Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks

For as long as there have been games, people have been trying to copy them and play for free. The humble tape recorder was the first weapon of choice, then CD burners took up the mantle, and now the internet acts as one big black market for free and highly illegal games.
Publishers have struck back will all kinds of increasingly controversial copy protection systems over the years, the PC version of Assassin’s Creed II currently the latest title to raise the ire of gamers with its “No ‘net connection, no game for you” policy. But that kind of thing is no fun. We remember when publishers and devs used to come up will all kinds of crazy and imaginative ways to keep us off the pirate ship. And thusly, we’ve looked back in time and picked out our favourites. And thusly, here they are. And, Assassin's Creed II could learn a thing or two from these

Lenslok 

Used in: A whole bunch of ‘80s home computer games

How it worked: Once the cacophonic banshee-wailing of the tape loading sequence finally came to a merciful end, the game would compound the player’s emotional trauma by flashing up a garbled two-letter code on screen.

  Above: Gaming in the '80s was seriously rock 'n' roll

The code could only be properly read by putting an included plastic prism lens up against the screen, and once deciphered it had to be typed in to make the game run. But there were two problems. Firstly, the code had to be manually scaled to make it readable on different sizes of TV, and the system didn’t work at all on particularly big or small screens. Secondly, the codes were incredibly easy to hack, given a bit of coding knowledge. Needless to say, it was dropped after much complaint.

Gimped Batman

Used in: Batman: Arkham Asylum

How it worked: Very sneakily indeed. Rather than simply blocking pirates from playing the game, Rocksteady chose to give them just enough tantalising bat-joy to show them what they were missing. Illegal copies of the game worked perfectly apart from one little detail. Batman’s cape glide ability was disabled, making the game playable but uncompleteable. If the Joker made DRM, this is the DRM he would make.

All your base are belong to EA

Used in: Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
How it worked: By exploding the pirates’ dreams of free RTS in a very real sense. After 30 seconds of play on a pirated copy of the game, the player’s base and units would detonate. Whether the cause was suicidal pirate guilt or an overzealous bid on the units’ part to escape the horror of war is unknown. What is known is that like more recent EA DRM, the base blasting trick caused all kinds of problems, in particular blowing up the armies of plenty of legitimate players. Call it a pre-emptive strike just in case they were thinking of passing a copy on.

Broken guns and double-hard bad guys

Used in: Operation Flashpoint
How it worked: Like Arkham Asylum, the original Flashpoint chose to punish pirates with broken dreams of what might have been. But if Arkham was cruel and unusual punishment, Flashpoint was Guantanamo Bay.

                                 Above: Don't get excited. That's just a scoped pea-shooter
Using a system called FADE (which detected pirate copies by inserting fake errors in the original game code, which CD copiers would clean up, making rip-offs immediately obvious) dodgy copies would let the game run without any problems, but would gradually change the gameplay in increasingly horrible ways. Guns would lose accuracy, enemies would become bullet-sponges and the player’s character would gain the battle resilience of a dead jellyfish.