The epic struggle between game makers and pirates has yielded some crazy copy protection methods over the past decades. Here's how far we've come in the realm of security...

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Recently, Bioware technical producer Derek French caused a stir by announcing that PC versions of both Mass Effect and Spore would utilize online SecuROM copy protection that required the games to automatically re-check with a central server every ten days. The idea was roundly and vigorously panned by the gaming community, to the point at which EA chose to relent and alter its plans rather than suffer the public relations backlash.

All's well that ends well, and yet this minor kafuffle is only the latest salvo in a war that has been waged for decades between those who produce and sell the games we play and the software pirates who would see them copied and illegally distributed. It's made copy protection a hot topic of discussion lately in PC gaming. Its roots, however, reach all the way back to the dawn of computer gaming as a pursuit.

The Early Years

Software piracy has always been a thorn in the side of the gaming world, but in the beginning, it was less of an issue than it is today. The industry was in its infancy, and the idea that games would someday be the kind of multi-billion dollar behemoth that would be plagued by the effects of widespread piracy was unfathomable. The PC was still primarily a business and productivity tool, and what gaming experience it could offer often came in such primitive formats as magazine-based code that had to be manually typed into DOS.

What's more, pirating and sharing games back then was hard. Software at the time tended to ship in formats such as cartridges, which were incredibly difficult for anyone without an engineering background to duplicate, or audio cassettes, in a time when the dual cassette deck had yet to achieve widespread market penetration.

All of this changed with the arrival of the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Suddenly, data could be copied easily and without degradation via PC from one media to another. The benefit to developers was great in terms of the amount of information and complexity they could now sink into their games, but they were also faced with a generation of gamers who were learning how easy it was to copy and share among their friends.

The response was to enact some of the earliest and most primitive forms of copy protection. Games would sometimes ship on diskettes with holes laid out in precise locations. Others wrote files to a disk after installation that would make it impossible to install that game from the same disk a second time. Needless to say, these methods made the experience for legitimate users complicated and problematic, and more than a few fled to the then-gestating online communities of BBSs for custom-made hacks and software duplication applications. It was time for a more creative solution.