SecuRom's New Internet-Required PC Game DRM > Well,

Well,

lol, I'm thinking this was one of the Dungeons & Dragons games! Maybe Eye of the Beholder?? Man, that's a throw back to ~1993 or so!

reply to EPS

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Manual Lookups

Another common copy protection technique was the “manual lookup.” Populous, X-Com: UFO Defense, Railroad Tycoon, Prophecy, and countless other titles went this route. With this method, no additional items needed to be packaged with the game, and the C.P. could take up previously unused space in the margins of the user guide. Populous would show a coat-of-arms for a given world and ask the player to provide the name of said world. One shield was displayed on the bottom corner of every page or two in the manual, and you had to flip through until you found the right one. It was kind of a brute-force way to do it, but it worked. Without the manual, the game wouldn’t play. Railroad Tycoon, I understand, provided images of trains (what else?) and asked the player to identify them correctly. Prophecy would show an image of a particular enemy, and again, the player would have to flip through the book to find the one that matched exactly. Considering the state of character sprites at the time, the number of unique variations was surprising. You could usually identify the correct image and get on with your game, but the interruptions were annoying and time consuming. Sim City used a similar technique, although it was not part of the manual. A “High Scores” page in dark red was included in the box, and each page/name combination had a unique symbol pair. There were four pages containing 88 codes each, all nearly impossible to read, even in good light – yeah, that must have been fun. At least it was photocopy-proof, even if it wasn’t friendly to the eyes.

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