A code wheel was a set of printed card discs pinned together at the centre, each turning against the others. Before a game would start, it showed a pair of symbols; the player turned the wheel until they lined up and typed in the word or number that appeared in a window. It was copy protection that lived in the box instead of on the disk, so the disk could be copied, backed up and installed on a hard drive without trouble. A pirate could copy the disk, too, but not the wheel, or not easily. The idea was admired by other designers, turned into a joke by The Secret of Monkey Island, and grumbled about by reviewers who had to squint at wheels printed black on black.
Fast facts
- In print by: January 1987, when a game designer called Starflight’s codewheel “brilliant” (Computer Gaming World).
- What it replaced: protection on the disk. .info reported in 1991 that most publishers, “recently including even Psygnosis”, had moved to code wheels and manual look-ups.
- Best-known example: the Dial-A-Pirate wheel packed with The Secret of Monkey Island.
- Its weakness: a wheel could be photocopied in every position, so some publishers printed theirs in colours a photocopier could not read.
Starflight
The word “codewheel” appears in Computer Gaming World in January 1987, in a printed transcript of an online conference of game designers held on CompuServe. Robert Woodhead of Sir-Tech, the company behind Wizardry, 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, written in the game’s own voice, listed the wheel among the things in the box: “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 then went wrong on purpose. In Starflight, according to Retro Gamer, a player who entered the wrong code from the wheel could still leave the space port, but “police ships would give chase and pull you over for software piracy!”
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, which could stop a game being backed up or installed on a hard drive. SSI’s Pool of Radiance on the Commodore 64 came with “four disks (not copy-protected), a code wheel (which provides the copy-protection)”, as COMPUTE!’s Gazette put it. Amazing Computing’s 1990 review of Lucasfilm’s Pipe Dream on the Amiga noted that the game came “on one non-copy-protected disk”, and that its manual encouraged a backup copy, but “you do need the code wheel to begin”: the game showed a picture and the name of a colour, 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 gave Lemmings a key-disk check instead, the magazine reported that the company planned code wheels for future releases: “That’s some of the best gaming news we’ve heard in a long time.”
Dial-A-Pirate
The Secret of Monkey Island made the wheel part of the joke. Reviewing the Atari 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 to give the quantities in a voodoo potion, and that Cinemaware’s Rocket Ranger made its codes part of operating the hero’s rocket pack.
Complaints
A wheel was quicker to use than a manual look-up, but it drew complaints of its own. The worst were about legibility. To stop photocopying, some wheels were printed in dark ink on dark card. .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.” PC Review found the wheel for U.S. Gold’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game in 1992 “printed on jet-black cardboard” with “even blacker figures”, so hard to see that the reviewer had to read it “directly under a bright light”. And CGW’s reviewer of Out of This World (Another World in Europe) 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.”
Others were about size and repetition. 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 published his own patch to remove the check. Accolade’s add-on disk for Test Drive III came with a second wheel to be used alongside the first, so a player might consult both in one session, which CGW called “a nuisance”.
None of it stopped a determined copier. 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.”
Sources
- Patricia Fitzgibbons, “News and Views from the Gamers’ Forum On-Line Conference”, Computer Gaming World issue 34, January 1987, p. 49: Robert Woodhead on Starflight’s codewheel.
- Mark Bausman, Starflight review, Computer Gaming World issue 35, March 1987.
- Computer Gaming World issue 46, April 1988: Earl Weaver Baseball and its codewheel.
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette, January 1989, p. 30: Pool of Radiance.
- Andrew Reese, Falcon review, Start vol. 3 no. 9, April 1989.
- Computist issue 62, December 1988: a reader on The Bard’s Tale III.
- Pipe Dream review, Amazing Computing vol. 5 no. 6, June 1990.
- .info issue 40, June 1991: letters reply, Lemmings news item and Gold of the Aztecs review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991: Test Drive III Road and Car #1 Play Disk.
- John King Tarpinian, The Secret of Monkey Island review, AtariUser issue 4, August 1991.
- PC Review issue 9, July 1992: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game review.
- Allen Greenberg, Out of This World review, Computer Gaming World issue 97, August 1992.
- Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004, pp. 52–53: feature on software piracy and copy protection.