Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010)

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61 pointstrueduke54 comments

I think the most ingenious anti-piracy trick was "Game Dev Tycoon"'s, which is after this post was made.

The pirated copy had users unable to win or pass a certain point because their games started to get pirated (in the game).

They also released the cracked game themselves to torrents, thus bypassing the troubles other games had where legite players got hit by anti-piracy issues.

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...

I typically download cracked games because I'd like to one, try them first. Second, have a copy that doesn't require some DRM/Online check, etc.

I've bought probably 10-20x the games I've actually played as well. I stopped playing video games regularly in 1998, but kept buying for the next 2 decades. My rule about 10 years ago was the game had to have all DRM and be under $10.

I'll finish Baldur's Gate and Thief 1 & 2 eventually!

Earthbound had a pretty fiendish one too, with the game not only increasing the difficulty of the main game by spawning extra enemies on a pirated version, but also wiping out your save data after it deliberately crashed at the final boss fight. Given that this was a 30 odd hour RPG, god help anyone who suffered from that one.

There's also the infamous scorpion trick they did in one of the Serious Sam games too. If it detected the game was pirated, it'd load an invincible monster that could kill you in seconds and would hunt you down through much of the game. Certainly made for a memorable experience, though it may also gave a bunch of people the amusing extra challenge of trying to avoid the thing for as long as possible.

The scorpion trick sounds like pure fun for those up for a challenge! :D

In the C64 piracy heyday of the mid 1980s, there was an urban legend of this anti-piracy tactic: At manufacturing/packaging time, some games' floppies had a physical hole punched in a far-away track where normal game usage would never ever send the drive head, so no problems.

Of course, pirates got a lot of mileage out of brute-force full-disk/bit copiers which would try to simply dupe every track on the disk, without regard for format or contents since this would successfully duplicate a handful of file-level tricks such as hidden or intentionally corrupted files that the game would look for. Anyways, the story goes ... if your bit-copying drive stepped out to that distant track ... whammo. <insert-expensive-mechanical-noise>

Or so the rumour goes. As brave teens, we doubted it and it never deterred anyone I knew. Interesting concept, though, if the topic is fiendish tricks.

According to Jon Burton, something like this was actually done for the Amiga game Leander, although not with the intent to damage hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA

Here's a photo of the disk: https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528

Debunked in this thread by Galahad ( an oldschool amiga cracker ) and Richard Aplin ( a dev ) : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=89662

That Jon Burton guy isn't a reliable source of information.

I don't know about physical holes in the media, but a number of Apple // games had a few bad sectors sprinkled throughout the disk that would cause the 5.25" drives to make sort of a "BBRRRRNK" noise when copy programs hit them, and then ultimately the copy program would stop and show an error.

Copy //+ defeated this by letting you choose what game you were copying, and it had a list of sectors to avoid for each game. The good ol' days. This was back when calling stolen programs "warez" was still cool.

That's not quite how it works.

Bad sectors were expected by copiers like Locksmith or Copy//+. They were nothing special. The copiers tried to make sense of them by identifying the address and data markers, which were often altered (D5 AA 96, ...) but if they encountered an error, they would just signal it and move on.

The cracker then had to take over, e.g. analyze the raw content of the track or just start disassembling and find out how to read these malformed tracks (or sometimes, they contained specific bit patterns that didn't represent any data but were verified by the copy protection).

Source: I still crack Apple ][ games now and then for the fun of it.

Eeeenteresting. That makes more sense than going through the effort to jank physical media in a way that can be easily side-stepped.

Here's some of my old games: https://imgur.com/a/8Psom

I (re)bought most of them in the late 90s after chucking my games in the early 90s when I got tired of my Apple //e.

Still have my original Apple //e and a backup. Finally got that color monitor upgrade too!

Wow, are you me?

I actually have the Ultima VII games on my desktop as we speak.

I've restarted AutoDuel. The only issue is there was some glitch or easter egg in the game copy I originally had which gave me 850k in cash. Playing w/o a ton of cash is much harder.

Nice! Bards Tale 2 was boss.

> What is known is that like more recent EA DRM, the base blasting trick caused all kinds of problems, in particular blowing up the armies of plenty of legitimate players.

I remember spending hours on EA's helpline trying to get them to fix this, because now and then, my base would explode, despite the game's legitimacy.

From memory, it became a "won't fix" when we worked out it was only when I would connect to a match with someone with an illegitimate version of the game.

It can happen in offline games as well - I had a legitimate install where the campaign worked but a AI skirmish would trigger this (IIRC force-applying the latest patch, even thought it ostensibly was already installed, eventually fixed it).

While not game related, 3d studio max had a genius one in the early 2000's. They could detect when the software was cracked and would slowly degrade the model polygons. Eventually there were a bunch of questions on the support forums.

Games are one thing, but if I was evaluating that software before buying it, such funny business would not favorably incline me towards it.

You'd probably be running the evaluation version not a pirated copy then.

I think that Steam has been the best actual deterrence to piracy.

Every time I try to buy games from Steam I get to play the game for 24 hours, after which my Steam account gets banned and my payment refunded.

I can see how this may deter piracy, but to be honest constantly creating new accounts gets frustrating pretty quickly.

That is not normal at all, I assume you have contacted Valve customer support and nobody has been able to work out the problem?

I tried that once, but the support just replied with some bizarre KYC procedure. https://clbin.com/gCNYu

I'm trying to buy games, not open a bank account.

Are you using the same PayPal account each time (or similar billing details)? I'd suspect that being linked to a locked account is why future accounts also get locked.

I've experienced this with two different paypal accounts I created specifically to use with steam after they stopped accepting bitcoin payments.

It's also frustrating when you change your password, the client accepts the change, logs you in, but silently truncates the password.

After several weeks of not being able to play my games unless I changed my password first, and receiving nothing like actual customer service from Valve, I've never given them another penny - or any other game dev/service using DRM. Once bitten.

Valve has ridiculously bad support. Some years ago I was trying to report a fairly serious security issue, they closed my ticket and instructed me to post on the forums instead.

What’s their strategy?

Providing a relatively lean, no-bullshit-attached interface for buying games + adding a gamification layer (achievements, social profiles). That, and frequent discounts.

For people who have the money to buy a game, using Steam is much easier (and free of perceived malware risks) than torrenting.

Providing a service that's better than you can get by piracy.

Always online DRM, combined with an easy point of entry for people to buy and manage games. Their prices have historically been good, and they are also convenient and trustworthy

Is it always online? I thought you just needed to be online when you booted the game, so your singleplayer game wouldn't exit on you if your internet died.

It's completely game dependent. You can distribute games that are completely DRM-free through Steam if you wish: http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

Close enough. There is an offline mode in the Steam menus, but you need to be online to initially activate it.

IME the offline mode is very flaky indeed. Every time I've needed it, it failed me.

I remember some of the loops that we needed to go through to keep Steam working on a ship. Where personal PCs can stay airgapped from the Internet for 9 months to a year. Changing date (windows and bios), system rollbacks, and just about anything else. It was pretty terrible.

In theory offline mode is supposed to work, and does on Mac. But on Windows steam breaks itself eventually.

Depends on the game. Some games (especially older ones) can launch in offline mode

Is it settable per game? I have vague memories of choosing single player games because I was offline and those would probably still be on Steam.

Depends on the game. I just got a nasty surprise with Prey (2017 single player game) which refused to run when my internet connection died.

Burger Time for the Apple ][ was apparently a pile of copy-protection triggers with a mediocre video game attached to it.

https://ia801505.us.archive.org/33/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/...

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-har...

jwz has an entertaining referrer check on that link...

You can avoid that by setting a referrer header override for jwz’s site in your Firefox settings, so his site never sees the HN referrer.

Luckily it seems like browsers are starting to retire that header soon anyway, so his annoying trick will break.

I don't believe they're retiring that header totally, just returning only the domain, and not the full path. Correct?

It's only in "Private Browsing Mode", not for the everyday part of Firefox, firstly.

Secondly, you're absolutely correct, they're just stripping path information, not the domain.

Yeah, it's pretty childish.

Just open the link in incognito mode.

I was hoping this would be about how piracy was detected, but it was mostly what happened when it was detected.

This article came out before GTAIV. It enabled permanent 'drunk mode' on pirated copies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSL_x-TKnvM

Red Alert 2 highlights the perils of this approach - it's very easy to trigger on a legitimate install (I had it happen even on a clean XP install with the game installed directly from CD), and it just makes the game appear broken.

The reputation and sales risks of false positives are what concerned me. I'd probably not do it for that reason. I think Windows XP Activation was the first time I saw anti-piracy features go really, really bad for all kinds of paying customers.

I thought the two methods described in this video were both good:

http://youtu.be/Qaq9vlfoGnA

Also, the method described here, even though it didn't result in a financially successful game, was pretty clever (pirating the game meant your game company would be defeated by pirates):

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/30/game_dev_tycoon/

Discussed at the time (a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738195

There's a few more not in this article or HN comments in the two, Cracked articles below:

http://www.cracked.com/article_20482_5-hilarious-ways-game-d...

http://www.cracked.com/article_22222_6-hilarious-ways-game-d...

This might be worth a page that comprehensively lists and summarizes various games' approaches. Developers of new games that glance at such a page might find old ones that would work for them or get ideas for better ones. Has anyone started on such a page?

Funny stuff. I still have my Lenslok with my copy of Elite for the ZX Spectrum.

Square Enix used to punish pirates for their multiplayer games by putting them all together on to the crappest servers they had and making the gameplay slightly crappy in every possible way.

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