[vxxzy]

Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are, if you see this, thank you!

[gandalfian]

I once used the example key shown in a software manuals how to register section. It worked. I was rather chuffed at the time.

[noAnswer]

My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)

[boredemployee]

wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!

[esrauch]

The way this worked was there's a very large amount of keys accepted by the installer and a very tiny fraction of them are actually issued / valid for online play.

There wasn't that much value in having the installer keys be that narrow; if you have a legal cd it'll have the key printed right on the case (and there's no way to stop sharing). If it's a burned cd either the person who ripped it can just include the key or they can edit the installer itself to accept any key.

[qu4z-2]

My standard strategy for installing StarCraft (at LAN parties I often had to do it a few times in a row) was just to mash the keyboard a few times until I got through. It usually took somewhere between five and ten tries, in my experience.

[Waterluvian]

There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”

[pxx]

Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.

[hadlock]

All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.

[flatiron]

I used a key gen for quake 3 when it came out. Was surprised when I was able to play online. Told my friends who were not able to play online. I guess I was just lucky my key was an actual key!

[ilyt]

That feels like some dev being lazy and adding backdoor easy to type keys for testing stuff

[Razengan]

StarCraft was my first attempt and success at "cracking" a game!

Apparently it had a bug where it didn't recognize the CD on Windows 98 but it worked on Windows 95!

Didn't have internet, so I fired up Visual Studio, stepped through the .exe, and tried flipping each JE/JNE or JZ/JNZ instruction that came before the copy protection error showed up.

It worked!! I searched for the sequence of instructions in a hex editor and modified the exe. And it led me to one of the best games ever to this date. :)