Look back through the history of videogames and you'll find that DRM (Digital Rights Management) was around even in the earliest generations of consoles and computers. For instance, many Commodore 64 games included deliberately damaged sectors. Those corrupt data areas didn't cause trouble on the original cassette because the cassette deck could skip over them easily. When copied, though, they corrupted the copy so badly that it became unplayable. A simple but effective trick, yet far from unbreakable. Soon enough, crackers found workarounds, but at least it stopped casual copying among honest users with legal copies.
That was the real goal: not to deter crackers (a battle that was lost from the start) but to make copying harder for the average user. So here we're not talking about DRM as we know it today, but about more primitive anti-piracy methods that operated outside the game. A quick but juicy rundown of the most common (and not so common) antipiracy measures—from code wheels like The Secret of Monkey Island's Dial-A-Pirate to lenses that (with some luck) decoded a screen code. If you're over 30, you'll likely remember many of these; if you're younger, be prepared to be amazed at what we pirate kids of the '80s and '90s had to endure.
Code Wheels
Without a doubt, one of the most memorable ways to protect a game against indiscriminate copying. This method became super famous thanks to the Dial-A-Pirate, the rotating disks full of pirate faces from The Secret of Monkey Island. In this case, before entering the game, you were shown the face of a pirate, composed of two parts (the upper and lower halves).
The wheel was made with a larger disk as the base and a smaller one that rotated on top (with seven holes allowing access to read what was written on the larger disk). The large disk held the upper part of the pirate's face. The smaller, rotating disk contained the lower part. Your mission was to spin the lower disk until the face on screen was assembled, then answer the question posed about that pirate. For each of the many pirate face combinations, there were seven keywords. The reference for choosing the correct keyword was the name of an island (Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, Nebraska, St. Kitts, and Tortuga). Each hole in the upper disk had an island name beneath it. With the correct configuration, you just looked at which hole the question referred to and wrote down the number visible through that opening. If we take the image above as an example, which asks, "When was this pirate hanged on Montserrat?" and use the Dial-A-Pirate online, we find the correct answer is "1670". Go ahead and try it!
That's how code wheels worked, with varying degrees of complexity. Some were quite easy to replicate with good photocopies, but not always. Want more examples and to see them in action online without downloading anything? Check out this nice gallery of classic code wheels.
For instance, the gallery included images with IDs "134040,134041,134042,134044,134047,134048". Here are a few examples:
Password Words in the Manual
One of the most widely used anti-piracy measures. It required no extra hardware (just the original manual) and the procedure was quite simple: you had to refer to the manual to find a keyword, often citing the page number, the line (or paragraph), and the word's position within that line or paragraph. For example: "Write the 10th word from line 8 on page 5 of the manual". Yes, back then games came with beautiful, detailed manuals written on real paper. If a game was copied, you probably didn't have the manual handy, especially in an era when the internet was a rarity.
Of course, if you had a trusted pirate dealer, the game would come "cracked" and none of this was necessary. However, this was a good way to prevent user-to-user copying, unless you also copied the manuals. Many variations existed; sometimes it wasn't a word but an image or a code printed across different pages. Some had it as an integral part of the game, like in King's Quest 3, where the spell ingredients needed to beat the game were only in the original manual.
Code Cards
Similar to code wheels, but without the literal spin. Code cards were exactly that: a handful of cards full of codes associated with a word, a drawing, or some other reference. At first, being few pages, they were much easier to photocopy. The problem for pirates began when developers started applying anti-piracy measures to the anti-piracy cards themselves.
How? Very simple: a dark background with black letters, for example. If you had the original, no problem. But photocopies were impossible to read. Of course, you could manually copy each code (something I've done in my darkest moments), but the sheer volume of codes and variations often made even the most enthusiastic fan give up.
Also, as with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, some cards could only be read by holding a transparent, colored plastic film over them. Photocopying those invisible characters was impossible! Lastly, to further fight photocopies, codes could have color keys that were completely lost in black-and-white copies. Very clever!
In the case of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you either had the original with the manual or you couldn't play it at all. Unless you got it cracked!
Lenslok
One of the worst aberrations ever conceived, with the worst of the "anti-copy" ideology. An unnecessary absurdity that penalized legitimate owners of the game, while those of us with cracked copies didn't even know it existed. Lenslok "worked" on computers like the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Sinclair QL, MSX and Amstrad CPC.
The method consisted of "deciphering" a code displayed on screen, using a pair of foldable lenses (the Lenslok) that rearranged the image so that, with some luck, you could read it. That code was always a combination of two letters, which you had to type to gain access.
The problem was that not all screens at the time were compatible with this ridiculous accessory, designed exclusively for medium-sized displays. If you had a smaller or larger screen, you were out of luck—there was no way to decipher it. Even with a compatible screen, it needed special calibration, which wasn't always possible. A true disaster.
All these anti-copy methods gradually died with the arrival of CD-ROM on personal computers. At first, because we users couldn't copy CD games, they became unnecessary. Later, when CD burners reached every home, they wouldn't have been effective anyway, since the internet was much more common. It would have cost us nothing to download what we needed to start the game, without any photocopy or craftwork.
