Gaming 004: Pirates of the 7 CDs
In part 4 of my retro-gaming series, a nostalgic look back at game piracy and copy protection of the 1980's.
Two things before we start:
I’m going to talk about software piracy, which is essentially (and sometimes arguably) considered stealing. I’m guilty of it in the past, and even though I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has elapsed on the transgressions I’m going to talk about, it does make me nervous. Not because I’m worried about some delayed consequence, but because I’m afraid post might be construed as either a condoning of the practice, or a defense of copy/copyright protection. It is neither. What I’m after here is just the discussion about the mechanics of how it used to work, and also, the general weirdness of the whole 80s game scene.
“Pirates of the 7 CDs” is kind of an inaccurate title. I’ll talk a lot about how things went down way back in the floppy disk days, and only a little about CDs. But “CDs” sounds more like “Seas” so I thought it was cooler with the whole pirate theme. So have at me, matey!
How Old is Software Piracy, Anyway?
In Gaming 001 , I talk about the difficulty of determining when, exactly, we started playing games on machines. You can easily go back before microprocessors, and then before electronics, and then before the industrial age and still keep finding examples that sort of, but maybe not completely, fit the definition of a machine for game playing.
A similar situation exists when you try to pinpoint when it was that people first started making unauthorized copies of software. If you go strictly by the computer definition, you are at least bounded by when computers that could run transportable programs were around. But if you choose the looser definition of ‘software’ as intellectual property, you end up talking about sheet music, dress patterns, books, and before you know it you are discussing how the Romans pirated all the Greek gods and stories. It’s just sort of human nature that if something that is created and sold can also be copied, someone will attempt to get a free copy of that thing.
Even within the “modern computer age”, it’s a bit fuzzy for me. Were there mainframe programs that were pirated in the 50s, 60s, 70s? Probably, and if the right mix of readers see this article, maybe we’ll get to hear about it, but it is not something I can speak to.
My earliest experiences with pirated games though come around 1984 or so, when I was entering my Junior year at Boston University. Up till then the computers I had personally owned were a Netronics ELF II, and Commodore Vic-20, both of which supported cassette tape program storage only. (The Vic had cartridges also, but pirating carts is pretty hardcore and rarely does the benefit exceed the cost) And then there is the thing about, there was not much worth pirating for these machines anyway - although there were some small developers selling games for the Vic on cassette, I never really owned many, and the ones I did were not worth copying.
In 1984 though, I upgraded my Vic to the latest Commodore machine, the Commodore 64. I had a sweet summer job and some cash flow, so this was a significant upgrade for me. In addition to the new computer I also bought a proper monitor, printer, and importantly, my first floppy drive. I’d like to say it was necessary useful for my studies in engineering classes, but not really. I can remember one time it saved me a hike to the computer center at 2AM though to finish a group project in Ada on the MV 10000 system there (which is incidentally, the ‘machine’ from the famous computer engineering book, Soul of a New Machine).
That computer was a donation from Data General to the university. It may have had a soul, but they skimped on RAM — the machine only had a total of 4MB on it, and the Ada compiler alone consumed 2MB. So more than one person logged on would bring it to its knees. I had to resort to using it at odd hours to finish the project, and the 40-column Commodore 64 terminal program and modem setup was not ideal, but worked good enough to save me the 1/2 mile walk in the middle of the night.
But I digress. The truth was, this was mostly a gaming and hacking machine. Computers were becoming more popular for students to bring to school, and where in Freshman year only one other on my floor had one, by Junior year I had at least several friends who also owned computers, mostly Commodore 64’s.
Coming Up Empty at Nerd Central
And we would most definitely make unauthorized copies of games. I had a few to share, but my roommate Tom, who had a much bigger social circle than I, had more. We built a pretty good starter collection of games, that was later expanded by a visit to my roommate’s brother Fred, who was a physics student at MIT.
Visits across the river from BU to MIT were always next-level-nerd for me. Fred worked in the MIT Plasma Fusion center which featured an impressive tokamak fusion reactor that looked like something out of a sci fi movie. The control room alone was powered by three VAX 11/780 computers and a large array of terminals, the CRTs of which (according to Fred), would distort wildly due to the magnetic field induced when the reactor was running. For comparisons sake - BU College of Engineering had just received their first and only VAX 780, and here MIT was with three tucked away in just one building on campus.
But the software pirate aspect of this trip was to be honest disappointing, we traded just a few disks. Maybe its because those MIT guys were too busy actually studying and making plasma to play games. More likely was, we were in with the wrong MIT crowd with Fred and his friends. His roommate though was a pirate of a different sort, and was stealing satellite TV using an antenna he had fashioned out of an empty Pringles can. (I thought they were putting me on when they first told me this, but it actually worked.)
So we didn’t really go back to that well for more games, but the game collecting did go on. Keep in mind that the internet was not really a thing at this point, at least in a form that was accessible by me. So game pirating was a sneaker-net affair, full of ‘know a guy’, drug-deal-like meetups to swap stuff, sometimes with people who I barely knew.
Risky Business and a Really Fat Cat
The strangest exchange of games I remember was a real jackpot, and came from what I thought at the time was an unlikely source - high school students. My roommate Tom was a much better student than I. Maybe not enough to get him into MIT like his brother, but he was good enough at math that he had landed a part-time job as a math teaching assistant in the Newton school system - an affluent suburb of Boston.
Somehow, Tom had convinced one of his students there that it would be a good idea to have us over his house to exchange Commodore 64 games. When Tom invited me along, I was skeptical - thinking (wrongly) that high school kids would not really be interested in or capable of pirating computer games, and this trip was going to be another bust. But we took the green line up to Newton, and the next thing you know we are at this kid’s house, which I am sure on today’s market at least would be a multi-million-dollar affair.
The maybe 15 year old kid greeted us somewhat nervously at the door. He was home alone, save for the most gigantic orange tabby cat I have seen in my life, aptly named “Max”. To say that this memory sets off alarm bells for older, parent-of-two-kids me would be an understatement. Pretty irresponsible for the kid to have strangers over while alone, very irresponsible for us to go.
The whole thing was playing out like a scene from Risky Business, except swap in downloading Epyx Summer Games instead of sex with Rebecca De Mornay. Even then I could sense that this meetup was sketchy, and the kid also kind of realized inviting us over without telling anyone wasn’t the wisest of ideas. I hung back while Tom handled the delicate negotiations about what games to swap. I was trying not to seem threatening, but I’m sure that just made things worse.
“How much does your cat weigh?” I asked, from the next room.
“Thirty Pounds.” the kid said, in between a string of “Got it already…” comments to Tom regarding games we intended to offer in trade. I had to look up “30 pound cat” while writing this article to see if it was even a thing. There are reports of a few, but it seems unlikely based on my memory of him that Max was one. So either I got the number wrong, or the kid was mistaken, or lying.
Whatever Max’s weight was though, he was a big cat. And something that this kid was most definitely not lying about was his ability to pirate games. We eventually strolled across expensive oriental carpets and up to this kid’s room (ugh. Yeah, I know.) and he opened this 5.25-inch floppy disk case that was full of just about every game that had come out for the Commodore 64 to date.
I was stunned. We’d swapped games before with sketchy pirates at BU, and nerdy physics guys at MIT, but this collection far exceeded anything we’d ever seen. Equally impressive was this kid’s setup, which featured multiple floppy drives, ‘high speed’ modem, and large color monitor.
I know what you might be saying in your head: Rich, privileged high-school kid is a software pirate; Wow, hot take, Ned. Not exactly a new development I know, by today’s standards. But it was certainly a surprise to me, at the time. What blew my mind further was the level of sophistication this guy and his friends had reached in sharing games. When we asked how they had amassed such a big collection, the kid told us that they would call up each other, usingthe 3-way phone calling feature to allow two other people to be called from one line, with each extra kid adding in one more to form an ad-hoc, 1984 internet of sorts.
Then someone would “stream” a game over their phone modem, using some custom pirate software that allowed the games to be read off disk and transmitted on the phone line, while others on the call ran in the opposite direction, receiving on their modems and writing to disk. I think the kid said they had at one point up to eight people conferenced in this way, which seems unlikely to me now because of the noise aspect of that many people on a phone line, but who knows.
Whatever the case, this setup had resulted in their massive, mutual game hoard. In the end we maybe gave them one measly title from our collection, and received a dozen or more games in return. This uneven exchange was thanks in part due to Tom’s amazing social engineering ability — he would be “Charisma 18” if he was a D&D character, to use a nerdy reference. But I think the real reason we got what we did was just because this kid thought it was cool that a “teacher” was interested in pirating games, and wanted something he had.
The Good Old Bad Sector Trick
One of the most important “scores” that day was a disk utility program, favorited by their pirate crew. I don’t remember the name today, but it was a menu-driven, DOS-like affair that allowed you to do things like the phone streaming trick. For us though the useful feature of this utility was the ability to do very ‘raw’ copies of disks.
Because software developers were beginning to fight back against this new copying threat that was going on. One of the first things they did on Commodore machines at least was a clever trick. On their source disks, they would mark certain disk sectors as “bad” on purpose, and then in their game programs, verify that the bad sectors were present and unreadable before running the program.
This would trip up a normal floppy copy program, because it would either fail when it hit the bad sector, or dutifully skip it, and not create an equivalent bad sector on the destination floppy. It was a cool idea, but not one that was really effective, because disk copy programs that allowed you to write in bad sectors were circulating not very long after games that used this trick were out. In fact, I think I might have known about the utility to do raw disk copies before I even encountered a game that needed it.
Later as hacking got better, “cracked” copies of games would be distributed with these types of protection checks removed. Cracked games were not really easy to come by really until the internet got going though, as a vehicle to distribute them. One of the earliest hacked games I had though was Star Control, which featured a different form of copy protection that was prevalent in the late 1980s…
Where Did I Leave the Code Wheel ?
I remember shopping for games at places like CompUSA in the 80’s, and coming back with a box containing at least one floppy, full printed manual, and sometimes extra goodies like a poster or map. And for some games, a circular paper code wheel. These little devices came in varying degrees of complexity, but the central theme was to design something that can create a very large number of possible combined results, such that it would be impractical to simply write down all the codes.
You’d fire up your game, get a challenge question consisting of some combination of things that needed to be aligned on the wheel and which window to read a result in, and you would type in your response to start the game. The code wheel was a pain but also kind of fun, so it seemed somehow less intrusive than simpler similar systems that were also floating around, like the scheme where you were asked for say the 5th word on page 23 of the game manual.
These tricks were again partly effective mainly due to the lack of home internet. With a viable distribution mechanism, someone somewhere could have either written a program or published a very big document of codes, and shared it to defeat the code wheel, without cracking the game. (In fact if you check the links below, there is a site that lets you run virtual versions of code wheels for various old games.)
But without an effective way to share this kind of information, it really just got down to knowing someone with a legit copy. Like when my friend Jeff would call me from Maryland when he wanted to play Pool of Radiance, and I would dial in the code for him.
The CD-ROM Era
So as I warned, despite the title of the post, I don’t have any really good stories or memories of CD copy protection. The earliest CD-ROM game I ever played was probably Myst ( a paid copy even), and it blew me and others at the time away with its upgraded music and graphics, owing to the extra storage afforded by the CD. This largely made up for the generally lackluster gameplay, but it meant the game does not age particularly well, because the value proposition of it is mostly eclipsed by better games, despite many attempts to update it.
I could be wrong but for Myst, the ‘copy protection’ may have just been the mere fact it was a CD - since CD-ROM burners did not come out for a while after read-only drives, making it hard to duplicate for a friend. And copying the entire CD to your hard drive was also impractical in this timeframe for many because of how small hard drives were.
After this point, copy protection and piracy gets kind of boring and commodified. You get into the license key thing, and the rise of commercial licensing software, and corresponding pirate tools to crack games that used it. Then internet news groups, Warez, Tor, and whatever we are up to now.
There are some standout weird things. I do remember in the 90’s the whole “dongle” fad, of having to plug in a little piece of hardware, a lot of times into your parallel printer port. This thing was seen by me at least more often at work, where we would be running licensed CAD tools that cost thousands of dollars a seat. But there are some cases of games using dongles apparently (I don’t remember any). Also - other wacky things I don’t personally remember, see the link below for some truly strange copy protection schemes.
Did I miss a favorite (or hated) copy protection scheme from the old days? Let’s hear about it. Also any good game piracy stories that a friend partook in. Not you, of course.
Next Time: Mad Ned tries to do away with multiplication, in a bid to expand the programming world to include non-math-types. How crazy and flawed a plan is this? Find out next time in: The Case for the Liberal Arts Programmer
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