Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."

No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!

It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.

This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.

Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another example of this in the indie scene.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522

* Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games

People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.

Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?

While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...

BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).

https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...

This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...

I also just really miss printed game manuals.

My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!

And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.

Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.

I still remember, back in the mid 90s, playing it with my brother and some friends. We spent so much time trying to beat the default bobsleigh time, land a 100+ meter jump in the ski jumping event, or survive that dreaded third lap in skating. But no matter what, we just couldn't pull it off.

Years later, I even gave it another shot under Dosbox, thinking, "Alright, I was just a clueless kid back then. Now it's my time to shine." Nope. Still couldn't do it.

Turns out we obviously had a cracked copy. But honestly, trying to actually buy a game when you’re a 12yo in mid-90s France (obviously without any Internet connection) wasn’t exactly easy.

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

> Uncovering the mechanics of "The Games: Winter Challenge"

  1. It is harder to see if your crack was successfully completed, especially if the degradation happens late in game.
  2. If the game is fun until it goes wonk and the person learns it is pirated, they may decide to buy the real deal.
  3. The potential damage, if you didn't have a noticeable false-positive rate, is limited and for those unwittingly hit and find out their software is pirated, they're likely to not buy/get from the downloaded source again.
  4. From the standpoint of a developer, it is creative fun.

Yeah, I get that maybe it made the developer and/or publisher feel some kind of 'justice' was done, but it's ultimately bad for your brand to have any game out in the world that has subtly degraded performance. The players of pirated versions probably just assumed the company makes games that are buggy or with really bad difficulty scaling. Reducing piracy by making players not want your games doesn't seem like a winning long-term strategy.

Some publishers instead layered their piracy checks later in the game play or delayed stopping pirated play until some number of game events after detection. If they were concerned crackers would find an explicit error message, another option is to change game play in some other way like this game ended the luge race before the player finished. A legit game behavior at the wrong time is still harder to find than an error box or specific text.

I played it on a B&W TV.

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.

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

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