[fnord77]

I remember an old Apple ][ game that someone had copied from somewhere and it got passed around by us jr high school students.

It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.

Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy

[eej71]

You could be thinking of gorgon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_(video_game)

[fnord77]

Now that I started looking for it, I think it was Repton because I remember buildings.

I think the crack protection was pretty clever - it let you play a couple seconds of the game to get a taste of it. If I had the means I would have bought it, but I was a poor 14 year old

https://www.gamesdatabase.org/game/apple-ii/repton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repton_(1983_video_game)

[dole]

I'd never heard of Gorgon but had to've run across Nasir's name at least once during my gaming years... and wow, what a pedigree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasir_Gebelli

Had 3-D World Runner for the OG NES, played it again a few weeks ago doing some handheld emu hacking and couldn't put it down.