Manual protection asked the player a question that only the box could answer. Type the third word on line five of page twelve. Find this starbase on the map and give the first four letters of its name. Enter the colours shown in this square of the card. The disk itself could be copied as often as anyone liked; what a copier lacked was the printed material. The method ran from Spectrum cassettes in 1984 to PC floppy disks in the mid-1990s, and it gave publishers a way to protect games that could still be backed up and installed on a hard drive. The cost fell on buyers, who kept the manual beside the computer, lost it at their peril, and in some cases held code sheets up to a bright light to read them.
A card in the cassette box
One of the earliest examples in the British magazines was a card, not a manual. Jet Set Willy (Software Projects, 1984) came with “a colour-coded table printed in the cassette inlay”, Simon Goodwin wrote in CRASH. “When the program is loaded it displays a row of randomly coloured blobs — these have to be matched up with the table, and appropriate keys must to be pressed before the game starts.” Personal Computer Games explained the idea, “it’s harder to copy the card than to copy the program”, and saw the drawback straight away: “it’s easy to imagine people buying the game, losing the card, and getting very, very annoyed.”
Thor’s Giant’s Revenge used a colour card the same year, and CRASH found it “so badly printed that it is hard to distinguish some of the colours except under ideal lighting conditions. The pale blue (cyan) and green are almost identical”. Goodwin’s verdict on the method, written at the end of 1985, covered most of the complaints that followed over the next decade. It was “irritating for legitimate owners of the game, who have to go through the same ritual every time they want to load their copy”; it was “a major obstacle for those with poor eyesight or grotty TV’s”; and it did not work, since “once the colours have been written as letters it takes less than 10 minutes to copy the whole chart”.
Page, line and word
As games grew and came with thick manuals, the manual became the key. Retro Gamer remembered that “games like Microplay’s Carrier Command and Microprose’s Formula One Grand Prix asked the player to look in the manual and enter a certain word from a certain paragraph, from a certain page”. Some asked when the game loaded, others after play had begun. The reasoning was that a long manual took too much time and paper to photocopy.
By the early 1990s the look-up was routine. Computer Gaming World listed each game’s protection in the data box at the head of its reviews. Many said “None”, but “Document Look-up”, “Code-Wheel Look-Up” and “Manual Look-Up Scheme” appear there too. Reviewers judged the schemes on how much they got in the way. ZZAP!64, reviewing SSI’s Gateway to the Savage Frontier in December 1991, was pleased that the question “(finally!) is presented in the right order (page number, then line number, with word number last)”, and that “the password is needed only the first time you start, instead of the previous random calls.” .info thought a manual check on Disney’s Animation Studio “less obnoxious than disk-based copy protection”, but still “irritating to those of us who aren’t thieves”.
Code wheels, which turned the look-up into a card dial, were the other common form; see Code Wheels.
Paper a photocopier could not read
Photocopiers were the obvious answer to manual protection, so some publishers printed their codes in colours that a copier could not reproduce. Skyfox II: The Cygnus Conflict asked the player to find a starbase on a map of the Cygnus system and type the first four letters of its name. CGW noted in 1988 that “the map is printed on navy blue paper with navy blue ink. This makes the map hard to photocopy.” The code sheet for the original DOS release of SimCity was, in Retro Gamer’s memory, “printed on shiny red paper”, which was hard to read “particularly under artificial light which tended to reflect off it”. Worms on the Amiga used “black gloss text printed on black matt paper”.
Players with ordinary eyesight struggled as much as pirates. Reviewing Edward O. Thorp’s Real Blackjack in 1991, CGW described a disk that “can be copied but the game only begins after a random five-digit password code is input”, with the codes printed “on the infamous non-reproducible dark red paper. The paper color prevents photocopying but also defeats most users, even the ones with good eyesight. One must tilt the code sheet in bright light to get the number.” The publisher, the reviewer added, “says he has not received any complaints about this protection scheme. Well, he has now.” When Sir-Tech’s Crusaders of the Dark Savant went back to a plain look-up word in 1992, CGW’s previewer welcomed “no more black-on-red non-repro paper”.
Getting the answer wrong
A few games let a wrong answer through and punished it later. According to Retro Gamer, SimCity did not reset when the player gave the wrong city; the game carried on but sent earthquakes, typhoons and Godzilla against the city until it was unplayable. The same idea appears on code-wheel games such as Starflight and Falcon (see Code Wheels).
Did it work?
The magazines thought it slowed down casual copying at best. Arguing against copy protection in COMPUTE!‘s Amiga Resource section in 1990, one writer pointed out that disk protection was easy to crack with cheap copiers, “and manuals are even easier to photocopy”, and that “the worst problem with most protection schemes is that they assume the purchaser is a pirate”. Amiga Format, answering readers’ letters about copying in 1992, concluded that “such deterrents as manual protection or codewheels don’t seem to make the grade in these days of the readily-accessible photocopier”, and argued that lower prices would do more. Retro Gamer added the buyer’s risk: “manuals were liable to become lost, rendering the game unplayable.”
The method faded with the floppy disk. CGW’s data box for X-COM: Terror from the Deep in 1995 read “Protection: Manual look-up (floppy only)”: the CD-ROM version needed no look-up at all.
Sources
- Personal Computer Games issue 6, May 1984: Jet Set Willy review.
- CRASH issue 9, October 1984, p. 95: Giant’s Revenge review.
- Simon Goodwin, Tech Tips, CRASH issue 24 (Christmas Special 1985, dated January 1986), p. 153: Jet Set Willy’s colour card.
- Computer Gaming World issue 45, March 1988, pp. 31 and 55: Skyfox II: The Cygnus Conflict review.
- COMPUTE! issue 123, November 1990 (Amiga Resource edition): “Taking Sides” debate on copy protection.
- .info issue 37, March 1991, p. 22: Disney’s Animation Studio.
- Computer Gaming World issue 82, May 1991: Edward O. Thorp’s Real Blackjack review.
- ZZAP!64 issue 79, December 1991: Gateway to the Savage Frontier review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 91, February 1992: Crusaders of the Dark Savant preview.
- Amiga Format issue 35, June 1992: letters page.
- Computer Gaming World issue 99, October 1992: Global Effect review.
- Computer Gaming World issue 132, July 1995: X-COM: Terror from the Deep review.
- Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004, pp. 52–53: feature on software piracy and copy protection.