Indy III has a copy protection with a “red gel decoder” 
(actually it wasn’t gel, but a red plastic foil). It was similar to the Zak McKracken copy protection. If you don’t enter the right symbols at the very beginning, you can’t save in the game.
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Yeah, black ink on dark brown background paper. It worked for the copy machines at that time: it was very difficult to copy it. Nowadays, with any program able to manipulate images, you can easily obtain this:
Anyway, latest copies of Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders™ do not include the VISA code protection anymore.
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Indy III exists in a copy protection free mode too - or was it Indy 4? (I own the first release of Indy 3 - on 5,25 inch discs with the copy protection :))
Ideally yes, but then they’d no longer be poor ^^.
But that’s apples and oranges anyway, you can copy games for zero cost, no?
It’s more like having an endless supply of pate de foie gras, and assuring that the inventor of foie gras gets fairly compensated for their invention.
As a developer, I’d of course be happier if they saved money to buy my game. Probably it’s more realistic that they buy the game after some years, when it’s become cheaper. Either way, whether they pirate it after release, or buy it for 99ct on steam some years later, there’s not going to be a profit for the developer.
Oh, that never appeared in my version. I guess the publisher removed it but forgot to include the grail diary.
Hm… It seems that only the EGA version had that copy protection:
(Edit: At least the Amiga version had that copy protection too.)
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=6852&sid=a77be1193ef35cc1ea3dcdad71ba6606
Here is a picture from the copy protection:
And here is a picture of the box content:
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I definitely wouldn’t buy a game that forces me to be online just to avoid piracy.
I understand that majority people wouldn’t give a dam about it, but I don’t understand how someone can act like he can’t even conceive that there are people who don’t pirate anything but would have a problem with it.
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I’m not sure exactly what point it is that you’re trying to make, but we’re talking about what poor people sometimes actually do–not what it is that they should do.
For instance, I shouldn’t have pirated Doom as a child, but at the time I just didn’t have the ability to pay for it and I really wanted to play it, so I happily accepted a copy when a friend offered it to me. Now that I can afford Doom, I’ve purchased multiple retail copies of the game. That doesn’t really excuse pirating it in the first place, but I simply would not have been able to buy the game at the time (even if I had the money, I would have had a tough time getting an adult to order it for me). In the end, I ended up paying for it at about the same time I would have had I not pirated it, with the difference being that I got to play it before I should have been able to.
I shouldn’t have done that, but I in fact did do it, and it’s a common story for broke kids who later become adults with jobs.
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If the motivation is there, then yes, they will recreate script logic. I’ve seen private servers in action, and some of them are virtually indistinguishable from official Blizzard servers of the time–complete with the timed holiday events. A lot of work goes into those–a lot more work than would be required in recreating a single-player adventure game. Even taking the nuclear option and forcing the entire game to run on a server so that the gameplay is streamed to the player’s computer wouldn’t stop piracy. Take a look at the adventure games found here:
These guys not only completely recreated a half-dozen adventure games from scratch, they performed huge sound and visual upgrades in the process. In the case of King’s Quest II at least, they even added a whole bunch of additional story and gameplay. If developers can do that without charging for money, it can only be a lot easier to do so when it’s basically a straight port of a game.
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The original Commodore 64 version of Maniac Mansion also didn´t have the copy protection.
On the first floor was just a regular wooden door.
I wonder what the reason for that was, hadn´t a system been worked out yet by that point or why was the C64 the only one without the copy protection?
That’s true. My guess is because it was a brand new game, a sort of experiment… and simply they didn’t think about it. Or, as Ron stated on another thread on this forum, they definitely didn’t want to copy protect the game.
My first copy of Maniac Mansion came together with other 20 games, on unnamed 5.25" floppy disks.
Cracking was not illegal and very common back then, so why worrying about copy protection?
Things changed one year later, with Zak McKracken And The Alien Mindbenders.
Same here. When I was a kid, I think I didn’t have a single game that wasn’t pirated. I also didn’t have a complete idea of what it meant. I knew that my friends with consoles had to buy their games, and they were expensive. But I had a C64 and a PC: C64 games came in cassettes from magazines (Italians will understand - those shady cassettes with fake names and probably illegal too, but we had no idea at the time), and PC games were SO easy to exchange, we didn’t even think about it.
By the way, we weren’t exactly “poor”. But we weren’t rich either, and I didn’t want to ask them money for games. So I grew up with the habit of exchanging games or borrowing them from friends who had paid.
This habit was difficult to eradicate. As a teenager I understood that I was basically stealing, but I was so used that I didn’t care. It needed time: so, when I got my first paycheck, I bought my first game. Nowadays I don’t pirate anymore: I don’t have time for playing anyway 
but the few games I have, I paid for them.
I suppose that for kids now it’s different - it’s a completely different market, the world changed. I mean, my generation still struggled with the idea of having to pay for something online… music, for example. But now, even 30-something people accept to buy digital copies of things. So I suppose younger people, who grew up in an online world, don’t have the same impulse to have everything for free.
At least some C64 versions had a copy protection. Peter Rittwages site says that the NTSC (read: US) version used the XEMAG 2.0 copy protection. That doesn’t use a code table, but an on-disc protection where the disc was modified. But it seems that the german translation doesn’t had a copy protection at all.
I had this very copy of Maniac Mansion. When I wrote
LOAD"*",8,1
the following appeared:
I think it was cracked, isn’t it?
Yes, this should be the crack of the US version of Maniac Mansion.
But be aware, that some “cracker groups” had even cracked games without a copy protection. For example you can find a “cracked” version of the german Maniac Mansion version (that never had a copy protection).
Protecting a game with some kind of anti-piracy system is not just a technological and economical matter but also a political issue.
Developers who decide to use an anti-piracy system make (unwillingly or not) a political decision, because their choice will define what’s their stance on piracy, how they want to treat potential customers and even how forgiving they are towards people who can’t afford to buy their game.
All this choices contribute to build a profile and a reputation that will affect how in the future the developers will be treated by some parts of the gaming community. Reputation always impact sales.
So, I don’t think that the question “would you lose more customers than you’d gain?” is the only important one if you assume that the developers will publish more than one title, because deciding to use a good anti-piracy system will for sure piss off some people, both people who wanted the game for free and people who buy the game and feel that the developers didn’t trust the players.
These people will share their opinions on the Internet, which in turn will affect the reputation of the developers even more, leading to negative consequences in the medium and long term.
There are several decisions that can affect the reputation and the long-term results of a company. Do you want to use a strong and effective anti-piracy system? Do you want to use DRM? Do you want to limit people’s ability to publish “let’s play” on YouTube and Twitch?
It’s difficult to estimate what consequences these choices will have in the long run.
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…consequences which can also be measured in lost customers. So the question “do you lose more customers than you’d gain” accounts for this negative reputation effects as well.
on a side note… I don’t imagine why on earth such a move should cause a negative reputation effect. If I see that developers write “sorry, we had to make the game online-only because of freeloaders. Blame them, not us.”. If I read this, I would never consider blaming the developers, I’d blame the freeloaders. It seems to me incredibly counterintuitive that someone could blame the developers.
Because the players who bought the game have to deal with the copy protection.
What if you lose the connection? What if the severs are overloaded? What if I want to play the game/adventure while traveling? What if I want to play the game on two of my computers? And what if I want to play the game in 20 years, when the servers are shut down? Should I list more?
All these problems are caused by the developers because they implemented the copy protection in that way.
(In addition, the pirates don’t have these problems - so why should I buy the version with the annoying copy protection?)
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But you didn’t buy the right to do these things… that’s what I don’t understand… you are angry that you can’t do something you have no right to do?
(except from the “servers overloaded” problem; that would be a reason to complain, if it happened)