Game comes with a letter referenced in the game

>Is this the best anti piracy measure ever conceived?
iirc a developer released their game for free on the pirate bay saying something along the lines of "if you dont want to pay, that's fine, but if you like the game please support us and buy it" and it gave them more sales

I remember fucking this up as a kid even though I owned it
>dip letter in water
>let me just hold it in there 'cause I'm 10 years old and retarded
>letter falls apart
>never saw the number
>wtf now what
>based Nintendo Power Game Atlas(tm) bails me out

The gold box dnd games did it better. Printers were expensive as fuck back then so most people didn't have one to use to copy and distribute manuals. So the anti piracy was just "random page #, random sentence #, what's the third word?"

man the world really was different before google

Is this why this game was never rereleased?

>buykeks lose the manual and can't play again
>piratechads just distribute the code/cdkey together with the game
These protections went out of style for a reason

Uncle Steve...

HES IN!

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Best piracy measure has always been adding some bizarre message or error so retards post about it on forums. It doesn't prevent shit but at least it's funny.

HoLy sHiT. ThIs iS pRoBaBlY tHe wOrSt pOsT I'vE eVer SeEn oN /vR/?

It was though. The Wii had it on virtual console. Complete with a little bucket of water icon to splash on the letter to reveal the code.

I prefer the anti-piracy methods that are confusing / seem innocuous enough to be just a glitch or something weird and pirates will ask about it and immediately out themselves to everyone and look like gigantic retards

>Printers were expensive as fuck back then so most people didn't have one to use to copy and distribute manuals.
In the 1980s you could go to local library and it would cost only a few dollar to photocopy an entire manual. The fact that it was so easy to photocopy manuals is why they started producing manuals with bizarre color schemes, e.g. black text with a colored background. While black and white photocopiers were cheap and easy to find color photocopies were not and only they could effectively create copies of bizarre color schemes.

They LITERALLY did this with MGS1.

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>Standing in front of a library photocopier for 2 hours and spending $5 to do so isn't a deterrent.

Umm, sweetie.

*village sign post*
747MHz
FUCK THE WAGGLIN TRIBE
*village sign post*

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Not anti piracy but this reminds me of Leisure suit Larry where the first game had an “age test” to see if you were actually an adult. But the questions have aged horribly so most adults nowadays would fail it.

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It wasn't. You don't understand because you probably grew up in a digital age when everything is so easily accessible from the comfort of your own home.

I had a special edition of the game that didnt have that code on the back. I ended up just going through every codec frequency. Took like 5mins theres not many channels actually.

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>Born in the late 70s

Yes, it was a deterrent. If someone asked me to go spend hours in front of a copier so they could run a copy of a game I'd just tell them to fuck off and go buy it.

What are you talking about "hours"? It doesn't take that long to copy maybe a couple of dozen pages. This is how piracy was back in those days. If you wanted to pirate a game you physically had to meet that person somewhere and exchange physical objects. That might be an alien concept to you but that's simply how it was.

Some chad had made a save file named "747MHZ" when we rented the game, thanks whoever you were.

I doubt it's an anti-piracy measure though, the special MMC chip the game uses probably worked better for that

except if you keep calling people they eventually give you meryls codec frequency.

t. rented it from a blockbuster the first time I played it in 98

Also, as a contingency for rentalfags, if you keep pestering Colonol he will get pissed at you and give you the codex.

Or you could just let the thot Meyrl die and get the true ending.

The gold box games manuals were over a hundred pages because of all the journal entries. With the printing speed of photocopiers in that era it would take literally hours. I'm not claiming nobody did it. But if you think it wasn't an effective deterrent then you're an idiot.

>Desolder chink chip
>insert freedom chip

devs on suicide watch

Just scan 2 pages at once nigga, like get your pirate niggas to rip out the pages nigga, it ain't hard.

This was a nifty way of anti piracy.

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I remember pirating games off of the internet and getting all these bullshit beginning screen on DOS games and having to use the README.txt to circumnavigate that anticonsumerist bullshit. One universal constant is how asshurt people are for copying their homework.

Man there were some great ones.
I remember in like 1990 on my c64 copy of teenage mutant 'hero' turtles, the game manual had this like negative print paper with black font code tables. The game had an algorithm to tell you what code key to look up in your game manual.
On my amiga, I think it was the platformer 'Premiere' where you had a bunch of shapes shown to you as a key to the code in its game manual, but at least it was cracked so you could type in anything.

Thats literally what they did back then based on an algorithm when making the game discs and it was a fucking cunt when you lost the game manual

the best antipiracy measure ever was Valve creating Steam
they literally made it easier to pay for a product than to pirate it
it is the same as with spotify and normies: it became easier for them to pay than to pirate and upload that shit to their devices
and the same with netflix: it is easier to pop netflix and pay the fee to watch movies than to download from some shady website. ofc, tech savy people will disagree, but the vast majority of people want something easy, and they will be more than happy to pay for convenience over free
as el Gaben said, piracy is a service issue

>anticonsumerist bullshit
yeah what kind of asshole wants to make momey off something they created

.t dev

From what I heard you have to have the CD in game item equipped with no weapon and suddenly Meryl's frequency just magically appears in the list. Nobody ever tells you what it is. It just appears.

That in game item was the real problem here. People probably wouldn't have been as puzzled by "Look on the back of the CD case" if there wasn't a CD case in Snake's inventory in the game. It's a cheap trick designed to do nothing but frustrate people. You can't even just equip the CD to have Meryl's frequency pop up, you have to equip the CD AND not equip any weapons. Why do you have to have no weapons equipped for it to work? Because Kojima.

youtube.com/watch?v=DwrPuCnNbv8

I have a soft spot for this kind of anti-piracy ideas but not only don't they work nowadays, it could be fun as just a sort of novelty merch, but this stuff doesn't age well. I remember the Monkey Island one, at one point my mother threw away by accident the pirate wheel and that was it, no more Monkey Island for me.

>they literally made it easier to pay for a product than to pirate it
Except it didn't. At best it made it AS easy as pirating, not easier, and that's if you ignore the whole having to give money part of the equation. And when Steam first came out it wasn't easier than pirating. Remember the error 37 shit with Diablo 3? That was Steam all the fucking time for ages after its release. Fuck you assholes that praise online DRM shit and all the hassles that come with it as "easier than pirating" just because it happens to be Valve's online DRM shit.

Except Diablo 3 used battle.net you stupid chink Epic shill.

What's your point? Steam didn't work for shit when it was launched either. I remember buying Half Life 2, installing it, being excited to finally play it only to be treated with a connection error message and the game refusing to run because the online only DRM wouldn't allow it. That was the "better than piracy" experience all us legitimate consumers got on Half Life 2 launch day. Fuck yourself.

>use windows explorer to navigate to your half life folder
>double click hl2.exe

Yikes!

Congratulations, you have successfully pretended to be retarded.

seethe and cope

yes, that happened for Undertale

>Copying their homework
If you mean capitalismwise, it always means, one less pirate means one sold unit. The only problem is if your game is bad than piracy doesnt means hit. But for Pokemon or Call of Duty it means an actual sold game.

If you referr to school. Its like "i worked hard than user comes ask for homework, never let me copy homework because he hasnt any and still he gets the same grade".
You know sometimes this "homework copying" means that you made the work for other but dont get any return. So people dont want to be used.

This.
Also no need to save games physically anymore.
I'm mostly pirating because nine out of ten games I don't own anyway are bags of shit I toss away after an hour but I also have some "classics" I always like to play in my steam account so I all I need to start playing is basically a mediocre internet connection and a computer regardless of where I am.
Is it DRM shit? Yes sure. But I'm ok with that as long as the DRM offers something valuable for me.
I still like playing Diablo II and its a total pain in the ass to manually save my characters externally plus I haven't been able to use those cd's for years because they simply degraded so much.
Its such a hassle to pirate games that aren't offered as download every time I want to replay them. I have like three sets of Neverwinter Nights Keys but they are all useless without a functioning disc so I have to pirate that game I own three times if I want to play it.

you do know that people just download the same fucking copy off pirate sites right faggot

It's all true what you said. I just don't agree. I let some dood copy my highschool algebra homework and we all came out the wiser for it. I even made a couple dollars.

Ok, fair point.
But i guess you got paid? Thats what most "Bro, can i copy your homework" dont do, they want it for free.

Yeah. Todd Collin. He was the coolest fucking guy at school. I had a homo crush on him no homo. He would pretend to be a woman over Steam to get free games from people.