(mrwint.github.io)
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!
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.
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
https://paleotronic.com/2024/01/28/confessions-of-a-disk-cra...
This looks like an older version of the same text that he later edited into a chapter of the book (does not have the claim about only finding failed cracks):
https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/the-journal-of-computer/j...
Sorry for stealing your game, I was young.
Is there anything where you don't find Fabrice Bellard along the way if you just dig deep enough?
I also just really miss printed game manuals.
I played it on a B&W TV.
Also later games that wanted the CD to be in the drive to be played.
There have been a couple of times even in modern games like Civ 6 where everything goes so wrong I wonder if somehow it erroneously flagged itself as pirated for some reason.
My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.
Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.
It wouldn't be out of place in a library.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
What a delight that game and its manual were.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
It was some sort of "Defender" style game. Apparently cracking ("Cracked by the Nibbler") caused some obstacles to become invisible. You could play the game for a bit but you pretty quickly crashed into one of these.
Wish I could remember the name of the game. I would have liked to played a legit copy