Not me.
The most well-known game to use it was Elite for the ZX Spectrum.
I didn’t know they have such a long history of annoying people with DRM. I’m glad I didn’t back their Kickstarter.
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Like the exit Visa codes in zak: black symbols on a kind of dark burgundy background.
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On the picture it says “Dial-A-Interview”, which looks odd to me. Where’s @PiecesOfKate when we need her!?
Can even be annoying at home. I have the games ready to run in an emulator on my PC, but the old manuals and stuff are stored away in crates in the basement.
Though to be honest, when it comes to DRM I guess a code wheel or something to look up in the manual is about the least obtrusive. I hated games that came on disks with deliberate bad sectors or standards-violating CDs, or require online registration or being always-online.
I really liked the copy protection of Indy4, however. If you started the game, and hit space or enter (or whatever the key was), before the actual copy protection came up, it would always ask for the exact same combination 
.
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The best copy protection ever are IMHO the Infocom “feelies”, because they were part of one or more puzzles and very good embedded into the story.
So to beat the record, we’d have to go off-topic in the first post! And after that in the thread title … let the challenge begin!
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I’m pretty sure that Discourse has a badge for it.
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Obviously they didn’t want people to just photocopy the codes. It was similar with Indy3, where it was red text on a strange red background, and you had to put a red foil on top to actually be able to make out the writing. What they did not consider, however, was having a kid around with a free afternoon that would do the copying manually .
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This was an early prototype and is now fixed.
Manuals etc. are all digitally scanned/PDF’d etc.
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This type of thing is exactly what I was talking about…
Yeah he also made an excellent video game doc that Ron Gilbert is interviewed for among other people.
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Yeah, when you see him talking games he knows what he is on about.
We have a couple of shows here, One called Goes8Bit and another one and the celebrities on there know fuck all about games and you can tell from a mile off.
Like Old Top Gear vs new Top Gear, people who know the subject vs people who read from a script
Oh yeah, we had those in germany too. I especially remember this comedy woman who said she was never into Mario because she thought the guy with the moustache didn´t have any sex appeal (WTF?).
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You can tell a fake a mile away.
There is a show on our Channel 4 called The Last Leg, it is a show which was for the London Olympics 2012 hosted by three guys, 2 of which have only one leg. One has part of his hand missing and one able bodied guy, So funny, as all 3 are stand up comedians it really works. Anyway it proved so popular that it has been on ever since. Those guys love games too!
- Gamers are not naturally funny.
- Comedians don’t all like games.
Agreed. That 8bit one is quite annoying. That woman who commentates through it is just embarrassing.
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Totally agree. I watched a couple of episodes and knew it wasn’t for me. I’ve been a gamer since the mid 80s, I just hate when people think they ‘know’ something when they really don’t.
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Any of you guys seen “The Video Game Years”(it should be on Amazon Prime) ? I thought that one was real good. But the talking heads also vary greatly in quality and there are one or two comedians who aren´t really funny but keep trying so hard. But in general I liked the series.
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A good doc was From Bedrooms to Billions (about the British games industry) has so many famous coders graphic artists talking on there it is well made by friends of friends. Even on C4 at one point I think. It was a KS that took ages to come to fruition but it was good. Over priced but good.
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Never seen the original (as I never had an 8-bit machine, unless you count the Atari 2600), but I backed their Amiga Years, and when that came out, a somewhat trimmed down version also ran on German TV:
https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/die-amiga-story-100.html
I was actually quite impressed how informative and deep it was, given the format.
Generally, I haven’t seen much video game related stuff on TV. I think I watched a few episodes of
And I thought there was a short, weekly show on Arte or some 3rd program I watched irregularly, but googling didn’t turn up anything. As I gave up on TV about 5 years ago, I can’t really tell where it ran or what it was called (or even what it was actually about).
On top of that, I really like what Conan O’Brien does with games:
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You can get “From Bedrooms to Billions” and “The Amiga Years” still here:
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I know a guy who worked for a big publisher back the 80s and 90s and one of his main jobs was to come up with code to prevent copying of tapes. No matter how complicated he made it (and he really did) they always seemed to find a way around it.
I only had 2 pirated games one was one I copied on a tape player for the c16+4 and the other was a copy of Dune 2 for the Amiga, ended up having a clever thing that stopped it working properly.
Though I’ve got a Mame arcade machine with full emulation
I do prefer to own actual legit copies of games. That’s why I go to gog a lot and re-buy games I already owned I’d prefer to do that and do my part. Like the Scumm games, I could just install them all but I’ve gone and bought as many as I can off gog.com
It does help that they are reasonable price wise too
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