Advent Calendar 06: Don't Copy That Floppy!

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

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I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

In the beginning, nobody copy protected software. If you were buying Big Iron like a PDP-11, you got everything you needed to run the computer from the manufacturer. If you wanted something else, you wrote it yourself, and obviously if you wrote it yourself, you could do whatever you wanted with it. Will Crowther charged nothing for ADVENT, and made no effort to keep anyone else from copying or modifying the source code -- culturally, that just wasn't a thing. Anyone who had access to a mainframe or mini-computer to play the game probably also had enough access to program a game themselves, and the notion of keeping them out of ADVENT's guts was ridiculous. The idea of third-party copyrighted commercial software didn't exist until 8-bit microcomputers started landing in the homes of people who didn't care how they worked, and just wanted them to do neat things.

Early copy-protection on computer games, as mentioned, was external. Diskettes (in the US; cassettes elsewhere) were mainly positioned as storage for the end user. They were supposed to be portable, interchangeable, inexpensive, and easily-duplicated. This made them problematic for commercial publishers who didn't want people running off copy after copy of stuff they were trying to make money off of. By packing games with tchotchkes like feelies, code wheels, LensLok prisms, or just a boring serial number, they at least ensured you couldn't get the game to work without some access to the packaging. I remember playing The Island of Dr. Brain and having to grub around in the included EncycloAlmanaTionaryOgraphy to find a password every time I started it up. 

Beyond that, there wasn't a lot that could be done, other than prey on the conscience of casual pirates with pieces like the embarrassingly 1990s PSA, "Don't Copy That Floppy". It was roughly as effective as the MPAA's 'would you download a car?' campaign. I guess they didn't anticipate that a lot of the public, given the chance to duplicate a car with no significant effort or impact to the original item, would say 'yes'.

On the console side, piracy was deterred by making the physical media difficult to duplicate. Atari, Nintendo, and Sega all went with a cartridge format, where the program code of each game was permanently embedded on a chip called a ROM (read-only memory) inside the plastic shell. These were not impossible to duplicate; my father worked with EEPROMs (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory -- a kind of ROM you can write and re-write), and we probably had everything we needed to copy the program ROM from a game cartridge in our garage. Few people would have had these, though, and fewer people would have bothered. Even Dad didn't, and Dad was the sort who devoted considerable time and energy into figuring out how to copy Macrovision-protected VHS tapes, strictly because the gatekeeping annoyed him.

Console and computer publishers alike got a reprieve with the advent of CD-ROMs, but it was brief. CD-ROM was in development as far back as 1982; the Yellow Book standard was first published in 1983, and the technology demonstrated at a consumer electronics show in 1984. The Philips CM-100, the first consumer CD-ROM drive, was available in 1986, but the format was not mainstream enough to put games on until the early '90s. The Orange Book standard for writable CD-Rs had already been published, in 1988, and by 1995 you could get a CD burner for under $1000, which was cheap enough to make small-scale piracy a reasonable business venture. I recall the family getting a tricked out 486 PC with CD-ROM multimedia package in about '93 or '94, and my big gift for Christmas '99 was an IDE CD burner for my desktop computer, replaced in 2002 with a $200 drive that could deal with CD-RWs. So yeah, the security of an "uncopyable" CD did not last long.

Knowing this, a lot of software publishers implemented their own copy-protection schemes. Some, like SecuROM, were available ready-made from outside vendors and merely slapped on top of the commercial game. These off-the-rack solutions had the same problem as hardware security -- once cracked, they stayed cracked forever, and the crack transferred to anything that used the same version of the program -- and sometimes added an additional layer of "what the actual fuck, did nobody think that through?" 

Others opted to simply code into their game checks for legitimacy of the software. If an authentic retail copy of the software was running, everything would be normal. If the game failed the check and was declared a pirate copy, the programmers could implement whatever consequences they felt would be most effective. 

Or funniest. Usually they went with funniest. 

The bulk of a game's sales happen right after its release, so they didn't need to keep the pirates at bay forever, they just needed to delay and annoy them for a month or two for the extra work to be worth the effort. So over on the PC you get Crysis Warhead's hilarious chicken gun, Serious Sam 3's unkillable scorpion stalker, and Alan Wake and Quantum Break slapping a jaunty eyepatch on your main character. And on the original Playstation, perhaps the most infamous piece of console anti-piracy fuckery ever made, Spyro the Dragon.