore the house of your uncle and find out where he was.
After a while, you found a machine and when you finally assemble everything and start it....the game stop working and loop in a "we're tired of hacking" message ! Of course, with the cracked version.
And it was clever, because
1) you tried the game and enjoyed it. And now you're frustrated and want to play it, so you might actually buy it
2) the anticopy test was late in the game, so everyone who copied it thought the copy was ok and spreaded it.
A sort of shareware.
fipar
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.
watusername
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 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522
* Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games
jerf
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.
mschuster91
> 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.
skocznymroczny
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
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.
Ntrails
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
it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon": https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-devel...
saratogacx
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.mrandish
> Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy.
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.
computerthings
[dead]
mschuster91
> 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
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel
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
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
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
> 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.
ferguess_k
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).
eej71
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-cra...
candl
Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
p0w3n3d
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
That must have been CloneCD then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
Delk
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.
paulryanrogers
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.
brazzy
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
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
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?
g-b-r
A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
paulryanrogers
A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the 1996 version.
2mlWQbCK
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/j...
PaulHoule
Apple ][ games like Ultima were famous for crashing 20 hours in if you didn't crack the hidden checks.
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"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!