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Comment by calcsam | Hacker News Reader

Wow, an icon of my childhood gone.

If you're an affected developer, shoot me an email & I'll be happy to put you in our pipeline.

Icon is the correct term.

SimCity had one of the earliest form of DRM I remember. The almost-impossible to Xerox manual (highly reflective paper so photocopies would come black) was used to answer a question the game asked you, about the population of a specific city on a certain page of the manual.

Loosing the manual was not an option.

Farewell Maxis.

I remember hand-copying the numbers from a black on dark dark grey crinkled photocopy acquired from a friend of a friend in my spare time during classes in high school. Boy was I glad to finish that... Then I discovered that the PC version didn't look anywhere near as good as the B&W Mac version :(

Definitely iconic. Fond memories!

DRM is _digital_ though, it was just called copyright protection back then.

And the Sierra adventure games had this form of copyright protection way before SimCity.

You are quite right! never thought about it but yeah, it's more copy protection. Thanks.

Wasn't it a black on dark maroon list of city populations? It's been a while, but that's what I remember.

Precisely. A purple-ish brown and very glossy background.

Gotcha. I didn't recall it being extra glossy, but that makes sense now!

Ironically, one day later there's a post in HN that links to old copy protection schemes.

And there's a pic of the manual of course:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/copyprotec...

This is not DRM, it's copy protection. DRM is about stopping you from using a product you paid money for - as Wikipedia puts it "[controling] the use of digital content and devices after sale." No matter how many years in the future you travel, no matter what happens to Maxis, the original Sim City will still work (assuming you still have the manual, and hardware capable of playing it.)

I'm glad there has sometime, somewhere, been a literal, physical-realm use for the term "Copy Protection"

I remember this style of copy-protection in another game released the same year (1989). Indianapolis 500: The game would ask a question that would be answerable from the manual.[1]

[1] http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/897/Indianapolis+500+-+The...

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