One of the funniest ones is "Game Dev Tycoon". The developers themselves released a cracked version in the pirate scene. But if you played it, you would at some point get a message saying that your sales are going down due to pirates downloading your games illegally. And this of course made your company eventually go bankrupt. People of course got fooled and started asking in the forums why their 10/10 rated games wouldn't make any profit if all copies were pirated. Quite ironic.

Ah Yeah... Sim City... people bought the game on it's release day, but they could not play because the servers got flooded. But what happens the next day? Someone released a crack that bypasses the permanent online requirement and let you play any copy of it. The people that bought the game were still fighting to get into the game while the people that did not pay for the game was enjoying the game. One of these times when DRM can backfire at you and make your loyal customers very unhappy while being completely useless against piracy.

It's always great when DRM makes you, the actual customer, have a bad time while somebody with a pirated copy has no issues at all.

There's an amazing side mission in the witcher 3 where the main character helps an old wizard who bought a castle second hand but then found out the original owner put protective magic on the house to stop anyone else from using the house, this magic had a clever name with an acronym that spelled DRM. The game was just making fun of the really militant drm that is used these days. Like the drm featured in any ea game.

The worst part on DRM is that, historically speaking, as time goes by these games only get more and more unplayable.

Gabe Newel even said "The way to beat pirates to make your service beter than the pirates."

Here's my DRM horror story: I had bought SPORE and installed it on my computer, but was unable to play it because I had to do homework. My brother ended up playing it first, and it bound to his EA account. I was stuck with a broken game that did not let me upload or download things from online servers, which was a huge feature of SPORE. I played the game a little, but basically quit after a while because I was reminded of it every time I played. Oh! and here's the kicker, I contacted EA, and they said I couldn't' do anything about the fact that I legitimately bought it and it bound to my brother's account. To this day, I am apprehensive to buy ANYTHING made by EA.

Nowadays they've finally mastered the perfect copy prevention technique: make the content so bad that nobody is interested in copying it!

>Or you're board as balls and simply want something to watch while you eat lunch... **gasp** Oh LGR, you know me too well!

Oh god. The memories of looking up extra CD keys online so my friends and I could have a LAN party with only one copy of the game. Those were the days.

I like the DRM from the '80s and early '90s that actually fits into the game lore, like resarching codes and looking up info. It kind of adds to and enhances the game's experience in a way.

Holy shit I couldn't even tell that this video was from 2012. Your quality has always been so consistent!

Thank you GOG for not using DRM!

I know this is a really old video... BUT... just so you know it was one of the 3 most important videos on KZfaq that made me want to start my own channel :D Thanks Clint for turning non-interesting subjects into brilliantly documented history pieces!!!

This was just recommended for me and i thought it was a new video right up until you mentioned the "upcoming" SimCity nightmare. Lol

Metal Gear Solid: "The frequency is on the back of the CD case." You spend ages looking through your inventory or running around trying to find a CD case before realising they meant the actual game case.

Copy Protection is mostly useless because it can be bypassed and only cripples the experience of the people who legally bought the game. There are several games I own and payed for but always play cracked because of intrusive and often incompatible drm and/or third-party front ends like uplay. You can argue the ethics of piracy all day long but it's pretty much a no-brainer to not constantly screw over the people who still spend money on games.

The worst has to be constant online confirmation and limited installs. Computers are usually replaced as they age, so limited installs are already anti-PC/Mac to begin with. It's almost like they think they're doing this on consoles. And as for online? You shouldn't need to be online to play something which doesn't use the internet for any gameplay features.

I liked the one of "Red Alert 2" where your base blew up after a few second when using a pirated version. But sometimes also when the CD could not be read properly.

The one thing that bugs me about all this DRM is simple: What happens when the game goes out of print? I want to play Commander Keen 6. Where can I get it? Nowhere legitimately. My mother threw out the floppies I once had because she's smart. That particular game is actually pretty easy to pirate because the DRM was just manual look up. But in 20 years, I want to play Batman: Arkham Asylum. However company has since gone bust, the authentication servers are down. How can I play it? I can't. The problem with all DRM is people not really thinking about the future of art and culture. They just assume no one will want to play their games in 20 years. I cannot think of anything more laughable.

that mini book from alone in the dark is adorable

I remember the copy-protection of the game "M1 Tank Platoon" in the Amiga days: A tank-game the protection was identifying American and Russian tanks & armoured vehicles. All it took to "break" this DRM was going to the local library and finding a book on modern Tanks. ^_^

In the late 90's I got copy of the original Leisure Suit Larry. It didn't have DRM, but it did have a bunch of questions you had to answer to prove you were an adult before you could play. The problem was that while I was an adult the questions were written in the 80's for Adults in the 80's. So I had to look up a lot of the answers, even though I was over 18.

DRM stands for: Disastrous-Fucking-Bullshit-That Really Makes-You-Want-To-Smash-The-Fucking-Disk

For game silliness, Game Dev Tycoon is my favorite. The devs made it so that pirated copies made you go bankrupt BECAUSE the games you made were pirated. Diabolical...

Instructions unclear. Watched while eating dinner instead.

I love how accurate you low key predicted how bad the situation with Sim City would be.

When you said "oversized CDs", I was so confused because I thought you meant a physically oversized CD and I was wondering how on earth that would work. I'm an idiot. XD

The mere mention of Starforce sent a shiver down my spine

As a consumer and a developer I dislike DRM and consider it to be largely pointless. Not only will pirates get around it, but at the point that a legitimate customer is adversely impacted by it that can lead to loss of future sales. I know many DRM companies list the number of pirates copies and try to say that it represent such and so losses, but that's assuming 100% of pirates would actually have paid for it, and really, I think that it's a minority of uses who are actually discouraged from buying when piracy is available. Unless of course the pirates have a better experience with the DRM removed, in which case users will be more likely to pirate even if they could otherwise buy it. Even in cases like Starcraft 3, where it took more than a year to pirate, I would still call that a failure because people generally don't want to buy software that can destroy their computer's basic functionality. This of course is why Starforce threatened to sue CNET. The more that people are aware of what it will actually do, the less they will want to buy it, and you can't exactly return a game once opened. For online examples, my primary issue stems around the loss of "First Sale Doctrine" and, imho, the first platform that can successfully sell used virtual copies alongside new copies and otherwise allow people to transfer their content will gain a competitive advantage over literally every other online platform. Although, I am still more likely to to purchase a DRM free version. The issue with DRM that's based around a particular hardware configuration is that upgrading your computer can invalidate the install. I once had a case where upgrading the graphics card required me to buy a game a second time, because it also had limited install. Instead I didn't buy it a second time and I never bought another product from that company since. With the exception of an MMO, where online play is to be expected, I outright refuse to buy any game that requires an always on internet connection. Only the pirates get to play without issue. When you create a situation that rewards piracy and punishes customers you pretty much deserve to be pirated. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of people who bought those games later on pirated it just to stop the headaches.

As someone who grew up on VHS, I have my own take on the DRM concept - Around 1993 the first VHS tapes to feature what was dubbed "Macrovision" appeared in video stores (two examples in Australia were the Palace Films release of "Nemesis" and the 21st Century Pictures release of "Cyber Tracker"). Within the year most labels used this tech but some didn't. As for overriding this form of VHS DRM, it is surprisingly easy to circumvent - simply connect the "source player" (the VCR playing the tape) to another VCR (which doesn't have to be able to play tapes, just be able to transmit the output, then connect that one to the copy-making VCR or DVD recorder and this will work fine (although you might come across a candidate for the "bypass player" that might not want to play ball). This method also works fine for copying DVDs VCR-style to a DVD recorder.

I've spent countless hours as a child, trying to crack the code and climb the mountain in King's Quest 6. Now 22 years later, I finally found out that I was missing the guidebook! Thanks LGR!

The install limit thing is so friggin archaic, just recently I had to contact Magix because the mere act of updating to Windows 10 had used up one of my installations of Movie Edit Pro.

Hello LGR, I would like to personally thank you for sharing your nostalgia and extensive knowledge of gaming. I hope you see this and I hope this inspires you to continue doing what you are doing for as long as you can. Thank you.

Wow this brings back memories! I wrote my senior thesis in Software Engineering on copy protection back in '94! I spent months hanging out on IRC and obscure web sites discussing the issue. It was a really competitive field and different groups and individuals would try to be the first to provide a hack for any new software that came out. The conclusion for my paper was that it all failed because ultimately hackers would figure out a way to jump the copy protection code and create an executable which you could run and hack your own version.

A three level copy protection wheel can be made into a two dimensional spreadsheet. It turns out if you use the first two values to calculate an offset, you can then use the third as an index. I did this for several games way back in the day... all in case I lost my manuals, of course.

Took them years to crack DJ Max Trilogy. I had to import my damned copy and I still have the entire thing, and it was money well spent as the game is amazing.

If drm worked well that would be one thing ... Seems drm only stops the people who bought the software.

DRM: Draconian Revenue Monitoring

The Gold Box D&D games (Pool of Radiance and sequels) had pretty amusing code wheels that had multiple fantasy alphabets. It was used as copy protection, but you could also use it to translate coded messages that appeared in the game for extra loot or even optional areas.

Online-DRM checks need to stop. These game developers don't realize that no matter how hard they try or how much money they invest into their DRM system, someone out there is smarter than them and ALWAYS cracks it! I bought House of the Dead Overkill for my Android Tablet, played it for weeks and then stopped playing it. 2 months later I was on the train to work and suddenly had this urge to play HotD:Overkill again. I start it up and get slapped in the face that I need to activate my software with an internet connection in order to play it! I wanted to @#%(^ all over Sega for that crap! I had to tether my Tablet to my Phone, reactivate the licence and I was able to play it again. WHAT A LOAD OF BULLCRAP!!!!!!!!! The worst part is that there was no warning that the game had an online DRM check when I purchased that POS game. I wrote a complaint to Sega about it, they told me to suck it and they're doing this to protect their software from piracy. So you know what I did right after? I uninstalled the game, downloaded a cracked version of the game and now I can play it offline WHENEVER I WANT WITHOUT THE NEED OF TETHERING IT TO MY PHONE! SUCK ON THAT SEGA!!!!!!!! Besides, I bought the game! It's not like I stole it. I just wanted a version of the game that doesn't waste my time with all this DRM crap. When will these companies learn? Why waste millions of dollars to DRM protect their games that will end up being cracked anyways, when they can just release release the game without online-DRM and be happy that there are some people out there that will buy your game just because they love your game and your company? If you sell 1 million copies, but 5 million played your game for free through piracy, then so what? You still sold 1 million copies! Don't slap an online-DRM just so you can boost an extra 500k to maybe 1 million extra copies because maybe you won't even manage to sell that many extra copies in the end.

DRM is like the fucking war on drugs.

On a side note; DRM is also known as "Digital Restrictions Management", mostly by those who oppose it.

When I was in third grade, I borrowed the game "Traders" from my classmate, but when he wanted it back he also naturally wanted the DRM sheet back, which meant I wouldn't be able to play it anymore. A color copying machine would have solved the problem, but I was in third grade and either didn't have access to one or (more likely) didn't think of it. So I spent the day in class manually copying the grid of tiny different colored shapes - squares, circles and Xs - using colored pencils. But I only got about 1/3 of the way through copying it before he got impatient and demanded it back. But I had something, at least. So each time I booted up the game, I'd have to hope that the code that it asked for (C3 or A6, or whatever) was included on my incomplete sheet, or reboot the game and try again. I tell ya, these kids nowadays don't know how good they have it..

I still remember the nightmare that was the Zak McKracken copy protection for the C64. You had numerous sheets of paper filled from top to bottom with tiny, hard to distinguish geometrical shapes, which the game prompted you to look up every time you used the airplane in the game to leave the country. It was dreadful.

When I got Skyrim, the game forced me to install Steam to play it, even though I bought it physically. Me, not having a Steam account, installed it on my sister's account instead. That caused a stupid amount of trouble for us before we worked out how playing offline worked. I do enjoy using Steam now, but if I buy a physical game, I want to be able to play it as-is. If I have to download extra shit off the internet to scare off the pirates or whatever else, what's even the point of releasing a physical copy? It would be cheaper and more eco-friendly to not be mass-producing all those plastic bits and pieces for something you have to go online at least once to use anyway.

"Not gonna condone or condemn any of it" Proceeds to condemn all of it.

0:22 this. Your videos are very relaxing to watch

Imagine if Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing have DRM...

Scary part of online-required DRM/activation is in 5+ years, will the program continue to function? Shockingly I can still activate Windows XP when I play with it. But when will a company decide to axe that feature? And if so will they release a free patch to disable it? (Probably not.) When I buy things, I hold on to them. I love every now and then taking out an old computer, and playing old things on it. Who is to say that in another 20 years I cannot play software I paid for? Great video explaining all the technologies.

lgr has had such consistently high quality content i couldn't tell this was a video from a decade ago until clint talked about simcity 2013 in future tense

4:49 _Manual?_ This game is like a billion years old. I don't have the manual! Then thou art screwed.

No matter what type of protection, someone always cracks it. I thought that the dongle idea was great in the mid 2000's until I found a program that would trick the computer into thinking you have it plugged in. Like a virtual disc drive.

The music at the beginning of this video is from The Sims. It's track SHD_dt_cheap4.mp3, just incase anybody is wondering. I recognized it right off the bat. It's by Jerry Martin.

Startropics on the NES actually had a feely included. There was a letter from the main character's uncle stapled to the instruction book. Halfway through the game, you're told to dip the bottom half of the letter in water to reveal the radio frequency you need to progress.

I remember a few old Cd-rom games that could easily be cracked in notepad, it was basically just a search path pointing to a file on the disk so all you needed to do was copy the targeted file and change the text file. Those were the days. Btw, I started using steam when it was in beta and I was quite surprised when it scanned my computer for installed games and recognized a bunch of games I had borrowed from friends. I still have access to all them through my steam account, I like steam.

StarForce completely fucked my friend's computer when we tried to lan rainbow six lockdown. It corrupted his hard drive completely. I had to reinstall windows for him.

Fuck, I was eating ramen when I pressed play.

ultima 8 has a piece of fabric as drm. thank goodness the copy i found at the thrift store had it included.

3:59 - who the hell was feeding their disks to crocodiles?

A funny little tidbit. The Atari ST version of Ultima V had on disk copy protection, and if the disc happened to be pirated, the game would be hard as balls and be winnable. The company that distributed the German version just copied the game to blank floppies and sold those.

This is why I prefer GOG: No DRM at all! =D

I truly believe copyright needs a massive overhaul. It doest help artists or buyers it just makes frustrating less valuable products.

"...a library full of unplayable bits and bytes." I'm not a fan of extremes, so I settle for the middle ground and format my computer in nibbles.

I love the dial-a-pirate. King's Quest 6 had a lot of in-game copy protection, but it was well-implemented

Thanks for the brief quick review of DRM being 25 its nice to learn what was going on when i was born and the years before, started with windows me as my first comp

The latest sim city was so hated that as soon as a decent competitor got onto the market in the form of cities skylines EA's sales of the game dropped to practically zero. I haven't heard anyone talk about sim city is years.

I had a pirated version of Monkey Island with a copied Dial-a-pirate, laminated and everything. My dad didn’t mess around. Still one of my favorite series.

Once I tried to download a sims expansion pack on my computer and I typed in the ISBN code instead of the serial code

game dev simulator has a fade system where you always lose because of pirating if you have the official released pirated version.

My dad had a Commodore Amiga when i was a child. Also a stack of nearly 200 disks all pirated

Oh Dial-a-Pirate, how you delayed my ability to play Monkey Island for months. I remember my mum told me to draw each individual combination and I got about 3 spins drawn before I got bored, which meant inevitably 9 times out of 10 I loaded the game I couldn't play it... but oh my when a combination I had drawn came up.... oh the joy...

Its funny, because when I first saw this video, I watched while eating lunch. You are a mindreading master! (Or not.. Who knows?)

"Starforce threatened to sue BoingBoing and CNET for reporting on these issues." I'm sorry, what? That is NOT the way to make your DRM look better in the public eye, you lamebrains!

Railroad Tycoon had a good one; you had to identify a train engine by looking it up in the manual. They were probably guessing that anyone who knows enough about trains to not need the manual are also the sort of early fans who will *increase* sales if you let them pirate the game. There was also a Countdown game that required you to look up or solve a 9-letter anagram in 30sec, and similar reasoning applies.

My first game crack back in the day was Pool of Radiance on the Commodore, which used a code wheel. All I did was take a sector editor and find the area in the software that contained the various symbols and change them all to the same thing. I think I changed it to the letter A. I then changed the window directions to tell people to type the letter A to begin. Did the same thing to the rest of the SSI game collection, and then uploaded them to the largest BBS in Kansas City.

We were all correct. Sim City 2013 came with always online DRM. We bitched at them and we finally got an offline mode. :D

The best DRM is no DRM at all. Prison Architect has a Steam version, and a No-DRM version. So if you give the exe and files to other person, it works! And you know what? Everyone pirates it. But then buys it. The developer said once "The only thing I hear is Pirated, then bought!"

My brother and I used to play the hell out of that football game at 4:16. You just picked plays, waited (and waited) and then watched the computer play them out. Some of those matchups got pretty intense lol.

Watched while installing HL2, Conflict Desert Storm and MSoffice 07 from bootleg CDs made in 2007. 3rd world is a magical place.

I recently had my internet shut off due to financial issues and it wasn't until then I realized how shitty DRM really is. I have hard copies of both sims 3 and sims 4. Can't even install them, because I need a connection to origin. And even games that I already had installed on origin won't allow me to play them because they need to be activated. Can't activate them because NO INTERNET. Now I have all these games and can't play any of them. Thanks DRM policies. I feel bad for any body who doesn't have internet for some reason. They're basically saying fuck you to that part of their fan base.

I was going to make a comment about how Always Online games would be unplayable when the servers shut down in 10 years time, but then I realized that if they had Always Online DRM, chances are, the game wasn't that good to begin with and not worth coming back to.

7:15 I really enjoyed the King’s Quest 6 copy protection. Since it actually made you read the guide to find the information action, instead of just looking it up, I was interested and I read the whole thing. It provided even more atmosphere and lore, and useful information for much of the game, outside of the Cliffs of Logic and the Labyrinth. (Though I did only play it in the future, and didn’t pay for it at all. I did have a real KQV CD growing up, and that’s probably lost in a box somewhere at my parents’ house.) Apparently KQIII’s meticulous typing in of precisely worded spells or you die was just unintentional copy protection, and there was boring copy protection elsewhere in the game? It was just cumbersome because that’s Roberta Williams’s trademark style.

I still remember the poem that was used in the KQ6 manual for a puzzle in game. "Three roses laid upon the bower, A scythe for he who cuts the flower, A crown, a dove, most noble race! Thy bones make sacred this dread place."

Dude, I'm literally eating ramen right now, what the fuck

"Do not toast your floppies" "Do not feed your floppies to crocodiles" "Do not use your floppies as kites"

Clint, Your historical videos rival The Gaming Historian, who is the only other channel I donate to via Patreon. I'm proudly donating to you now, as well. Your videos are hideously fascinating and I'm only about halfway through your catalog. PLEASE keep it up!!!

1:44 That 8-inch floppy disk though! I feel that nostalgia in my bones!

An interesting DRM can be found in professional RC sims. You want to play them using an RC controller since using a joystick or keyboard kinda defeats the purpose. Some RC sims use a special dongle that allows you to connect your transmitter to a computer via a trainer port. Other go the full mile and you need to use a transmiter-shaped joystick included in the box. You can copy the software all you want, but getting it to run without the provided hardware was a royal pain in the butt. This kinda faded into obscurity with the rise of broadband internet. Nowadays most games are downloaded, and RC sims are no different, so shipping prioperiatary hardware is out of the question. Some of them who are still sold in boxes in hobby shops still use it though

How bout Earthbound where not only do enemy encounters become more frequent but once you reach the final boss the game crashes and erases your save file

it may have been mentioned (i didn't read all 2985 comments) but there was a way to defeat the copy protection on mid to late 80's pc disks, both 5.25 and 3.5 inch. The best piece of tech at the time which most people have never heard of. The "Copy II PC Deluxe Option Board" by central point. Literally, that was the name of it. Purchased mine at EggHead computers and it allowed a pure duplicate of a disk bypasswing all ondisk protection. Worked 100% of the time. Thanks for the great article LGR.

I am just watching your videos for weeks now. So informative and entertaining! Awesome channel! :D

There was one for the Amiga that was particularly bad - It was a 32 page codebook, printed by black laser, on black glossy pages. Thus you had to tilt the page under the light to see the matte printing on the page. No colour photocopying that one!

One of the worst offenders of Constant Online DRM is friggin Sonic Adventure 2 for Steam. WHY DID IT EVEN NEED THAT? You cannot play offline, as a stupid 17 yr old with sleep problems, my internet is cut off after 11pm, and cannot play my sweet dose of Chao Garden. Horribly unnecessary, not even sure why it ever needed Constant Online DRM. Fucking hate it.

This is a video I come back to and rewatch every few years. Its a great recap of DRM up to 2012.

Ton of info, not annoyingly edited, well done LGR-man

Copy protection is birth control for software :)

There was a game called "Game Dev Tycoon" where you ran a gaming company, and the company themselves put an intentionally bugged version on a site they found distributed pirated games / software. The "bug" was that no matter what you did, your company in-game would start losing money to piracy and eventually go bankrupt. I thought that was pretty funny. :)

One thing I remember quite well was the copy protection in Pizza Syndicate. As long as you don't offer at least one of the pizzas from the manual (of cookbook), not a single customer would enter your restaurant. We bought the game, just played it right from the box and it took us a lot of time to discover this issue by accident: very frustrating, but also memorable.

Wow this video holds up so well that I honestly thought it came out this year. Good job.