Code Wheels
Analog DRM
A code wheel is a pair of printed discs a game asks the player to consult before it runs, so the disk itself could ship unprotected. In print from Starflight in 1987 to Monkey Island's Dial-A-Pirate, with reviewers recording both the jokes and the black-on-black wheels.
A code wheel is a pair of printed discs pinned at the centre, one turning against the other, that a game asks the player to consult before it will run: line up two symbols, read the answer through a window, type it in. It was a form of copy protection that lived in the box rather than on the disk, so the disk itself could be copied and installed freely. The word is in print by January 1987, when Robert Woodhead of Sir-Tech called Starflight’s “brilliant” and asked its designer whether he could steal it.
Fast facts
- Earliest named here: Starflight (Binary Systems), whose “launch code wheel” came in the box with the galaxy map (Computer Gaming World, 1987).
- Dial-A-Pirate: packed with The Secret of Monkey Island; find the pirate’s face on the wheel and enter the year he was hanged.
- Why publishers liked it: the disk could ship unprotected. .info reported in 1991 that most publishers, “recently including even Psygnosis”, had moved from disk-based protection to code wheels and manual look-ups.
- Why players did not, always: a wheel printed black on black; wheels the size of the manual; add-on disks with a second wheel.
Starflight
The earliest use of the word held here is in a CompuServe conference of game designers that Computer Gaming World printed in January 1987. Robert Woodhead of Sir-Tech told Rod McConnell of Binary Systems: “By the way, the copy protection on Starflight – the codewheel – is brilliant. Can I steal it for one of my games, Rod?” CGW’s review two months later listed the wheel among the props in the box, written in the game’s voice: “a transcript from last week’s Operation Starflight briefing, a technical reference manual, operations disk, galaxy map, and launch code wheel.”
What a wrong answer did
Some games did not refuse a wrong code; they let the player in and broke later. CGW explained in 1988 why Earl Weaver Baseball on the IBM PC sometimes failed to retire a side after three outs: “This is not a programming bug. This is using one’s security codewheel incorrectly.” Given wrong data at the start, “the program allows you to play normally long enough to get the feel of the game and then goes haywire. That may induce some of the pirates to actually purchase a copy.”
Falcon on the Atari ST did the same in the air. Andrew Reese wrote in Start that the player had “to align two symbols on the code wheel and type in a letter to fly your Falcon. If you don’t enter the correct code twice in a row, Falcon will load, but you will suffer a catastrophic engine failure about one minute into the flight.”
In place of disk protection
The wheel’s appeal to publishers was that it replaced protection on the disk. Amazing Computing’s 1990 review of Lucasfilm’s Pipe Dream on the Amiga noted that the game came “on one non-copy-protected disk”, whose manual encouraged a backup copy, but “you do need the code wheel to begin”: the game showed a picture and a colour name, and the player dialled the matching picture.
By 1991 .info could tell a reader that copy protection and hard-drive installation were “mostly becoming a moot point”, since most publishers had moved to “code wheels and manual-lookup schemes”. When Psygnosis offered a hard-disk-installable Lemmings with key-disk protection, the magazine reported that the company planned code wheels for future releases, “some of the best gaming news we’ve heard in a long time.”
Dial-A-Pirate
The Secret of Monkey Island made the wheel a joke that fitted the game. Reviewing the ST version in 1991, John King Tarpinian wrote that the disks were not copy protected “but the protection scheme should give a chuckle. This game is a swashbuckling adventure—so how do you protect against piracy? Find a specified pirate up on a Dial-A-Pirate code wheel and then enter when the pirate was hanged. This is to be done with your tongue firmly planted in your cheek.”
Retro Gamer later recorded that the wheel was dropped from re-releases, that Monkey Island 2 used its wheel for the quantities in a voodoo potion, and that Cinemaware’s Rocket Ranger made its codes part of operating the rocket pack.
Complaints
The wheel was easier on the player than a manual look-up, but it drew complaints of its own. A Computist reader found The Bard’s Tale III’s wheel “enormous and a real pain to get out every time you pass onto a dimension”, and removed the check with a one-byte edit. .info called the black-on-black wheel in Gold of the Aztecs “the worst code-wheel copy protection I’ve ever seen”: “after it has a few fingerprints on it, it’s nearly impossible to read.” Accolade’s add-on disk for Test Drive III shipped with a second wheel to be used alongside the first, so a player might consult both in one session, which CGW called “a nuisance”. And CGW’s reviewer of Delphine’s Out of This World reported that its wheel was “known ‘affectionately’ by many players as the code-wheel from hell” and “seems to have used more ink than the manual itself.”
Retro Gamer’s verdict, looking back, was that “spinning a code wheel was preferable to thumbing through a manual, but the wheels were far easier to duplicate. You simply had to photocopy it in all of its positions.”