Glad to hear him say it, I always respected what Brad Wardell's said in previous interviews I've read. I have been saying pretty much the same thing since the 1980s. Every game that came out for the Apple ][+ back then was cracked, without exception. Some people spent a brief amount of time putting in some existing copy protection technology. I saw other people I worked for spend immense amounts of time putting self-encrypting/decrypting disk access routines into their code. Didn't make any difference in the amount of piracy as far as I could see. The pirates loved that kind of stuff, it was like a new puzzle to solve.
When one of my employers asked me to hook in the copy protection supplied by the disk duplication firm we used, into a Commodore 64 game, I hooked it in with one call in the bootstrap loader. Knowing that the average user trying to copy a disk image would be defeated, and the serious, assembly-tracing pirate (or anybody who got their games from one) would not be. Same result as if I'd spent extra hours, days, or weeks peppering more protection calls & other tricks through the code. (Plus more disk checks would slow the game down.) I spent the minimum amount of time needed to get the job done, and I went back to programming and designing "fun", which is a game developer's job. Not working on annoying copy protection technologies that don't even boost sales much.
It always bothered me in the 80s and 90s when the Software Publishers Association would report the amount of sales lost to piracy by calculating it as if 100% of the pirates would have bought a legal copy if they were unable to obtain a free one. That's just clearly untrue. But then, overestimating numbers ludicrously to support your point is a time honored human tradition, isn't it?
I'm in online games now, where piracy is mostly a non-issue anyway. But I was always glad a lot of people played my single-player games. As an artist, amongst those billions who would never want to buy my work, wouldn't I rather some of them see it and experience it, rather than none of 'em? Of course I do. I could wish they'd all give me money - but then, I could wish the Flying Spaghetti Monster would give me magic jellybeans that grant wishes, too. I'm a pragmatist, I try to shoot for things I could actually get to happen in this world.
If it didn't have the Fortran source code, you're thinking of the wrong issue.
One year Creative Computing went all-out with their April Fool's issue. (I think this was around 1979-1981.) The issue had a normal cover and a bunch of normal articles on one side, if you flipped the magazine over and upside-down, there was a gag cover and the other half was full of gag articles and gag advertisements. One of them showed a circuit board on an anvil, with an elf holding a chisel to it and about to pound it with a big mallet. And it said "We still make our Apple sound cards the old fashioned way. One at a time, by hand."
This was back in the day when computer magazines would still print entire program listings for people to type into their home computer by hand, most often in BASIC. Making fun of this, the April Fool's issue said they were including the full listing of the original Crowther & Woods Adventure game. The joke was after reading that intro, it was actually THERE, photo-reduced enough that it would fit onto a few pages of the magazine. The text was small, but still legible. Of course it was not only far more than any sane person would read and retype by hand, but it was all in Fortran, which no personal computer of the era had a compiler for. (Compilers of any kind were pretty rare in those days, most PCs running either interpreted BASIC or assembly language - though there was a Pascal for the Apple ][+).
I hope I still have my tattered copy of that issue in the boxes full of stuff in my garage. But surely there must be a number of geeks that have saved that memorable, hilarious issue - in my view, the high point of the magazine's entire run.
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Glad to hear him say it, I always respected what Brad Wardell's said in previous interviews I've read. I have been saying pretty much the same thing since the 1980s. Every game that came out for the Apple ][+ back then was cracked, without exception. Some people spent a brief amount of time putting in some existing copy protection technology. I saw other people I worked for spend immense amounts of time putting self-encrypting/decrypting disk access routines into their code. Didn't make any difference in the amount of piracy as far as I could see. The pirates loved that kind of stuff, it was like a new puzzle to solve.
When one of my employers asked me to hook in the copy protection supplied by the disk duplication firm we used, into a Commodore 64 game, I hooked it in with one call in the bootstrap loader. Knowing that the average user trying to copy a disk image would be defeated, and the serious, assembly-tracing pirate (or anybody who got their games from one) would not be. Same result as if I'd spent extra hours, days, or weeks peppering more protection calls & other tricks through the code. (Plus more disk checks would slow the game down.) I spent the minimum amount of time needed to get the job done, and I went back to programming and designing "fun", which is a game developer's job. Not working on annoying copy protection technologies that don't even boost sales much.
It always bothered me in the 80s and 90s when the Software Publishers Association would report the amount of sales lost to piracy by calculating it as if 100% of the pirates would have bought a legal copy if they were unable to obtain a free one. That's just clearly untrue. But then, overestimating numbers ludicrously to support your point is a time honored human tradition, isn't it?
I'm in online games now, where piracy is mostly a non-issue anyway. But I was always glad a lot of people played my single-player games. As an artist, amongst those billions who would never want to buy my work, wouldn't I rather some of them see it and experience it, rather than none of 'em? Of course I do. I could wish they'd all give me money - but then, I could wish the Flying Spaghetti Monster would give me magic jellybeans that grant wishes, too. I'm a pragmatist, I try to shoot for things I could actually get to happen in this world.
-- Dr. Cat
If it didn't have the Fortran source code, you're thinking of the wrong issue.
One year Creative Computing went all-out with their April Fool's issue. (I think this was around 1979-1981.) The issue had a normal cover and a bunch of normal articles on one side, if you flipped the magazine over and upside-down, there was a gag cover and the other half was full of gag articles and gag advertisements. One of them showed a circuit board on an anvil, with an elf holding a chisel to it and about to pound it with a big mallet. And it said "We still make our Apple sound cards the old fashioned way. One at a time, by hand."
This was back in the day when computer magazines would still print entire program listings for people to type into their home computer by hand, most often in BASIC. Making fun of this, the April Fool's issue said they were including the full listing of the original Crowther & Woods Adventure game. The joke was after reading that intro, it was actually THERE, photo-reduced enough that it would fit onto a few pages of the magazine. The text was small, but still legible. Of course it was not only far more than any sane person would read and retype by hand, but it was all in Fortran, which no personal computer of the era had a compiler for. (Compilers of any kind were pretty rare in those days, most PCs running either interpreted BASIC or assembly language - though there was a Pascal for the Apple ][+).
I hope I still have my tattered copy of that issue in the boxes full of stuff in my garage. But surely there must be a number of geeks that have saved that memorable, hilarious issue - in my view, the high point of the magazine's entire run.
-- Dr. Cat