I remember in the mid-2000s, some record label put DRM on their CDs so that it couldn't be read by a CD-ROM drive in a computer. Only someone the same day discovered that if you held down the "shift" key on your PC when you inserted disc until it loaded, it played without a hitch.
Ah yes, MediaMax CD-3. It was used by RCA and BMG. It was even more heinous than that. It replaced your CD-ROM device driver so that it checked every bit of data read off of it to decide whether or not "approved" apps were allowed to see that data. Its bigger brother, XCP (by SonyBMG), was even more heinous in that it installed a rootkit so poorly designed that it became one of the biggest vectors for the worst malware on Windows XP. Also the reason why holding shift works is because autorun itself doesn't run if you hold shift while inserting a disc. Hopefully that's news to someone reading this.
This quote has been repeated many times, but it deserves to be repeated many, many more: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." -Gabe Newell
Truest words ever spoken. Happy to pay, but the more I'm treated like an adversary, the less cooperative I become. And that is why I hack all of my consoles despite owning original media for all the games I play. Heck, I've bought SO MANY games on GOG that I already own physical versions of, just 'cause. And you know, maybe some of them are easier to play that way, but most of them I've never even downloaded.
My memory of Spore was finally getting my copy, only to find out the code included with the game had already been activated by another user (even though it was a sealed copy that I got on release day). Took months of emails back and forth between myself and EA just to finally get them to replace the code, and by then my friends had already moved on to other games, so I did too.
I bought a copy of Rainbow Six 3 Gold that was missing the key for the expansion pack. The spot for it was literally blank. Returned it in-person to Best Buy.
@@adamdufty2536 Seems just as likely that someone with access to a key generator made a key for themselves that matched yours. Unless EA was stupid enough to use a key generation that was sequential in nature, it would be extremely unlikely that anyone would have a key that looked enough like yours that a typo or two would be enough to shift it. The resealing thing is obviously also a possibility.
I will never get sick of hearing about companies so paranoid over such a non-issue that they create huge problems for themselves and encourage enough people to turn the non-issue into a major one.
*sarcasm* If they didn't then how could have control! How?! By making a great game and being transparent with the public? What a laugh, if they did that they might have to pay thier programmers a decent wage since they'd know how badly they are being ripped off! No this is so clearly better... *end sarcasm* Yea. The entire philosophy of trying to control from above and the excuses to justify that is just stupid and always backfires and devolves into paranoia eventually.
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If only companies were confident enough to remove the damn anti piracy measures after a period when most sales should have been done. And the games have been cracked for a while. So the legit copies dont run worse than the pirated ones *cough* denuvo *cough*.
Wasn’t there an instance where a game company goofed up so badly on the “check disk is in tray” measure, that they had to resort to giving thier customers a pirated version they downloaded? That was pretty dumb…
Rainbow Six Vegas 2 if I recall correctly. DRM was so bad they took some pirate crack for it and uploaded it as the official patch. It even had the creator's watermark iirc.
The worst part about the whole Spore debacle is Will Wright didn't want any form of DRM in that game to begin with, but EA refused to listen. EDIT: wow never dreamed i'd get over 1,000 likes, thanks everyone!
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo It's Capitalism in action my friend. Why spend some money to create something amazing that people want to buy for years to come and praise, when you can make five dollars with a netloss today? Fuck Capitalism.
Hearing about Spore's Anti-Piracy stuff made me want to pirate Spore just so I could get around all that BS even though I don't even want the game. I'm not joking. The Anti-Piracy failed so bad it made someone that doesn't even care about the game want to pirate it.
Final Combat is Trash Can ! +1 10 Year Annivesary Buulll Sh*tssssssss ! +1 Deus Vult Kill Them All ! +1 Fking RED CHİNESE ! +1 KİLL THEM ALL ! DOWN ENEMYS AND TRAİTORS !
One thing I've never understood about companies is the mindset they have that stopping piracy will make the pirates buy their stuff, by using drm like the ones in the video they end up spending money while chasing money that doesn't exist.
Yeah, that's always been my understanding. First, the piracy usually isn't enough to actually affect sales in terms of people who can and would buy it, but choose *instead* to pirate a game. This is not the same person who pirates a game because a demo is so stripped it doesn't really show enough of the game to make a purchase decision, and it certainly doesn't account for someone who would never buy the game because they simply think it just isn't worth it. The way to stop piracy is almost literally "Make thing good, give it a reasonable price point, and make it convenient to play/own." That's it. That's the secret. This anti-piracy crap still going on with Steam and 'rent to never own' style of games...they never learned anything. Also, with the fall of Netflix being a central hub for series and films, an uptick of piracy has occurred because of the splitting and ultimately the cost of subscribing to way too many online premium channels. Again, make it good, make it priced fair in the public's mind and make it convenient. Apple figured this one out with iTunes early on and it's one of the ventures that skyrocketed their incomes. So for any business folks out there reading this, people are going to pirate your material whether you like it or not. They were never going to buy your product. They just weren't. Don't punish everyone else for something you literally have no control over.
That's what the RIAA tried to say about mp3's, 100 people downloaded song.mp3 for FREE, we have lost 100x the sale price of song on CD. As if the absence of mp3s being available, all 100 of those people would have bought the CD.
@@lmcgregoruk Yeah, the music industry vs. tech that makes pirating possible is hilariously stupid. I forgot to mention, too, that pirating music is free advertisement in which you don't have to do the work of paying the radio stations etc. to boost your visibility. People are doing it for you and it just cost you a buck or two per person doing it.
@@heavysystemsinc. IIRC what the Spyro guys had to say about it, anti-piracy only works if it's basically woven into the game code, layered, and subtle, and its job isn't to stop piracy but rather to basically turn pirated copies close to launch into free demo discs, since that's when people who are eager to play are most likely to buy it if they can't get it for free. (Also don't insult the cracking scene, asking them nicely to not release this game within [x] time of the release within the code actually works and hackers will, indeed, be nice and wait a bit before releasing the crack if asked to by devs. Or you could just turn your anti-piracy code into a way to hire new programmers and leave hiring contact info.)
2 ปีที่แล้ว +162
Thank you uncle Barry I've had "guru larry" withdrawals. This is just what my Sunday evening needed. Thank you again.
One funny one I always remember is Ooga Booga on Dreamcast. It was a party game with a bunch of game modes and different characters, one of them being a pirate. If it detected that you were playing a copied version, instead of starting up it would show a screen with the pirate dude that would do his taunts whenever you pressed any button. The cracking group that released the pirated version kept the screen in, but made it bypassable by pushing the start button. Not sure what category it would go in or if there's enough content for its own entry, but I would like to see it featured sometime.
The only anti-piracy measure that works is online only, and unless the game is actually an MMO or something with serious focus on multiplayer, it's just Mortal Kombat or Need for Speed that you can't play when your internet is down. Horrible!
When I was a little kid, the power went out while I was playing my PS1. When the power came back ON, my PS1 still worked but was a little wonky. As alittle kid, imagine My surprise when my Spyro game is suddenly calling me someone who broke the law at the tender age of 6, all because my laser got a little messed up.
I believe that the install limit was not to deter pirates, but used game sales. Also, Batman Arkham Asylum. The glide was disabled on pirated copies, making it so you could only play a portion of the game (as the glide was required to get past a certain point fairly early). But the Anti Piracy also triggered in legitimate PC copies of the game, making the PC version unplayable.
@@Larry It really is, even indie devs have asked to please pirate instead of buying second hand It's not just illegal, but instead of just not paying the devs for it, you're also loosing money You don't generate any sales for the games because the money goes to the previous owner of the game instead of the people who made it
@@rompevuevitos222 selling used games is not illegal. WTF are you smoking? Plus, once I buy a game, it's mine, the makers have no more say to it than any other item you buy and decide to sell. Do you have to pay Ford to sell your used pick up? Why the hell should video games be any different?
@@Ashannon888 When you boot up a game, there is always a warning saying that you may not distribute the game if not authorized (as in, if you're not an aproved store) Not all games have it, but most do
Kind of incredible how some of these seem like they're designed to encourage piracy rather than stop it. That being said, that last one really took the cake.
@@Larry of course, these days companies don't need the piracy excuse to randomly insert things into their products that decrease sales. It's like every industry has become allergic to money.
@@KairuHakubi They just don't have any empathy, they want money and fail to realize that people may not like what they are doing, but they don't care what people want, they care about the money they get Which makes them have these brainlet moments
@@KairuHakubi Yeah, it is smart to go after money above everything (despite already swimming in it) if you are a sociopath Except the human being is a social species which requires collaboration to survive, so being an ahole is definitively not the optimal way to do things
I'd say the best and most insidious anti-piracy measure is Earthbound's. If you have a pirated version, then not only does the enemy encounter rate go through the roof, but once you beat the final boss, the game locks and deletes your saves - making it impossible to see the ending.
No mention of the chaos that was StarForce? I mean, Ubisoft dropped it as an anti-piracy measure after they got sued because it damaged a customer's hardware. It also allowed non-administrator users to install software, making it a potential security risk.
We're talking about useless DRMs. StarForce wasn't useless, it was actually effective in halting the pirates as it was notoriously difficult to crack. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for example remained uncracked for 424 days after its release.
The irony for Spore is this: The game is available on GoG and the Securom has already been stripped out. Though from what I heard, not all games on there are DRM-Free.
I'm pretty sure that GoG's whole selling point was that they only sell DRM-free game, to ensure you're able to play and re-play them whenever you want, and you own it for good. What game did you hear that they sell that have DRM..?
Oh, just googled it...Seem like they do have some games, albeit a very small group of games that have some form of DRM. But thankfully, except for one case of an anti-cheat DRM, most of it seems to be merely cosmetic in nature and are tied to online accounts (but still completely playable offline, and even online in some cases without any account needed or connection to a third party services) Their official reasoning for it: "All games available on GOG have offline installers available. We stay in touch with the partners and do our best to keep them up to date. However, video games continue to evolve with many titles offering online modes, cosmetics, and incentives for completing certain actions by players. This might be subjective, but as long as these additional features and rewards do not affect the single-player offline experience in a major way, we believe that the developers and publishers should be free to design and sell their games in a way they choose."
Another irony is the "geniuses" over at CheatHappens gave up on ever making a working trainer for Spore, ban anyone who even dares request one without explanation, and have a raging hate boner for KelSat who actually made one that worked just fine before Steam and GoG.
I remember circumventing anti-piracy measures back in the days of CD and DVD games. But, I wasn't someone who gave friends pirated copies of the game. I just wanted the ability for my brother and I to play multi-player and not have to purchase a 2nd copy of the game. Then we got our 1st game console and we slowly stopped doing that.
The irony is that anti-piracy measures mostly hurt legitimate purchasers, be it things listed here or the slightly later game lagging due to disc loading, or getting unplayable due to it getting scratched, SecuROM and SafeDisk being infamous for hurting computers and ONLY being disabled in Windows 10 update, or even more modern "let's put a resource-hogging virus-like background process in their computer."
"Pirating games is dangerous, who knows what kind of malware the pirates might be adding to their cracks!", said the AAA game companies while adding harmful and insidious malware to their official releases as "copy protection".
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The problem with anti-piracy is that it rarely comes from the devs themselves, since they actually know technology and the users, it's something that always comes from high up, thinking pirates would be so affected by FOMO they would cave in instead of just playing something else.
high ups are terrible when dealing with anti piracy they have no idea what would actually be effective as measures and the cost to the customer and the developer
ive found that ever since demos have become few and far between Ive "pirated" more and more over the years with the games that have interested me on pc if i like the game even if i had completed the pirated version I will buy it so if developers want to make money and get piracy to a minimum then start creating a demo for your potential customers.
It's actually been proven that piracy helps improve sales of games for that same reason. If you hadn't have played a copied version, chances are you'd have never intended to play it, so never bought the game.
There's a number of games I own I pirated back in the day when I couldn't afford games. Dark Souls, Alien Isolation, Just Cause 2, -Mass Effect 3- lol no.
I honestly do not trust demos I'd still just get a cracked copy to test it properly and make sure the game doesn't take a huge dip midway or straight up clears my savefile or something that makes the game no longer fun MANY and i mean MANY games with demos have the best part at the beggining so you buy it and then you find out the rest is not nearly as good Ofc that i don't mean "oh well i beat the game and i got bored", if the game is bearable from start to end it's enough for me. But the amount of games i've started and haven't seen the failures of until it is too late is a bit large
@@rompevuevitos222 One of the big issues with demo's (which some indie devs are avoiding) is that the demo version doesn't get the same bug fix, quality of life and optimization patches as the full version, resulting in the demo becoming a rather poor representation of the latest release of the game. Also some companies used to include a prequel story in the demo that'd lead up to the full games story. Like Starcraft and Warcraft III for example (Warcraft 3's demo campaign is also available in the full version).
@@Nicholas_Steel That's why I miss demos: they felt like a special edition of the game, frozen in time, and even if they weren't unique campaigns, you got a highlight of some level in the middle of the game instead of starting the game from scratch and spending an hour on character creator and another on tutorials and slow exposition dump. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 are last demos I played done right, but of course the best demo-related memories are with PlayStation 1 demo discs. It's actually easier now making demos since nobody needs to contract magazines, print discs, or plug them into another game, just give us a download that has a few levels to screw around.
I also distinctly remember some anti-Piracy measure that limited installs... but counted swapping out computer parts as an install. Or something of the sorts.
Windows XP-onwards computers are different from older versions of Windows and other such operating systems; in the past, you could shut down your computer, swap out every part *besides* the hard disk drive you had it installed on (or even that, if you bothered to properly transfer it to another disk and even made sure it could boot from it), and then it would work when you would boot it up, most likely needing a device driver or two... Nowadays, any major hardware change means you are basically in need of reinstalling Windows.
@@RaspK the way around that is to go to device manager and uninstall the disk controller driver, and replace it with a generic version. that's always worked for me.
I see Nintendo took notes from Sabre Wulf, seeing as how they think a viable strategy for getting people to stop emulating their older games is to charge them ridiculous amounts of money to play those games on...emulators Nintendo made themselves...that have been proven to work worse than unofficial ones...
And remember that time the "official" Super Mario Bros. that Nintendo released for the switch was actually a pirated rom, at least according to the guy who had originally ripped the rom and said he recognized some filler code he wrote?
@@DinnerForkTongue Try every time. they even took down some sellers on ebay selling physical bootleg or rom hacks of Pokemon games. a few still exist though.
I twice had to program an anti-piracy measure in a game as part of my job. I made it.. as interesting as I could. The first took a random time after it detected the piracy, then would cause a random error, such as a null pointer access, divide by zero, etc. The second just kept making the game harder and wouldn't let the missions progress. It was a fun challenge, since I had to make sure it didn't cause permanent damage or anything like that, and didn't want to damage save files in case it was a mistake or someone wanted to buy the game after "tasting" it. Glad my work didn't make this list!
@@Larry The one that might be known was Star Trek: Bridge Commander. It did a check for the CD in the drive rather than any online shenanigans or anything like that, so there were of course ways around it
One copy protection I was able to pass by mistake was on Dune on MS-DOS. I got a copy of the game but you have to select the good page corresponding of the picture shown on the screen. I got lucky enough to find one and after that, restarted the game multiple times until I got the same picture again (not really a lot of tries to be honest).
Sounds like what I often do in the DOS version of SimEarth. It uses "look something up in the manual" copy protection, with data about the RL solar system's planets in an appendix. But I don't always feel like digging the manual out of a stack, so I'll often keep retrying until it gets to a bit of info I remember with the correct precision (e.g.: "Year on Mars (Earth days)" = 687, or "Axial tilt of Earth" = 23.45).
@@AaronOfMpls: My stand-by for SimEarth was always the 365.26 answer for the number of days per year for Earth, so looks like I wasn't the only one who just recalled one little bit of information and used that to bypass the copy protection.
@@RAKtheUndead Which is actually the number of days in a _sidereal_ year (1 orbit relative to the stars -- i.e., to the universe in general). I'll have to remember that one when it comes up.
The DRM I broke by mistake was Fallout 3. I can't remember why I tried this, but starting the game using one of the executables Bethesda included with the install skipped the CD checking.
The best anti-piracy measure any dev can take is making a really good game that people will want to spend money on. That's as far as any measures should go.
I remember my brother having problems with the lenslock device that came with the Spectrum version of Elite. The later idea, random(ish) words from the short story were a better idea. More recently I transferred from XP to Windows 7 and reinstalled my genuine copy of Corel Draw, which I'd paid through the nose for, only to be informed that Protexis had decided my copy was a pirate version (which I could have acquired quite easily). I contacted Coral and their solution? Buy a new copy at around £190, apparently this was a reduced price to male up for Protexis screwing me over.
And devs wonder why piracy even exists with stories like yours. It's literally a piece of code that can be copied time and time again, and as such isn't "theft" as the original copy still exists in it's entirety.
@@chazzcoolidge2654 It still should be illegal, otherwise no one could ever make a living out of it if anyone could just get it for free which means no entertainment But i fully understand why people do it, sometimes they can't afford it, the legit product is worse or the company just doesn't deserve the money to begin with
Spore is an epic story in and of itself of lost potential, Will Wright's vision being screwed over, and EA's usual BS. One of my first major gaming disappointments as a teen, probably the one that woke me up to how crappy the industry can be.
If you look past it's original pitch, Spore is still a great game. I think they made the right decision in scaling back, but they should have been far more transparent about it. Today's technology could quite easily handle Will Wright's original Spore idea imo.
I kinda dropped out of PC gaming for a while, just as the DRM started getting worse. * grabs tobacco pipe * "Back in my day..." everyone had a friend that had collected all the no-CD patches, and even though I bought (at the time, MOST of) my games legitimately, I would still crack them to run without the discs and hassles, and/or used Alcohol as a virtual CD drive with the circumvention features enabled. But, then there was Spore, and Diablo III, and so much other crap that I just got less interested in putting up with it, so I just bowed out. Not worth the trouble, and I still had a whole list of backlogged titles to occupy my time. When you have Unreal Tournament and StarCraft, what else do you need anyway?
@@nickwallette6201 I just yar harrd my way out of those crapfests That Games for Windows Live thing was awful Funny that you complain about DRM when consoles have built in DRM themselves tho, lol
One I remember: a series of 90s indie 3D space sims called Star Wolf / Star Wraith had a "copy protection" scheme that was literally nothing more than dropping an empty file into C:/Windows with an arbitrary filename. That was it. To "crack" the game, just make the file yourself. Not to make fun of the author (since they were quite nice games at the time) but that may the worst attempt at security-through-obscurity ever.
Man, I remember how much Spore was overshadowed by the SecuROM thing. Like, it would not have been able to live up to the initial hype anyway but that pretty much made people remember it almost for only that alone.
7:24 I literally thought of that problem before you mentioned it! How can the team of engineers that designed that thing not see that as a potential problem? Idiots.
I got Robocop 3 from my playground supplier about 2 weeks after release. Fantastic game. I also recall trying over and over again with screen lock. Bloody thing. I had the retail game of indy 500 but not the booklet (given to me by a relative). The anti piracy was questions about the race. My gran somehow had a glass tumbler with past winners on it. So if inwanted to play I had to keep loading it until 8mgot a "who won in 19xx" question lol.
@@Larry Not the same thing but mass effect remaster was a poor one with lost dlc code and etc. Modders\pirates just used content from the original to restore content.
@@robertnomok9750 Pinnacle Station DLC for ME1 (which let you unlock cross-class weapon specialisations by completing weapon-based grind tasks) was done by a third-party (not Bioware themselves) who lost the source code due to system corruption at one point, and with the tweaks to ME1 for Legendary Edition to remove the penalties for off-class weapon use (eg: in OG ME1 if you used an Assault Rifle on the class built for Snipers; you got accuracy penalties. LE ME1 made it so every class could use every weapon without penalty beyond the weapon's stats) Pinnacle Station didn't serve a purpose to actual gameplay or story anymore anyway. "Pirates" didn't do anything to MELE, Modders just found a way to take the precompiled binaries for Pinnacle Station from OG ME1 and bodge them in to MELE for those that wanted the holiday house you earn for completing all the challenges on the station, since the DLC didn't serve a practical function in MELE outside of being a Horde Sim to blow off steam in. The main things MELE did over OG ME Trilogy was: Unified art style, unified launcher, all the story mode DLC packs bundled in by default, and provide 2160p/4K textures and pre-rendered videos to replace the old 720p textures and videos made for the Xbox 360 to negate the need for big-ass mods lot ALOT (A Lot Of Textures) & ALOV (A Lot Of Videos) just to get 1080p textures and videos at the cost of like 5-10GB downloads per-mod per-game (examples: ALOT 1080p for ME3 is a 8.5GiB compressed zip file, ALOV 1080p for ME3 Base game is 6.2GiB compressed zip file, ALOV 1080p for ME3 DLC is 5.7GiB compressed zip file).
Spore would’ve been such a big hit, had they not botched the game with DRM and killed Maxis with screwing the players. Spore would’ve been up there with Minecraft. Guru Larry should do more videos on Spore’s failures, because it would make a great top five list!
@@PondScummer even as an adult in the mid 2000s, I thought Spore looked cool, it wasn’t just targeted for kids. GameStop was promoting the game, but how the game was hard to install and didn’t run well on lot of computers, that’s what killed the hype.
@9:40 The original SimCity (PC) also used that red unphotocopiable red paper. However, a friend of my dad's got the brilliant idea to run it through a fax machine and feed the output back into itself a few times. It worked! While it was hard to make it out it WAS easier then that bloody dark red that was almost impossible to read. I ended up kracking the PC version of SimCity so you wouldn't need to even enter in the stupid code. =P
Quarantine used a similar thing. I just scanned it and loaded it into paint shop pro, made it monochrome, and adjusted the cut off until it became black and white properly, then printed it out.
A retro delight as ever. I remember having (can’t remember what game it was) a small card with coloured squares in a grid printed all over it with letters for the anti piracy thing. It put me off playing it, sometimes.
Back in the days of the 3.5 inch floppy disks, I wrote training software, not the sort of topic that would invite piracy on a huge scale, but if a business we sold to had several locations, we needed to sell to each location, so we needed an anti piracy measure. We considered going down the dongle route, but that was expensive, so I took a look at the various anti-piracy tactics available at the time. The "write the word at page 3, para 2 word 17" idea didn't appeal to me as I'd be the one putting gods knows how much data in, but one company, TenCore, had a very simple tactic - they physically damaged a particular location on the disk, and to start the program, that disk had to be in drive A. This allowed the program to check the bad spot before running. This led me down the rabbit hole of looking for ways of altering the disk somehow for our own copy protection. Turns out there was a very simple way to do this. I altered the boot sector, put in a value in a particular location (I think I told it to assume 8 sectors per track instead of the standard 9) which had an unusual effect. The disk could still be read okay, the program would run, but if you used the diskcopy command (which duplicated every last byte on the disk) to try and pirate it, the destination disk would default to 9 sectors per track, and render it useless, as the first thing our software did was interrogate that part of the boot sector. We had a slightly embarrassing time, though, with one customer who called and complained that there was a virus on the main disk they'd received, and what were we going to do about it? Turns out that there WAS a virus, apparently very rare as no other customer complained, that did exactly the same trick to the boot sector.
I had Spore as a kid, never knew the DRM was that bad. I knew about the three install limit, but that was trendy in the 2000s for a lot of things that came on CD. Never knew it had to always be online, but so did the actual game if you wanted to read from the Sporepedia.
Yay! A Larry video! It always makes my day when I see you've released another great Fact Hunts video! They might be a few and far between, but I can always count on them being great and it makes me enjoy each one that much more!
The great irony is that by putting excessive DRM on your game and hyping up its security, all you're doing is making it a bigger target for any hacker as it makes it a higher profile challenge. And as many wise folks have stated; piracy is generally a service problem, and if the pirates are giving a better service than the official company you're doing it very wrong.
While the lenslock device would be unsuitable for the extreme largest and smallest of TV screens it did allow for a range of TV sizes, not just one specific size as you claimed. I remember the game I had with a lenslock on the Spectrum had a mode just before that OK check you showed in the video where you adjusted a line to match the length of the unfolded lenslock held flat on the screen. It had upper and lower limits of the line so on extremely large screens it would not be able to go small enough and on small screens it would not go large enough. Hell, the tiny screen you showed was smaller than the lenslock anyway! LOL
Sadly, Duncan MacDonald, author of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator and frequent contributor to magazines from Zero to PC Zone (as Mr. Cursor) died not that long ago :( Bloke was a legend
Might & Magic 4 does the "find the word in the book" thing when you first try to leave the town you start in, but you can just teleport to another town and get to the world map that way.
Not exactly copy protection but I remember Leisure Suit Larry giving you a quiz for your age to prevent minors from playing. Only having a few answers to pick you could figure out the right answers in a short amount of time however
Good old EA, screwing over customers since time immemorial. Just look at the whole Star Wars: Battlefront II disaster. The PC versions online component is completely broken at the moment, but the game itself is still being sold at $39.99 / €39.99, depending on the store front being used.
Hey there, Larry. Long time viewer, second time commenter (or so I think) An honorable mention that could very well tie in with your sporadic spore shenanigans is Sonic Mania. If my memory serves me correctly, the title got major flak for having Denuvo anti-piracy (essentially a sequel for SecuRom in this case) and needing an Internet connection for what was exclusively a single player game. Denuvo was boasting publicly about how their newest version (Denuvo 5.0) was the bees knees, a virtually unbreakable DRM... just to have the game cracked within 24 hours of release. Meaning that the pirates were enjoying Christian Whitehead's vision of Sonic while articles began running talking about how paying customers got stuck with an anti-piracy measure that ran sloppy code (causing noticable slowdown in the game they just bought) and a Internet requirement so pointless it'd make even SimCity 2013 blush.
In comparison, the "best" piracy prevention probably goes to Sega's early online efforts like MegaNet and Sega Channel. After all, what better way to prevent people from pirating the games than simply not allowing them to be internally stored?
Nope, the best piracy prevention was definitely the one the game tie-in for the 2005 movie Land of the Dead had. It had none, but the game was so bad that anybody who had pirated it would stop playing after 30 minutes max.
@@ReynLynxPSI At least one game became available, as Mega Man:The Wily Wars ended up on the Genesis mini. Also, I believe many of the games became retail releases, and they used the Sega Channel to promote them.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo If we consider the method of comparison to be "number of copies pirated", then "0" is better than "I can pirate it right now just to bump the number up." For reference, some Sega Channel media was leaked post-mortem via outside methods, but as there was no way to rip things directly from Sega Channel there's still a large chunk of lost media pertaining to it. Anything considered "Lost Media" can't be pirated, and in the Sega Channel's case, that's an example where it was like that by design.
I remember getting a Lenslock game as a kid, and could not for the life of me get it to work. Perhaps we were given the wrong Lenslock for the game we had. I had no idea that was a thing. But it would explain it.
Oh god, just hearing 'RF' brought back horrible memories of having to turn a dial to tune in the old TV to find a fuzzy picture of Dizzy...you kids with your HDMI's don't know how good you've got it these days!
Let me thank you for including such a variety of subtitles languages!! My girlfriend doesn't speak English but we can enjoy your great videos together because of it!!! :)
You forgot to add Midways strange way of slowing down PC Piracy ... in what clever way you ask , well why not make the title 4 to 8 times larger by not compressing the game files, aka putting the game textures\assets in RAW mode ... they made this to StrangleHold ... in a time when everyone was at 56kb/s internet speeds (Disney did the same with 2008 Turok , and the same was done by RockStar with GTAIV ) ... but they forgot about Rip epacker scene groups ,that could fit those games in extremely small sizes hahaha ... the only plus or side effect from those assets in RAW files was, they made those games future proof , since now you can play them in 4K with no HD packs needed ... well only few tweaks
We're not going to talk about the "always online" DRM for the last SimCity game that EA was caught lying about? You know, the one where EA claimed that players had to be online in a single-player game because some of the game is so complex that it has to run on EA servers? Which was not only debunked, but later, EA gave up and patched out the always online requirement. Also, I'm pretty sure the Steam version of Spore doesn't include SecuRom and allows you to install as many times as you want.
I'd be tempted to buy it for that, since I doubt the DRM on my CD copy will run properly on Wine or Proton in Linux. (It wouldn't even run properly on Windows 7, thanks to MS patching out some security vulnerabilities.) Maybe when it's on deep discount, so I'm not giving EA much more money...
My favorite anti piracy message this is for just shapes and beat. If you haven’t seen it it’s pretty funny and a bit wholesome. Obviously if you wanna see it preferably don’t pirate it yourself and just look it up
I remember RoboCop 3 on the Atari ST requiring a dongle to plug in the back. But you could make your own in minutes 😉 lol perhaps I should watch the video before commenting 😜
OMG! Lenslok . . . You've just made me feel right old. My copy of 'Elite' had Lenslok. It defo was a pig to use, 3/4 times it failed cos, as you say, it was near impossible to read the bloody screen.
I had intended to show my copy of Elite in the video as it was the first ever game to use it, but I can't find my copy and it's hella-expensive to buy the Lenslok version on eBay now :( (Spent £40 on that Robocop 3 for the video as I kept getting ones without the dongle >.>)
That's funny. That's a game I literally copied from my grandpa's old DOS computer to mess with at home. I was just fascinate with a space game being that small. But the one I got definitely did not have any sort of anti-piracy.
@@Larry Yeah. I lost mine years since. As for big box game prices . . . Ridiculous. I have a mate who deals in 'em, and I've had a couple of spats with him lately over prices. Waaaaaaay inflated IMHO.
So happy to see a Guru Larry video come up on my suggested vids. I wish you could post more since I've already watched em all! I was born in '85 so I really enjoy some of the old school games that I never had the chance to play. Cheers mate and keep em coming!
World Class Leaderboard on the Commodore 64 also included a "dongle" which was plugged in to the datasette port. This was fine until my Mum threw out the dongle thinking it was rubbish!
@@Larry I've just double checked the box. It was actually the Leaderboard Par 4 (1988) disk compilation, which included the original Leaderboard, Leaderboard Tournament, Leaderboard Executive Edition and World Class Leaderboard. It has the US Gold loko, and also another logo for "Access Software Incorporated". The dongle was a small piece of plastic designed to fit in the datasette port, with a single resistor across two of the contacts. The original Leaderboard would work without the dongle, but none of the others.
I HAVE ONE! I got the Command & Conquer First Decade collection years back and several games were real spotty with successful installs. When I finally got my favorite one to install, Red Alert 2, I had the option to connect to the internet and download the latest patch, and saw one was available. After installing, every time a map loaded, exactly 25 or 27 seconds later (I timed it at the time but can't remember the exact number now) everything under my control would explode. Game mode did not matter. The first Soviet mission couldn't even start because my stuff would explode before I got battlefield control. After a tumultuous foray into the Origin forums, I found some posts that discussed the issue. Turns out, what I was seeing was an anti-piracy countermeasure. But I had an official copy of the game bought from Best Buy. According to the forum users, there are two patches for the game, one official, one unofficial. It is considered common knowledge on the forums that the official patch was so poorly made that it triggered the countermeasure 100% of the time. And guess which patch the game finds when it checks online?
Spore was online only? really? Because I remember when it came out, I lived in an apartment without internet, and I could play it just fine. Just didn't have any sporepedia things from other creators.
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I remember in the mid-2000s, some record label put DRM on their CDs so that it couldn't be read by a CD-ROM drive in a computer. Only someone the same day discovered that if you held down the "shift" key on your PC when you inserted disc until it loaded, it played without a hitch.
Ah yes, MediaMax CD-3. It was used by RCA and BMG. It was even more heinous than that. It replaced your CD-ROM device driver so that it checked every bit of data read off of it to decide whether or not "approved" apps were allowed to see that data. Its bigger brother, XCP (by SonyBMG), was even more heinous in that it installed a rootkit so poorly designed that it became one of the biggest vectors for the worst malware on Windows XP.
Also the reason why holding shift works is because autorun itself doesn't run if you hold shift while inserting a disc. Hopefully that's news to someone reading this.
@@adamsfusion One of the first things I do on a new computer is disable every %&*%&*% autorun POS on it.
@@Wolfshead009 hello how can I accomplish that?
@@stratagemSG1 want to know too
@@BrickmanZero Want to know three.
This quote has been repeated many times, but it deserves to be repeated many, many more: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." -Gabe Newell
Truest words ever spoken. Happy to pay, but the more I'm treated like an adversary, the less cooperative I become. And that is why I hack all of my consoles despite owning original media for all the games I play.
Heck, I've bought SO MANY games on GOG that I already own physical versions of, just 'cause. And you know, maybe some of them are easier to play that way, but most of them I've never even downloaded.
Praise our Lord and Savior Gaben
@@nickwallette6201 same pay the people that put the work to mod their games and profit off 80% of it easy money
I pirate games I already own because it’s dumb you can’t play them while totally offline. If Steam allowed that then I wouldn’t have to do that…
@@BuetifullPersun Steam has an offline mode.
My memory of Spore was finally getting my copy, only to find out the code included with the game had already been activated by another user (even though it was a sealed copy that I got on release day). Took months of emails back and forth between myself and EA just to finally get them to replace the code, and by then my friends had already moved on to other games, so I did too.
I bought a copy of Rainbow Six 3 Gold that was missing the key for the expansion pack. The spot for it was literally blank. Returned it in-person to Best Buy.
Did EA ever explain what happened? Did they print the same code twice, or did the guy enter the code wrong and it happened to be yours?
@@Larry They weren't certain, but they believed that someone must have misentered their code and entered mine by mistake.
@@adamdufty2536 could be jokers from the game store with access to a sealing machine
@@adamdufty2536 Seems just as likely that someone with access to a key generator made a key for themselves that matched yours. Unless EA was stupid enough to use a key generation that was sequential in nature, it would be extremely unlikely that anyone would have a key that looked enough like yours that a typo or two would be enough to shift it.
The resealing thing is obviously also a possibility.
I will never get sick of hearing about companies so paranoid over such a non-issue that they create huge problems for themselves and encourage enough people to turn the non-issue into a major one.
Politics.
*sarcasm* If they didn't then how could have control! How?! By making a great game and being transparent with the public? What a laugh, if they did that they might have to pay thier programmers a decent wage since they'd know how badly they are being ripped off!
No this is so clearly better... *end sarcasm*
Yea. The entire philosophy of trying to control from above and the excuses to justify that is just stupid and always backfires and devolves into paranoia eventually.
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If only companies were confident enough to remove the damn anti piracy measures after a period when most sales should have been done. And the games have been cracked for a while. So the legit copies dont run worse than the pirated ones *cough* denuvo *cough*.
I dunno where you got the idea piracy is a non-issue. Did you watch this video?
Wasn’t there an instance where a game company goofed up so badly on the “check disk is in tray” measure, that they had to resort to giving thier customers a pirated version they downloaded? That was pretty dumb…
Ya it was one of the Rainbow Six titles. Larry talks about it in one of his other videos.
Rainbow Six Vegas 2 if I recall correctly. DRM was so bad they took some pirate crack for it and uploaded it as the official patch. It even had the creator's watermark iirc.
It worked as intended. The problem was that the intent changed. They couldn't check for a cd with the download version after all.
You mean Rainbow Six Vegas 2? I think everyone had a nice ride on the ROFLcopter over that one.
You're absolutely on the money. The company that caused that little debacle was Ubisoft. I believe Larry covered that story a few years ago.
The worst part about the whole Spore debacle is Will Wright didn't want any form of DRM in that game to begin with, but EA refused to listen.
EDIT: wow never dreamed i'd get over 1,000 likes, thanks everyone!
You could say!p,Will was (W)right all this time.
EA also had its hand dumbing down the gameplay, especially for the evolution mechanics.
Spore could've been such a banger of a game
And EA learned absolutely nothing from it. Five years later they tried the same with SimCity and of course failed again.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo It's Capitalism in action my friend.
Why spend some money to create something amazing that people want to buy for years to come and praise, when you can make five dollars with a netloss today?
Fuck Capitalism.
Hearing about Spore's Anti-Piracy stuff made me want to pirate Spore just so I could get around all that BS even though I don't even want the game. I'm not joking. The Anti-Piracy failed so bad it made someone that doesn't even care about the game want to pirate it.
naaah give it a chance...it grows on you, is really goofy and cool (more with the expansion).
of course, matey, yarr-harr-harr! your way to it!
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@@C.A._Old did I ask?
to be honest spore was eazy to crack
@@e_kedi Most games get cracked mere hours after they get released.
One thing I've never understood about companies is the mindset they have that stopping piracy will make the pirates buy their stuff, by using drm like the ones in the video they end up spending money while chasing money that doesn't exist.
and often making the game so unplayable that they chase away money that does
Yeah, that's always been my understanding. First, the piracy usually isn't enough to actually affect sales in terms of people who can and would buy it, but choose *instead* to pirate a game. This is not the same person who pirates a game because a demo is so stripped it doesn't really show enough of the game to make a purchase decision, and it certainly doesn't account for someone who would never buy the game because they simply think it just isn't worth it. The way to stop piracy is almost literally "Make thing good, give it a reasonable price point, and make it convenient to play/own." That's it. That's the secret. This anti-piracy crap still going on with Steam and 'rent to never own' style of games...they never learned anything.
Also, with the fall of Netflix being a central hub for series and films, an uptick of piracy has occurred because of the splitting and ultimately the cost of subscribing to way too many online premium channels.
Again, make it good, make it priced fair in the public's mind and make it convenient. Apple figured this one out with iTunes early on and it's one of the ventures that skyrocketed their incomes.
So for any business folks out there reading this, people are going to pirate your material whether you like it or not. They were never going to buy your product. They just weren't. Don't punish everyone else for something you literally have no control over.
That's what the RIAA tried to say about mp3's, 100 people downloaded song.mp3 for FREE, we have lost 100x the sale price of song on CD. As if the absence of mp3s being available, all 100 of those people would have bought the CD.
@@lmcgregoruk Yeah, the music industry vs. tech that makes pirating possible is hilariously stupid. I forgot to mention, too, that pirating music is free advertisement in which you don't have to do the work of paying the radio stations etc. to boost your visibility. People are doing it for you and it just cost you a buck or two per person doing it.
@@heavysystemsinc. IIRC what the Spyro guys had to say about it, anti-piracy only works if it's basically woven into the game code, layered, and subtle, and its job isn't to stop piracy but rather to basically turn pirated copies close to launch into free demo discs, since that's when people who are eager to play are most likely to buy it if they can't get it for free.
(Also don't insult the cracking scene, asking them nicely to not release this game within [x] time of the release within the code actually works and hackers will, indeed, be nice and wait a bit before releasing the crack if asked to by devs. Or you could just turn your anti-piracy code into a way to hire new programmers and leave hiring contact info.)
Thank you uncle Barry I've had "guru larry" withdrawals. This is just what my Sunday evening needed. Thank you again.
Lol, no worries, well I've got one more Fact Hunt before the end of the year :)
@@Larry whoooooo hooooooo 👊
Time for another "Helloooo you" relapse
Who's Barry?
@@Sandman_Slim Barry Lundy Sr.
One funny one I always remember is Ooga Booga on Dreamcast. It was a party game with a bunch of game modes and different characters, one of them being a pirate. If it detected that you were playing a copied version, instead of starting up it would show a screen with the pirate dude that would do his taunts whenever you pressed any button. The cracking group that released the pirated version kept the screen in, but made it bypassable by pushing the start button.
Not sure what category it would go in or if there's enough content for its own entry, but I would like to see it featured sometime.
I almost didn't realize how bloody brilliant the intro was.
Hook, the Pirates of the Caribbean, and a smorgasbord of other pirate themed games. 👍
saw Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat in there. Damn fine game from Westwood
So clever in deed!
And Gangplank Galleon from DKC3!
Where's my Sid Meier's Pirates???
@@arnox4554 The Xbox remake is there!
I utterly despise publishers that pull this kimd of baloney. It just ends up hurting regular paying customers and doesn't actually stop piracy.
Codex the same day a game with anti piracy comes out: "Thanks for the challenge"
The only anti-piracy measure that works is online only, and unless the game is actually an MMO or something with serious focus on multiplayer, it's just Mortal Kombat or Need for Speed that you can't play when your internet is down. Horrible!
...When piracy isn't even a big issue to begin with, as well.
When I was a little kid, the power went out while I was playing my PS1. When the power came back ON, my PS1 still worked but was a little wonky. As alittle kid, imagine My surprise when my Spyro game is suddenly calling me someone who broke the law at the tender age of 6, all because my laser got a little messed up.
I believe that the install limit was not to deter pirates, but used game sales.
Also, Batman Arkham Asylum. The glide was disabled on pirated copies, making it so you could only play a portion of the game (as the glide was required to get past a certain point fairly early). But the Anti Piracy also triggered in legitimate PC copies of the game, making the PC version unplayable.
Oh, more than likely. EA have said they consider the used game market to be worse than piracy.
@@Larry It really is, even indie devs have asked to please pirate instead of buying second hand
It's not just illegal, but instead of just not paying the devs for it, you're also loosing money
You don't generate any sales for the games because the money goes to the previous owner of the game instead of the people who made it
@@rompevuevitos222 selling used games is not illegal. WTF are you smoking? Plus, once I buy a game, it's mine, the makers have no more say to it than any other item you buy and decide to sell. Do you have to pay Ford to sell your used pick up? Why the hell should video games be any different?
@@Ashannon888 Do people not remember Sony trolling the fuck out of Microsoft at E3 one year?
@@Ashannon888 When you boot up a game, there is always a warning saying that you may not distribute the game if not authorized (as in, if you're not an aproved store)
Not all games have it, but most do
Kind of incredible how some of these seem like they're designed to encourage piracy rather than stop it. That being said, that last one really took the cake.
Worst thing is most of these only hurt legitimate purchases.
@@Larry of course, these days companies don't need the piracy excuse to randomly insert things into their products that decrease sales. It's like every industry has become allergic to money.
@@KairuHakubi They just don't have any empathy, they want money and fail to realize that people may not like what they are doing, but they don't care what people want, they care about the money they get
Which makes them have these brainlet moments
@@rompevuevitos222 I guess. in my experience, and historically, going after money tends to be something that goes with being smart.
@@KairuHakubi Yeah, it is smart to go after money above everything (despite already swimming in it) if you are a sociopath
Except the human being is a social species which requires collaboration to survive, so being an ahole is definitively not the optimal way to do things
I'd say the best and most insidious anti-piracy measure is Earthbound's.
If you have a pirated version, then not only does the enemy encounter rate go through the roof, but once you beat the final boss, the game locks and deletes your saves - making it impossible to see the ending.
I'm just like right to youtube it is
And in current days it's literally useless because you can just watch the ending online from a playthrough channels
@@Nekoszowa It still deletes all your data
@@bestaround3323 Which saves you the trouble of deleting it the next time you play.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 big brain
No mention of the chaos that was StarForce? I mean, Ubisoft dropped it as an anti-piracy measure after they got sued because it damaged a customer's hardware. It also allowed non-administrator users to install software, making it a potential security risk.
that was a different video, specifically on anti-piracy shit that damaged your computer. This was more 'didnt stop anyone from pirating for shit'
Damn.....
We're talking about useless DRMs. StarForce wasn't useless, it was actually effective in halting the pirates as it was notoriously difficult to crack. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for example remained uncracked for 424 days after its release.
O
M
F
G
!??
*HOW?*
The StarForce DRM in the King Kong demo, destroyed my OS, making me lose everything I ever had on my PC.
The irony for Spore is this: The game is available on GoG and the Securom has already been stripped out. Though from what I heard, not all games on there are DRM-Free.
Daily reminder that pirating games from AAA publishers is a victimless crime!
I'm pretty sure that GoG's whole selling point was that they only sell DRM-free game, to ensure you're able to play and re-play them whenever you want, and you own it for good.
What game did you hear that they sell that have DRM..?
Oh, just googled it...Seem like they do have some games, albeit a very small group of games that have some form of DRM. But thankfully, except for one case of an anti-cheat DRM, most of it seems to be merely cosmetic in nature and are tied to online accounts (but still completely playable offline, and even online in some cases without any account needed or connection to a third party services)
Their official reasoning for it: "All games available on GOG have offline installers available. We stay in touch with the partners and do our best to keep them up to date. However, video games continue to evolve with many titles offering online modes, cosmetics, and incentives for completing certain actions by players. This might be subjective, but as long as these additional features and rewards do not affect the single-player offline experience in a major way, we believe that the developers and publishers should be free to design and sell their games in a way they choose."
You have to get EA to add the game to your Origin library in order to play online though.
Another irony is the "geniuses" over at CheatHappens gave up on ever making a working trainer for Spore, ban anyone who even dares request one without explanation, and have a raging hate boner for KelSat who actually made one that worked just fine before Steam and GoG.
I remember circumventing anti-piracy measures back in the days of CD and DVD games. But, I wasn't someone who gave friends pirated copies of the game. I just wanted the ability for my brother and I to play multi-player and not have to purchase a 2nd copy of the game. Then we got our 1st game console and we slowly stopped doing that.
I did the same too. Though mostly wanted to get rid of the CD checks so I wouldn't hear the jet engine of my cdrom spin up every 5 minutes.
The irony is that anti-piracy measures mostly hurt legitimate purchasers, be it things listed here or the slightly later game lagging due to disc loading, or getting unplayable due to it getting scratched, SecuROM and SafeDisk being infamous for hurting computers and ONLY being disabled in Windows 10 update, or even more modern "let's put a resource-hogging virus-like background process in their computer."
Yeah real bright idea there, bet that was a pain in the ass to remove.
"Pirating games is dangerous, who knows what kind of malware the pirates might be adding to their cracks!", said the AAA game companies while adding harmful and insidious malware to their official releases as "copy protection".
Yeah, EA truly learned about their DRM policies after Spore, didn't they?
*SimCity 2013*
Oh....
Ahh I remember seeing an old let's play of that, then the DRM killed it mid video.
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The problem with anti-piracy is that it rarely comes from the devs themselves, since they actually know technology and the users, it's something that always comes from high up, thinking pirates would be so affected by FOMO they would cave in instead of just playing something else.
high ups are terrible when dealing with anti piracy they have no idea what would actually be effective as measures and the cost to the customer and the developer
putting the Gol D Roger's laugh in there was a great touch indeed
ive found that ever since demos have become few and far between Ive "pirated" more and more over the years with the games that have interested me on pc if i like the game even if i had completed the pirated version I will buy it so if developers want to make money and get piracy to a minimum then start creating a demo for your potential customers.
It's actually been proven that piracy helps improve sales of games for that same reason.
If you hadn't have played a copied version, chances are you'd have never intended to play it, so never bought the game.
There's a number of games I own I pirated back in the day when I couldn't afford games.
Dark Souls, Alien Isolation, Just Cause 2, -Mass Effect 3- lol no.
I honestly do not trust demos
I'd still just get a cracked copy to test it properly and make sure the game doesn't take a huge dip midway or straight up clears my savefile or something that makes the game no longer fun
MANY and i mean MANY games with demos have the best part at the beggining so you buy it and then you find out the rest is not nearly as good
Ofc that i don't mean "oh well i beat the game and i got bored", if the game is bearable from start to end it's enough for me.
But the amount of games i've started and haven't seen the failures of until it is too late is a bit large
@@rompevuevitos222 One of the big issues with demo's (which some indie devs are avoiding) is that the demo version doesn't get the same bug fix, quality of life and optimization patches as the full version, resulting in the demo becoming a rather poor representation of the latest release of the game.
Also some companies used to include a prequel story in the demo that'd lead up to the full games story. Like Starcraft and Warcraft III for example (Warcraft 3's demo campaign is also available in the full version).
@@Nicholas_Steel That's why I miss demos: they felt like a special edition of the game, frozen in time, and even if they weren't unique campaigns, you got a highlight of some level in the middle of the game instead of starting the game from scratch and spending an hour on character creator and another on tutorials and slow exposition dump.
Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 are last demos I played done right, but of course the best demo-related memories are with PlayStation 1 demo discs. It's actually easier now making demos since nobody needs to contract magazines, print discs, or plug them into another game, just give us a download that has a few levels to screw around.
I also distinctly remember some anti-Piracy measure that limited installs... but counted swapping out computer parts as an install. Or something of the sorts.
Bioshock
Windows XP-onwards computers are different from older versions of Windows and other such operating systems; in the past, you could shut down your computer, swap out every part *besides* the hard disk drive you had it installed on (or even that, if you bothered to properly transfer it to another disk and even made sure it could boot from it), and then it would work when you would boot it up, most likely needing a device driver or two...
Nowadays, any major hardware change means you are basically in need of reinstalling Windows.
That would be Windows XP and Windows 7 in my experience.
@@RaspK the way around that is to go to device manager and uninstall the disk controller driver, and replace it with a generic version. that's always worked for me.
I see Nintendo took notes from Sabre Wulf, seeing as how they think a viable strategy for getting people to stop emulating their older games is to charge them ridiculous amounts of money to play those games on...emulators Nintendo made themselves...that have been proven to work worse than unofficial ones...
And remember that time the "official" Super Mario Bros. that Nintendo released for the switch was actually a pirated rom, at least according to the guy who had originally ripped the rom and said he recognized some filler code he wrote?
@@PrototypeSpaceMonkey Well, if i remember correctly even their STM32 handhelds, the two Game&Watches, use iNES headered ROMs.
Nintendo can be assh___s sometimes..
@@kenrickkahn
"sometimes"?
@@DinnerForkTongue Try every time. they even took down some sellers on ebay selling physical bootleg or rom hacks of Pokemon games. a few still exist though.
the irony of a company named "code master" having one of the most laughable examples of a code sheet is just...glorious.
Codemasters refers to them being great programmers.
I twice had to program an anti-piracy measure in a game as part of my job. I made it.. as interesting as I could. The first took a random time after it detected the piracy, then would cause a random error, such as a null pointer access, divide by zero, etc. The second just kept making the game harder and wouldn't let the missions progress. It was a fun challenge, since I had to make sure it didn't cause permanent damage or anything like that, and didn't want to damage save files in case it was a mistake or someone wanted to buy the game after "tasting" it. Glad my work didn't make this list!
Ooh, can you say what games they were?
@@Larry The one that might be known was Star Trek: Bridge Commander. It did a check for the CD in the drive rather than any online shenanigans or anything like that, so there were of course ways around it
One copy protection I was able to pass by mistake was on Dune on MS-DOS. I got a copy of the game but you have to select the good page corresponding of the picture shown on the screen. I got lucky enough to find one and after that, restarted the game multiple times until I got the same picture again (not really a lot of tries to be honest).
Sounds like what I often do in the DOS version of SimEarth. It uses "look something up in the manual" copy protection, with data about the RL solar system's planets in an appendix. But I don't always feel like digging the manual out of a stack, so I'll often keep retrying until it gets to a bit of info I remember with the correct precision (e.g.: "Year on Mars (Earth days)" = 687, or "Axial tilt of Earth" = 23.45).
@@AaronOfMpls: My stand-by for SimEarth was always the 365.26 answer for the number of days per year for Earth, so looks like I wasn't the only one who just recalled one little bit of information and used that to bypass the copy protection.
@@RAKtheUndead Which is actually the number of days in a _sidereal_ year (1 orbit relative to the stars -- i.e., to the universe in general). I'll have to remember that one when it comes up.
The DRM I broke by mistake was Fallout 3. I can't remember why I tried this, but starting the game using one of the executables Bethesda included with the install skipped the CD checking.
Same with me and the F-15 & F-19 flight sims. Pick the correct plane from an outline. Got pretty good at that. :)
The best anti-piracy measure any dev can take is making a really good game that people will want to spend money on. That's as far as any measures should go.
LOL! I'm watching this WHILE playing a game which fell off the back of a pirate ship.
I remember my brother having problems with the lenslock device that came with the Spectrum version of Elite. The later idea, random(ish) words from the short story were a better idea.
More recently I transferred from XP to Windows 7 and reinstalled my genuine copy of Corel Draw, which I'd paid through the nose for, only to be informed that Protexis had decided my copy was a pirate version (which I could have acquired quite easily). I contacted Coral and their solution? Buy a new copy at around £190, apparently this was a reduced price to male up for Protexis screwing me over.
And devs wonder why piracy even exists with stories like yours. It's literally a piece of code that can be copied time and time again, and as such isn't "theft" as the original copy still exists in it's entirety.
@@chazzcoolidge2654 It still should be illegal, otherwise no one could ever make a living out of it if anyone could just get it for free which means no entertainment
But i fully understand why people do it, sometimes they can't afford it, the legit product is worse or the company just doesn't deserve the money to begin with
@@rompevuevitos222 If the devs make asses of themselves, get political, or use annoying DRM.
They can go to the devil.
I haven't though about Corel Draw in ages. People still use it ? They still make it ?
@@Intelwinsbigly what the devs do in their free time is not my problem, but DRM and anti consumer practices deserve some *yarrs* 100%
Spore is an epic story in and of itself of lost potential, Will Wright's vision being screwed over, and EA's usual BS. One of my first major gaming disappointments as a teen, probably the one that woke me up to how crappy the industry can be.
This, so much this.
If you look past it's original pitch, Spore is still a great game. I think they made the right decision in scaling back, but they should have been far more transparent about it. Today's technology could quite easily handle Will Wright's original Spore idea imo.
@@SockyNoob They didn't really have to scale it back, it was due to being rushed
I kinda dropped out of PC gaming for a while, just as the DRM started getting worse. * grabs tobacco pipe * "Back in my day..." everyone had a friend that had collected all the no-CD patches, and even though I bought (at the time, MOST of) my games legitimately, I would still crack them to run without the discs and hassles, and/or used Alcohol as a virtual CD drive with the circumvention features enabled.
But, then there was Spore, and Diablo III, and so much other crap that I just got less interested in putting up with it, so I just bowed out. Not worth the trouble, and I still had a whole list of backlogged titles to occupy my time. When you have Unreal Tournament and StarCraft, what else do you need anyway?
@@nickwallette6201 I just yar harrd my way out of those crapfests
That Games for Windows Live thing was awful
Funny that you complain about DRM when consoles have built in DRM themselves tho, lol
4:37 man that smile looks so sincere!
I'm happy to see you happy Larry!
One I remember: a series of 90s indie 3D space sims called Star Wolf / Star Wraith had a "copy protection" scheme that was literally nothing more than dropping an empty file into C:/Windows with an arbitrary filename. That was it. To "crack" the game, just make the file yourself. Not to make fun of the author (since they were quite nice games at the time) but that may the worst attempt at security-through-obscurity ever.
Man, I remember how much Spore was overshadowed by the SecuROM thing. Like, it would not have been able to live up to the initial hype anyway but that pretty much made people remember it almost for only that alone.
7:24 I literally thought of that problem before you mentioned it! How can the team of engineers that designed that thing not see that as a potential problem? Idiots.
The way Guru Larry says Opera made me imagine Oprah going "You get a sponsorsip! And you get a sponsorship! Everybody gets a sponsorship!"
I was listening and not watching at that point and was wondeing "WTF kinda browser is Oprah GX, what a weird name..." lol
I got Robocop 3 from my playground supplier about 2 weeks after release. Fantastic game. I also recall trying over and over again with screen lock. Bloody thing. I had the retail game of indy 500 but not the booklet (given to me by a relative). The anti piracy was questions about the race. My gran somehow had a glass tumbler with past winners on it. So if inwanted to play I had to keep loading it until 8mgot a "who won in 19xx" question lol.
ha, what arew the chances?
Thanks to that ad break, i was not only reminded that LocoRoco 2 wasn't a fever dream, i also got that song in my head now.
So these are "Laugh tales" Roger had such a fine time with.
My favorite piracy stories are the ones where a company goes to do a remaster and have to go to a pirate site just to get a copy lol
Can you remember any of those games? I did cover Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that did that for the digital version a few years ago.
@@Larry Not the same thing but mass effect remaster was a poor one with lost dlc code and etc. Modders\pirates just used content from the original to restore content.
@@robertnomok9750 Pinnacle Station DLC for ME1 (which let you unlock cross-class weapon specialisations by completing weapon-based grind tasks) was done by a third-party (not Bioware themselves) who lost the source code due to system corruption at one point, and with the tweaks to ME1 for Legendary Edition to remove the penalties for off-class weapon use (eg: in OG ME1 if you used an Assault Rifle on the class built for Snipers; you got accuracy penalties. LE ME1 made it so every class could use every weapon without penalty beyond the weapon's stats) Pinnacle Station didn't serve a purpose to actual gameplay or story anymore anyway.
"Pirates" didn't do anything to MELE, Modders just found a way to take the precompiled binaries for Pinnacle Station from OG ME1 and bodge them in to MELE for those that wanted the holiday house you earn for completing all the challenges on the station, since the DLC didn't serve a practical function in MELE outside of being a Horde Sim to blow off steam in.
The main things MELE did over OG ME Trilogy was: Unified art style, unified launcher, all the story mode DLC packs bundled in by default, and provide 2160p/4K textures and pre-rendered videos to replace the old 720p textures and videos made for the Xbox 360 to negate the need for big-ass mods lot ALOT (A Lot Of Textures) & ALOV (A Lot Of Videos) just to get 1080p textures and videos at the cost of like 5-10GB downloads per-mod per-game (examples: ALOT 1080p for ME3 is a 8.5GiB compressed zip file, ALOV 1080p for ME3 Base game is 6.2GiB compressed zip file, ALOV 1080p for ME3 DLC is 5.7GiB compressed zip file).
We have a saying that fits E.A... Thieves believes everybody steals..
Spore would’ve been such a big hit, had they not botched the game with DRM and killed Maxis with screwing the players. Spore would’ve been up there with Minecraft. Guru Larry should do more videos on Spore’s failures, because it would make a great top five list!
@@PondScummer even as an adult in the mid 2000s, I thought Spore looked cool, it wasn’t just targeted for kids. GameStop was promoting the game, but how the game was hard to install and didn’t run well on lot of computers, that’s what killed the hype.
Thanks for all you do, Larry. When I hear your "Hello, you!" I get such a good feeling inside. 🤗
I've known about the Opera browser for a while, listening to this audio only I thought it was connected to the talk show host 🤣
@9:40 The original SimCity (PC) also used that red unphotocopiable red paper. However, a friend of my dad's got the brilliant idea to run it through a fax machine and feed the output back into itself a few times. It worked! While it was hard to make it out it WAS easier then that bloody dark red that was almost impossible to read.
I ended up kracking the PC version of SimCity so you wouldn't need to even enter in the stupid code. =P
Quarantine used a similar thing. I just scanned it and loaded it into paint shop pro, made it monochrome, and adjusted the cut off until it became black and white properly, then printed it out.
"that's probably what got them bought by EA decades later, a fitting punishment"
I'm dead lmao
You're going to braz- err
You're being bought by EA!
A retro delight as ever. I remember having (can’t remember what game it was) a small card with coloured squares in a grid printed all over it with letters for the anti piracy thing. It put me off playing it, sometimes.
thanks matey :)
We'll stamp out piracy by charging double the price for the game...
Whose -moron- bright idea was that!?
8:10 Larry looks half way between a hobbit and Gollum
I never heard of that Robocop 3 game. For the time, it looks amazing :O
Back in the days of the 3.5 inch floppy disks, I wrote training software, not the sort of topic that would invite piracy on a huge scale, but if a business we sold to had several locations, we needed to sell to each location, so we needed an anti piracy measure.
We considered going down the dongle route, but that was expensive, so I took a look at the various anti-piracy tactics available at the time. The "write the word at page 3, para 2 word 17" idea didn't appeal to me as I'd be the one putting gods knows how much data in, but one company, TenCore, had a very simple tactic - they physically damaged a particular location on the disk, and to start the program, that disk had to be in drive A. This allowed the program to check the bad spot before running.
This led me down the rabbit hole of looking for ways of altering the disk somehow for our own copy protection. Turns out there was a very simple way to do this. I altered the boot sector, put in a value in a particular location (I think I told it to assume 8 sectors per track instead of the standard 9) which had an unusual effect. The disk could still be read okay, the program would run, but if you used the diskcopy command (which duplicated every last byte on the disk) to try and pirate it, the destination disk would default to 9 sectors per track, and render it useless, as the first thing our software did was interrogate that part of the boot sector.
We had a slightly embarrassing time, though, with one customer who called and complained that there was a virus on the main disk they'd received, and what were we going to do about it? Turns out that there WAS a virus, apparently very rare as no other customer complained, that did exactly the same trick to the boot sector.
I had Spore as a kid, never knew the DRM was that bad. I knew about the three install limit, but that was trendy in the 2000s for a lot of things that came on CD.
Never knew it had to always be online, but so did the actual game if you wanted to read from the Sporepedia.
Ah, a "´Ello you" before I have to get back to work tomorrow. Thank you, Larry. That really made me feel better.
Yay! A Larry video! It always makes my day when I see you've released another great Fact Hunts video! They might be a few and far between, but I can always count on them being great and it makes me enjoy each one that much more!
The Pirate King in the thumbnail? As Cwc would say, truly the cherry on the top of the sundae.
The great irony is that by putting excessive DRM on your game and hyping up its security, all you're doing is making it a bigger target for any hacker as it makes it a higher profile challenge. And as many wise folks have stated; piracy is generally a service problem, and if the pirates are giving a better service than the official company you're doing it very wrong.
I want to personally thank you for using a clip from Overboard. More people need to know about that demo disk classic.
Love how some of these measures actually encourage piracy. These videogame companies are so thick.
I wanted to get Opera GX for so long but I forgot what it was called. Thanks sponsorships! :D
While the lenslock device would be unsuitable for the extreme largest and smallest of TV screens it did allow for a range of TV sizes, not just one specific size as you claimed. I remember the game I had with a lenslock on the Spectrum had a mode just before that OK check you showed in the video where you adjusted a line to match the length of the unfolded lenslock held flat on the screen. It had upper and lower limits of the line so on extremely large screens it would not be able to go small enough and on small screens it would not go large enough. Hell, the tiny screen you showed was smaller than the lenslock anyway! LOL
Sadly, Duncan MacDonald, author of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator and frequent contributor to magazines from Zero to PC Zone (as Mr. Cursor) died not that long ago :( Bloke was a legend
Aw, I'm really sorry to hear that.
I’d love to see you do like a top five Christmas releases or release fails video.
Might & Magic 4 does the "find the word in the book" thing when you first try to leave the town you start in, but you can just teleport to another town and get to the world map that way.
Not exactly copy protection but I remember Leisure Suit Larry giving you a quiz for your age to prevent minors from playing. Only having a few answers to pick you could figure out the right answers in a short amount of time however
THAT LOCO ROCO SONG IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE AD OMG IT BROUGHT BACK SO MANY MEMORIES OF THAT GAME.
Good old EA, screwing over customers since time immemorial. Just look at the whole Star Wars: Battlefront II disaster. The PC versions online component is completely broken at the moment, but the game itself is still being sold at $39.99 / €39.99, depending on the store front being used.
That Pacman suit is fly as hell
Hey there, Larry. Long time viewer, second time commenter (or so I think)
An honorable mention that could very well tie in with your sporadic spore shenanigans is Sonic Mania. If my memory serves me correctly, the title got major flak for having Denuvo anti-piracy (essentially a sequel for SecuRom in this case) and needing an Internet connection for what was exclusively a single player game. Denuvo was boasting publicly about how their newest version (Denuvo 5.0) was the bees knees, a virtually unbreakable DRM... just to have the game cracked within 24 hours of release. Meaning that the pirates were enjoying Christian Whitehead's vision of Sonic while articles began running talking about how paying customers got stuck with an anti-piracy measure that ran sloppy code (causing noticable slowdown in the game they just bought) and a Internet requirement so pointless it'd make even SimCity 2013 blush.
I'll never get used to Larry's transformation from rotund git to Jim Carrey's skeleton.
In comparison, the "best" piracy prevention probably goes to Sega's early online efforts like MegaNet and Sega Channel. After all, what better way to prevent people from pirating the games than simply not allowing them to be internally stored?
Nope, the best piracy prevention was definitely the one the game tie-in for the 2005 movie Land of the Dead had. It had none, but the game was so bad that anybody who had pirated it would stop playing after 30 minutes max.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo Eh I thought that game was fine.
Ouch. Are a lot of the software from the Sega Channel lost media now because of that?
@@ReynLynxPSI At least one game became available, as Mega Man:The Wily Wars ended up on the Genesis mini. Also, I believe many of the games became retail releases, and they used the Sega Channel to promote them.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo If we consider the method of comparison to be "number of copies pirated", then "0" is better than "I can pirate it right now just to bump the number up."
For reference, some Sega Channel media was leaked post-mortem via outside methods, but as there was no way to rip things directly from Sega Channel there's still a large chunk of lost media pertaining to it. Anything considered "Lost Media" can't be pirated, and in the Sega Channel's case, that's an example where it was like that by design.
This video holds the distinction of having the best thumbnail I've ever seen on TH-cam. Absolutely brilliant.
Ha, thank you :D
I remember getting a Lenslock game as a kid, and could not for the life of me get it to work.
Perhaps we were given the wrong Lenslock for the game we had. I had no idea that was a thing.
But it would explain it.
Great choice on Gol D. Roger for the thumbnail.
“It’s rare but it does happen!” I’ve seen enough of your videos to know it isn’t that rare 😅
Oh god, just hearing 'RF' brought back horrible memories of having to turn a dial to tune in the old TV to find a fuzzy picture of Dizzy...you kids with your HDMI's don't know how good you've got it these days!
Anti-piracy usually doesn't work. 🤷♂️
Props to the Gol D. Roger Thumbnail, extremely apt :)
Let me thank you for including such a variety of subtitles languages!!
My girlfriend doesn't speak English but we can enjoy your great videos together because of it!!! :)
I never knew this, good to know. Love accessible channels!
I clicked because I remember that Anti-Piracy Trend from Last Year. Good Times.☺️♥️
My dad pirated Spore for me and my siblings when it came out. You know you fucked up when even parents realize that piracy is the better way.
i pirated most stuff myself but my dad knew about it and did not give a fuck
You forgot to add Midways strange way of slowing down PC Piracy ... in what clever way you ask , well why not make the title 4 to 8 times larger by not compressing the game files, aka putting the game textures\assets in RAW mode ... they made this to StrangleHold ... in a time when everyone was at 56kb/s internet speeds (Disney did the same with 2008 Turok , and the same was done by RockStar with GTAIV ) ... but they forgot about Rip
epacker scene groups ,that could fit those games in extremely small sizes hahaha ... the only plus or side effect from those assets in RAW files was, they made those games future proof , since now you can play them in 4K with no HD packs needed ... well only few tweaks
well a lot of devs in japan put dummy files into their games to increase size and make downloading them harder and costly.
@@robertnomok9750 no , they put game textures in as BMP images or PNG ... then compressed JPG (i know , since i own a large collection of them)
I liked the added touch of using Sabrewulf's theme from Killer Instinct during the Sabrewulf segment
Always so happy to see your videos. You are a real bright spot on TH-cam, and have such a great knowledge of gaming history!
I feel the same
one might say he's a guru
@@thecunninlynguist the only guru we need
Hope you're starting to feel better for the holidays sir! Thanks for the content Larry
We're not going to talk about the "always online" DRM for the last SimCity game that EA was caught lying about? You know, the one where EA claimed that players had to be online in a single-player game because some of the game is so complex that it has to run on EA servers? Which was not only debunked, but later, EA gave up and patched out the always online requirement.
Also, I'm pretty sure the Steam version of Spore doesn't include SecuRom and allows you to install as many times as you want.
I'd be tempted to buy it for that, since I doubt the DRM on my CD copy will run properly on Wine or Proton in Linux. (It wouldn't even run properly on Windows 7, thanks to MS patching out some security vulnerabilities.) Maybe when it's on deep discount, so I'm not giving EA much more money...
My favorite anti piracy message this is for just shapes and beat. If you haven’t seen it it’s pretty funny and a bit wholesome. Obviously if you wanna see it preferably don’t pirate it yourself and just look it up
I remember RoboCop 3 on the Atari ST requiring a dongle to plug in the back. But you could make your own in minutes 😉
lol perhaps I should watch the video before commenting 😜
You could just make your own? Ok, that is just a power move right there. A legitimate POWER MOVE.
I’d just like a big ol Merry Christmas from Mr. Bundy.
Guru Larry uploading another vid but with Gol Roger in the thumbnail? Perfection ✨
OMG! Lenslok . . . You've just made me feel right old.
My copy of 'Elite' had Lenslok. It defo was a pig to use, 3/4 times it failed cos, as you say, it was near impossible to read the bloody screen.
I had intended to show my copy of Elite in the video as it was the first ever game to use it, but I can't find my copy and it's hella-expensive to buy the Lenslok version on eBay now :(
(Spent £40 on that Robocop 3 for the video as I kept getting ones without the dongle >.>)
That's funny. That's a game I literally copied from my grandpa's old DOS computer to mess with at home. I was just fascinate with a space game being that small.
But the one I got definitely did not have any sort of anti-piracy.
@@Larry Yeah. I lost mine years since. As for big box game prices . . . Ridiculous. I have a mate who deals in 'em, and I've had a couple of spats with him lately over prices. Waaaaaaay inflated IMHO.
So happy to see a Guru Larry video come up on my suggested vids. I wish you could post more since I've already watched em all! I was born in '85 so I really enjoy some of the old school games that I never had the chance to play. Cheers mate and keep em coming!
World Class Leaderboard on the Commodore 64 also included a "dongle" which was plugged in to the datasette port. This was fine until my Mum threw out the dongle thinking it was rubbish!
Was that the US Gold version? I should look into that!
@@Larry I've just double checked the box. It was actually the Leaderboard Par 4 (1988) disk compilation, which included the original Leaderboard, Leaderboard Tournament, Leaderboard Executive Edition and World Class Leaderboard. It has the US Gold loko, and also another logo for "Access Software Incorporated". The dongle was a small piece of plastic designed to fit in the datasette port, with a single resistor across two of the contacts. The original Leaderboard would work without the dongle, but none of the others.
I HAVE ONE!
I got the Command & Conquer First Decade collection years back and several games were real spotty with successful installs. When I finally got my favorite one to install, Red Alert 2, I had the option to connect to the internet and download the latest patch, and saw one was available. After installing, every time a map loaded, exactly 25 or 27 seconds later (I timed it at the time but can't remember the exact number now) everything under my control would explode. Game mode did not matter. The first Soviet mission couldn't even start because my stuff would explode before I got battlefield control. After a tumultuous foray into the Origin forums, I found some posts that discussed the issue.
Turns out, what I was seeing was an anti-piracy countermeasure. But I had an official copy of the game bought from Best Buy. According to the forum users, there are two patches for the game, one official, one unofficial. It is considered common knowledge on the forums that the official patch was so poorly made that it triggered the countermeasure 100% of the time. And guess which patch the game finds when it checks online?
Spore was online only? really? Because I remember when it came out, I lived in an apartment without internet, and I could play it just fine. Just didn't have any sporepedia things from other creators.
No i think the Installing Online proctection was after you installed it should of had no problems offline.
"a fitting punishment" Classic Larry, love it!
I hope you have a wonderful holiday, Guru Larry!
This was so entertaining, I was unaware I watched all five anti-piracy tactics that failed.
Wow I never knew any of the EA one, just so EA 😂😂 great stuff as ever!
Props for playing the theme for Sabrewulf from Killer Instinct in the background of the section about the game Sabre Wulf.