Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge
91 comments
·April 28, 2025Reason077
GuB-42
And Razor1911 is still active! Both on the demoscene and on the warez scene.
throwaway7894
Sorry for the lazy question, but would you be able to share some links or pointers to where these guys are active? I've been out of the loop for a few decades but enjoyed the scene when I was a teenager.
GuB-42
On the demo part: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=158
One the crack side, I don't really follow much but you can find the occasional release, for example Red Dead Redemption.
miek
Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)
RIMR
To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today.
Fairlight was pretty problematic back in the 90's politically, they even did a fairly controversial nazi-themed demo. Definitely not the vibe they give off today.
anal_reactor
Nowadays though it's just Empress and everyone else, because Empress is the only one who cares enough to crack Denuvo, but only for selected games, and nothing recently.
null
fipar
Not mentioned in the article is Sid Meyer's Pirates! (the exclamation mark was part of the name, though I do get excited when talking about the game so I'd add it myself if it weren't).
This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
Ayesh
Not a DOS game, but one of the early Prince of Persia (circa 2007) had an evil DRM trick: after a few hours into the game, there is a pressure pad activated door that does not work on cracked versions. So if you are in a cracked versions, and if the crack is not good enough, you will spend a lot of time frustrated unable to go past that door.
It is possible that the crack itself broke the game, but I want to believe it's some genius evil idea someone from Ubisoft came up with.
miek
Since you mentioned "early Prince of Persia" being 2007, I thought I might blow your mind by pointing to the 1989 game :)
jhbadger
It's a bit like how most people think Wolfenstein started with the 3D version in 1992 and have never heard of the 1981 original.
shkkmo
That isn't really the same situation. The 1981 "version" is a stealth game that is pretty much completely unrelated to the 1992 game except through name, inspiration and theme.
The 1992 game was able to use the wolfenstein name because the trademark had lapsed the the original company had gone backrupt. While the 1992 game was originally intented to include stealth gameplay, none of those gameplay features from the 1981 game really made it into the final version of the 1992 game.
Key here is that M.U.S.E. sold no rights to id software, did not bless the 1992 game in any way, and there were no personel in common between the two games. They can't really be considered as part of the same franchise
cevn
I loaded this up recently on Genesis and it actually blew my mind how smooth the animations were for the 'parkour', to find out it was all mo-capped and faithfully recreated into pixels. I had no idea people were doing this in the 80's.
ajkjk
This book [1], which is the creator's diaries from the time annotated with lots of memoir-ish details, is really really good and talks about how the motion capture came to be at length. It's also just a very enjoyable book, not to mention very physically beautiful.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Making_of_Prince_of...
wildzzz
More like a rotoscoped bitmap animation than what we consider 3D motion capture now.
wyldfire
I had to re-read the post because I assumed it was referring to that one up until I got to "Ubisoft". I was like, didn't that one guy Jordan something do the whole thing himself? (Including the rotoscoping of the character)
Ayesh
Jordan Mechner :) pretty nice explanation with his "motion capture" footage. https://youtu.be/6ozxnrs0BP4
tgsovlerkhgsel
The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun).
While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...
mlinhares
One of the reasons Sony won in most third world countries, there was a lot of piracy for the multiple playstation devices and it was easy to access it. As those generations of gamers grew older and the country's economy improved, they didn't even consider xboxes as all their friends had sony consoles, why would you bother?
ferguess_k
Kudos to the original author who took the time to dive into it. I highly admire people who can dive into some technical topics and have the patience to figure everything else. They are the kind of people I look up to.
BTW whoever fascinated by the copy protection techniques of legacy systems should also check out this book: "Tome of Copy Protection", from ID (yeah the original Idea from the Deep).
skocznymroczny
Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.
People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
abra0
Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.
The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
Ntrails
I have a vague memory of a "game-dev studio tycoon" sim game which, if you played the pirated version, would have your sales taper off super hard and you'd go bust because pirates. There was, however, an explicit nod to this happening and it was at least clear that the failure was making a point
detaro
it was indeed "Game Dev Tycoon": https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/game-dev-tycoon-devel...
watusername
I always find official cracks* like this to be amusing and worrying at the same time. Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
Tangentially, this phenomenon isn't limited to retro DOS games: Rockstar was caught shipping a pirated version of Midnight Club 2 [0], and Sinking Ship [1] is another example of this in the indie scene.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311522
* Legally they aren't cracks because they are fully authorized distributions of the games
jerf
You can stop worrying, and move straight into... whatever it is on the spectrum from hangwringing to panic it is you are looking for, I offer no judgment here... because loss of source code and all build artifacts is the norm, not the exception. Completely normal. Unfortunate, but completely normal.
mschuster91
> Worrying because it could mean that the current owners don't even have access to the source code anymore, and it's sad to see the source of those games lost to time.
This is way too common. It even happens to the best and largest games - the code for CnC Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is supposed to be lost to time [1].
Often times it's just IP rights that get passed on when a studio collapses or gets bought out, and in other cases source code for dependencies (e.g. music or video player SDKs) isn't available any more.
codesnik
I remember playing old french game "Metal Mutant", which on a level three or four asked something in french (it was probably asking for a code from manual) and if you answered wrong, it wouldn't exit the game, but it'd just silently disable all projectiles, making game unwinnable. I as a kid spent hours wandering around, thinking that I missed some clue. And game didn't have any saves, so after banging my head for a couple hours, I'd exit game frustrated, and in a month or two I had to start from scratch if I wanted to try to complete that level again.
paulryanrogers
Amazing that GOG was so lazy that they didn't check to ensure their DRM removal was complete, before offering it for sale. Hopefully this will motivate them to do a proper fix.
brazzy
I would not blame GOG for that if even the official 1996 bundle release made the same mistake. The description in the article sounds like it was never officially confirmed knowledge that the game would become unwinnable if cracked incompletely.
How would you check for something you don't know about? They probably tried the game and when they couldn't win they ascribed it to insufficient skill. Even if they searched for information online, they probably (like OP) found discussions where some people complained about the game being unwinnable and got "you just suck!" replies.
Honestly, it was a dumb thing to do by the original developers.
paulryanrogers
QA should be playing these games to completion. At least one of the events in the game was completely unwinnable.
Devs then and now use poison pills like this to discourage dishonesty, and I don't fault them for it. It's hard to make a living producing digital content that's easily replicated at almost no cost.
g-b-r
A lot of people back then didn't realize that there were these secondary checks, I wouldn't blast GOG.
paulryanrogers
A lot of people back then weren't accepting payment for a faulty product, except the also clueless publishers of the 1996 version.
hiccuphippo
For a modern example I had a bad time trying to play Celeste using the family sharing feature in Steam. The game would slow down the jumping making it impossible to advance. I don't know why it would deem it as an illegal copy, I just deleted it and never tried the game again.
barbazoo
That’s a bummer because it’s a great game with a beautiful story around mental health.
eej71
If you enjoy stuff like this - do read up on 4am's incredible efforts to preserve Apple ][ software. Just amazing.
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
candl
Not DOS, but I remember playing a copy of Settlers III and was surprised when iron smelters produced pigs instead of iron.
p0w3n3d
That one was quite famous. Also the CD came with some sub-channel data, that only one program was able to copy. It had sheep on it but forgot its name
junga
That must have been CloneCD then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloneCD
"The “Razor1911” crack (1991)
Finally, we get to the only crack that actually works properly. Congratulations to Razor1911 for being the only ones not fooled by the game’s trickery."
No surprise here! I was never all that deep in the Warez scene, but every nerdy kid in the early 1990s knew that Razor 1911 were the most l33t game crackers around. It was kind of a mark of quality on any game. If Razor 1911 released it you knew that not only was it cracked competently, it was probably a good game too!