[_mlbt]

My favorite copy protection scheme was where you needed to enter some text from the printed manual that came with the game. The disks were easy to copy but the manuals required significant effort.

I also just really miss printed game manuals.

[lb1lf]

I hated the one on F-15 Strike Eagle II on the C64; game itself was great, but you needed to look up in the manual what colour deck crew vest was displayed on the screen prior to the game starting.

I played it on a B&W TV.

[g-b-r]

Hmm, I had bought a PC release of it at a newstand and it didn't have that protection

[llm_nerd]

SimCity had a hard to copy (at the time) red/black card with city populations, and during the game it would ask you for the population or name of cities based upon a graphical indicator lookup. If you failed the check it would inflict an unending series of disasters on your city.

There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.

[guappa]

It was massively annoying even if you had bought the game though.

Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.

[_mlbt]

We just kept the manuals for our most frequently played games on our computer desk. I don’t remember it being particularly burdensome, especially compared to the copy protection many games employ today. Plus, several games were designed to rely upon the manuals as part of their game play, like the Carmen Sandiego series.

[PaulHoule]

Still a problem in the console age. It was annoying as hell that I had Halo Wars 2 installed on my XBOX ONE but couldn't play it for the nine months that the disc was lost.

[g-b-r]

I personally didn't mind it, usually, for most games it was better to have the manual in front in any case

[int_19h]

In practice there'd still be a limited number of possible questions, so people would just compile the answers in a file that was included in the pirated distribution. I remember plenty of DOS games that came with something like that.

[thijson]

The ones I remember had a red tinted window that would reveal the hidden word. If you tried to photocopy it using a black and white photocopier the words wouldn't be visible anymore. Now in hindsight, I guess you could have photocopied the whole wheel with some red mylar on top of it.

I remember removing the copy protection from space quest. There was a later check that checksumed the copy protection code. That complicated the crack.

[chuckadams]

My least favorite was the protection typical on C-64 games that caused constant resets of the floppy drive, banging the head against the stop repeatedly. tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRRRAAAAAAP. I would crack games I owned (admittedly, most I did not own) just to keep them from eventually knocking my drive out of alignment. Loaded a lot faster too. Fast-Hack-Em FTW.

[g4zj]

Is this functionally different from a typical license key or activation key?

[pjc50]

It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual.

My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.

Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.

[GuB-42]

Microprose games had awesome manuals. Typically more than a hundred pages full of details going well beyond explaining the game itself. For example, in a flight simulator it had details on every plane in the game, the historical context of the missions, dogfighting techniques, etc...

It wouldn't be out of place in a library.

[rkomorn]

The manual to Grand Prix 2 taught me more about car racing than any other bit of reading, video, or whatever media. It had so much about how to drive, how to use telemetry, etc.

Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.

What a delight that game and its manual were.

[ClearAndPresent]

One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.

They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.

[mattkrause]

Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…”

They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.

[Clepsydra]

I believe there was a shortcut to skip the questions on the PC. I think it was ctrl+alt+x.

[mattkrause]

Gah! Where were you in 1994 when that knowledge would have come in handy?!

[vladms]

Besides not being a one time activation, it was not a "one key". The game would ask you for "N-th word on the M-th paragraph on P-th page", at each start for example. We are talking about an age where you would not have scanners or mobile phones with cameras.

[Ayesh]

To the adult me, this sounds tedious and not really worth. But the teen myself, I'm sure I would totally do it even I have to solve some riddle.

[poincaredisk]

>Not worth it

We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.

And yeah, we were younger.

Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, I did put the time in for X-Wing back in the day. A friend made copies of his disks, and let me borrow the manual so that I could copy the relevant bits down into a notebook. Took a while, but I had lots of time so not a big deal.

[derwiki]

That jogs my memory, I think “The Island of Dr. Brain” had something similar

[Narew]

for example "flashback" ask you a writen code in the manual at the beginning of each level if my memory is good. So it's was not a one time activation

[Narew]

here a example of it : (I only remember the first version) https://www.reddit.com/r/dosgaming/comments/86yxp4/question_...

[_mlbt]

Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.

[StanislavPetrov]

I remember one of the later Wizardry games (I believe it was Return of Werdna) came with a pamphlet full of codes that was printed on very dark brown paper that made it very difficult to make legible photocopies.

[jermaustin1]

It wasn't individual per install. Anyone with the game manual could find the word or code in the book. Some games asked for a random word from the manual on boot, so you couldn't just share the code, you needed to share the entire manual (or decompile or something to find all the words it is looking for).

[llm_nerd]

And the manuals usually themselves had "copy protection". Many were printed in variations of dark colours, such that any easily accessible copier would just copy a black page.

[fazeirony]

this was the comment i was looking for! i remember those red pages and found them annoying on even legitimately purchased games (which is how copy protection has always been IME - makes it so legitimate purchasers of a game got annoyed and hence, got cracks for games to just not be as annoyed!)