[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