Continuing its multiple “Schadenfreudian Slips” columns for Gamasutra, notable and more than a little eccentric German game company Schadenfreude Interactive presents an anecdotal account of the hardships of trying to find the right copy protection.

Schadenfreudian Slips: Copy Protection Racket

A silly story based around modern copy protection for games. What sucked me in and made me laugh was the look at old copy-protection schemes that I had forgotten about.

I remember especially games such as Keef the Thief, which had a large extremely dark brown copy protection manual (dark to deter photocopies), full of long and cryptic words on numbered pages. The game would ask you at many junctures to provide a word from a certain “paragraph” on a certain page. There were previous and other instances of this type of scheme in other games and software, but this one sticks out in my head mainly because I had to strain for minutes to read these black-on-dark-brown letters. By the time I had found the page, killed my eyes, and entered it, I had forgotten what exactly I was doing in the damn game!