Below I detail a small selection of the publisher’s most noteworthy brainwaves in no particular order, what they aimed to achieve, and why they failed dismally.
1. Budget games![]() |
They'll be paying you to take them off their hands next!
(Amiga Format issue 24, July 1991) |
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| An Amiga Format reader takes matters into his own hands in issue 71 (May 1995) |
More of an end-user preoccupation this one. Many people who pirated software would argue they did it simply because the retail price was so exorbitant they couldn’t afford to pay it. They rationalised that if the games were marked up at a more reasonable rate they’d happily start buying legitimate software and turn over a new leaf.
You can (kind of) evaluate the effectiveness of this concept by looking at the take-up of budget priced releases. Now these weren’t cut-price out of the goodness of the publisher’s hearts; they tended to be older games that had enjoyed their five minutes of fame and were considered a bit long in the tooth, looking decidedly shabby on the shelf next to hot off the press titles.
It’s impossible to discern how many people who would typically pirate games, instead chose to buy genuine budget titles based on the price policy alone. Wouldn’t they already own these games given that they are
re-releases?
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A.Nonymous ain't payin' whatever the price
(CU Amiga issue 27, May 1992) |
What we
do know is that the cracking groups would go to work on anything that was copyright protected regardless of the price point. If a group will crack a £2.99
Prism Leisure release (and they did), anything is fair game!
They generally weren’t in it to save money, make a political statement or play Robin Hood, it was all about the thrill of the race and the glory of being top dog - the first to strip out a game’s protection and distribute it to the adjudicators.
It would be interesting to know how many people bought cracked Prism games for £1 each at a car boot sale, under the counter in a shady software shop, or through mail order to save the extra couple of pounds.
No reliable statistics exist detailing the number of Amiga games pirated over the years, yet a useful parallel for comparison is the
modern games industry. This is far easier to monitor now that so many games function through tapping into a central server for authentication purposes.
Paul Johnson, programmer and Managing Director of Rubicon Development makes some pertinent observations in the comments section of an article entitled, ‘
It's better to embrace piracy’. To his dismay he notes that the ratio of installed counterfeit to genuine copies of his latest game is 20:1 despite the award-winning title being made available for a pittance of $3.
Very few
new games entered the Amiga market at a budget price, the publishers would argue because the costs of production are so high it wouldn’t be feasible. Had they done so we could compare the sales figures against those of the major full priced releases. My guess is they would have revealed just as many losses to piracy. Would a pirate really pass up the opportunity to pay a pound for a budget title that would otherwise cost a tenner in Boots? (incidentally one of the most fertile software retailers back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, believe it or not)
2. Unprotected gamesAnother prediction put forward by gamers was that by injecting disks with copyright protection, the publishers were throwing down the gauntlet, inciting crackers to kick it into touch, and to spread the unprotected editions. Release the games free of obstacles and any challenge would be rendered null and void, causing the crackers to leave well alone… so waxed the theory.
What this approach doesn’t take into consideration is that the protection isn’t necessarily aimed at the pros, it’s primarily there to deter the
casual playground X-Copy swapper. To this end, the publishers succeeded.
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Roy's not copyright protection's biggest fan
Amiga Format issue 6 (January 1990) |
Even so, make this a company policy and the problem becomes as widespread as it would in the hands of the organised illegal networks. Millions of people with no coding skills whatsoever would all of a sudden become equally capable of eating into a developer’s profits as the reverse engineering gurus!
Very often when games were re-released as budget titles, publishers would revise the code so as to discard the copyright protection, probably to save on any further outlay accorded to the third party developers of the chosen mechanism. Qwak and Licence to Kill are two such examples.
In some cases, publishers would even distribute cracked copies of their games, having first eliminated the cracktro screens, as this would be less arduous than attempting to bypass their own anti-piracy checks. This was the case with the Hit Squad edition of Ocean’s Toki, which was built on the foundations of Quartex’s release.
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| Lorne drops himself in it (Amiga Format issue 8, March 1990) |
3. Smart cards![]() |
| To summarise, not on your nelly! (Amiga Format 35, June 1992) |
With the advent of the Amiga 600’s entry into the home computer market, the possibility for publishers to begin releasing games on smart cards or cartridges became a reality. This is because it was the first system in the Amiga lineup to be issued with a 16-bit Type II PCMCIA slot designed to interface with external peripherals such as hard drives, SRAM cards, network cards, video capture devices and so on.
The rationale was that by issuing games on arcane, read-only memory media, it would be impossible for people to duplicate them - they wouldn’t have access to the advanced technology required to decrypt the data, or the blank media on which to reproduce it.
This one failed to leave the starting blocks for a number of reasons. Cartridge-based games could only be played on a computer with a compatible card slot, so this excluded the vast majority of the already established user base. Not at all ideal when mass distribution is imperative in order to recoup a developer’s investment.
Plus, Kelly (Sumner, Commodore MD), why don’t you tell us why none of the software in the A600 packs was distributed on smart cards?
"They're expensive. And when Fujitsu and Mitsubishi and all these guys get their acts together and realise that they're over-priced, we may well do something. The other thing is that the lead time on production of smart cards is 12 weeks - if there's a peak of sales, we can't turn them round quickly enough."
- Amiga Format Special annual issue 2 (1993)
The increased development costs would surely have pushed up the retail price of the finished product. Would gamers be willing to absorb that kind of hit when they’d already got into the habit of paying half the price of the average Sega Mega Drive or SNES game?
Had the PCMCIA slot become the defacto standard for launching software, it would permanently be engaged with the card-reading device, making it unavailable to other useful upgrade peripherals. Extinguish one of the A600’s USPs, and it doesn’t look quite so unique anymore.
The inherently unassailable nature of the cartridge wasn’t questioned at the time. This was certainly a bit presumptuous given that
devices were already available for all the popular cartridge-based systems that would allow you to dump the contents of a ROM onto floppy disks for backup - or purely piracy - purposes.
The copiers typically would cost much more than the games console itself, though it wouldn’t have taken long to recoup your ‘investment’ when you consider that an average 16-bit console game would have set you back anywhere between forty and sixty pounds.
It would only have been a matter of time before some shrewd engineer or programmer invented a similar system to transfer the data from an Amiga smart card onto a more flexible medium. Of course every Amiga already had a floppy drive built in, and the computer would have been incommunicado with the PCMCIA slot by default, so half the hurdle had been vaulted from the outset.
4. CDsReleasing games on compact discs was a similar proposition, though this would later prove to be the industry standard mechanism for software distribution for several years to come.
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| Ouch! (Amiga Format issue 20, March 1991) |
At the time, the financial burden required to embrace home CD duplication was far beyond the reach of the vast majority of would-be pirates. In 1992, a typical CD recorder would demand an insurmountable $10–12,000 investment! Even had that not been the case, the write-once media alone was so prohibitively expensive it made profiteering from the reproduction of commercial discs completely infeasible.
Economies of scale would have brought the power to control the distribution of their software within the grasp of the publisher, at least for the first few years of the CD’s adoption, making it the ideal anti-piracy weapon.
The stumbling block of course was that in the early ‘90s very few Amiga users had a CD reader. When they eventually became available they were supremely expensive and only viable should you have one of the more upgrade-friendly models. The CD32 redressed the balance, yet it was too little, too late. Commodore were on the brink of bankruptcy and many developers had already deserted the sinking ship.
5. Pay to play![]() |
Is there a psychiatrist in the house? Arcanum had clearly lost the plot
(Amiga Format issue 20, March 1991) |
This was undoubtedly the most ludicrous of all the piracy-thwarting manoeuvres proposed. The grand master plan was to have gamers pay a ‘nominal’ fee for a disk, and then phone a premium rate number to purchase unlock codes should they enjoy the game and wish to keep playing. At £1 a time it’s easy to see how the costs could spiral well beyond that of the average game you would buy outright from a high street retailer. Your (or more likely your
parents’) only salvation would be to pray you hit upon a game you really hated and the phone stayed firmly in its cradle!
By now it should also go without saying that 101 crackers would have amputated the flimsy, hobbling protection system in a heartbeat. The upshot being that the end user wouldn’t have to pay any more than the cost of a floppy or two to acquire the game, or play the unadulterated edition until the cows come home. When ‘home’ would typically be a milking station on a battery farm, that
wouldn’t have been any time soon!
Swerving the thorny issue of modern 'freemium' games entirely, I'll move on...
6. Dongles![]() |
| Ocean's one-man anti-piracy army goes it alone (Amiga Format issue 33, April 1992) |
I’ve covered in great depth the curious yarn of ‘Robocop 3 in the Dongle Chronicles’ elsewhere so won’t rehash the saga here. To cut a long story short, amidst much overwrought bluster, the device was circumvented in record time and it was back to the drawing board for Ocean.
7. Pack-in freebiesLure people in with collectable, novelty free gifts that aren’t included with the scuzzy, hand-scrawled floppies Paddy normally supplies you with round the back of the Dog and Gun on a Friday night, and they’ll choose to buy the genuine article instead. Even if incorporating these ‘freebies’ entails you paying a premium.
Shadow of the Beast is perhaps the most notorious example of such finagling in that the lusciously designed box included a t-shirt and poster featuring original artwork by the legendary Renaissance Man, Roger Dean. The only catch was that it cost £34.99, which possibly lead to the incidence of
more piracy, not less because people weren’t prepared to pay an extra tenner for the marketing gimmicks. These collectors packs show up on eBay once in a blue moon and command insane prices, precisely because there are so few of them available. That speaks volumes.
For other weird and wonderful examples, check out the ‘
Strange game extras and promo items’ thread over on the EAB forum.
8. Self-sabotaging pirate copiesA few developers built tamper-triggered glitches into their games to foil the pirates. You may have
thought you had a 1:1 copy of a game, that was until you reached a juncture where a critical task couldn't be performed because the program had been designed to fail at precisely that point.
The cracker would initially get the credit for being the first to release a working version, yet be left with egg on their faces when the embarrassing truth was revealed.
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| I can't wait to get into that guy's pants! |
Ocean’s Monkey-Island-wannabe, point ‘n’ click adventure, Hook, is the perfect example. One puzzle requires you to collect two beer tankards from the ‘Crossed Swords’ pub, and a further tankard from the ‘Bait and Tackle’ (which looks conspicuously much like another very similar pub).
You’d then visit the ‘Jolliest Roger's Place’ (yet another pub), and pay the barman in gold coins to fill up your three tankards with cocoa (beer wouldn’t have been very kid-friendly in a Peter Pan game now would it).
These would be offered to the man sitting at the table closest to the bar. He downs them in quick succession and presumably the massive influx of sugar sends him to sleep… he certainly
hasn’t passed out through alcohol-induced intoxication, no siree-bob, that wouldn’t be very appropriate.
What I can't fathom is why you need to pilfer mugs from pubs 1 and 2 in order to be served a drink in pub 3. Don't bars tend to keep a supply of drinking vessels on hand, just on the slim off-chance that someone might stumble in out of the blue and ask for liquid refreshments who hasn't brought their own?
While he sleeps you whip off his pants to form part of the pirate disguise that will allow you to blend into your surroundings, board Captain Hook’s ship, and ultimately defeat him armed with a ticking clock discovered on the beach using a metal detector (really just a magnet as you’ve been swindled by the tailor you purchase it from). All perfectly logical, coherent adventure game fare really.
How did this suddenly become a Hook walk-through guide? Oh yes, my point was that playing via Fairlight’s cracked copy, it wasn’t technically possible to acquire all three of the tankards (and fill them with ‘cocoa’ which has a frothy beer-head on top) so the game couldn’t be completed.
The glitch was eventually patched by another group to create a 100% working crack, but in the meantime Ocean must have been laughing their socks off.
You could argue that it did absolutely nothing to curb piracy because any sales lost had already dented the developer's bottom line, long before the end users realised they'd been duped.
Nevertheless, the wily rouse may have done wonders to cast doubt upon the quality of pirate copies in general. Potentially for
some gamers this would be sufficient enough to make them toe the line in future. Given that there’s a monumental 29 page thread recounting all the Amiga’s ‘
bad cracks’ over on the EAB forum, perhaps they would have been wise to do so.
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| Scaremongering was all the rage in Amiga mags (CU Amiga issue 35, January 1993) |
The battle to eradicate piracy, and avert the perennial necrosis of the much-maligned software industry rumbles on…
