Back when copy-protection was value added

When I was a certain age, my brother and I were basically addicted to a game called Civilization (image above from here). We would play it for hours. Because we had borrowed and copied the floppies from a friend, every now and then we had to answer a challenge question. The question — always asking us what two technologies were required to make a further technological advance in the game — would have been easy to answer with the game’s manual, but we were too cheap to shell out for photocopying.

Luckily, we played it so much that it didn’t take long before we had the whole game’s technology tree memorized. So, this copy protection, while annoying, didn’t make us go out and buy the game.

I did, however, buy Civ3 when I was older and richer, because I knew that the manuals and posters included in the box were wicked cool. They weren’t actually as wicked cool as I had hoped, mind you, but you still got some stuff.

Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a printed “Quick Start Guide” when you buy anything computer-related.

Obviously, I know that it’s cheaper to ship a pdf on a CD than it is to print and bind a real manual, but game designers should realize that all that extraneous stuff had value to the end user.

Personally, I value LPs with included posters and psychedelic cover art far more highly than I value mp3s, which are just the music. Games are kind of the same way. I like being able to zone out with a game in front of my computer, but it was always nice to have something extra, something tangible, something that made the game feel like it was mine, and not my computer’s.

Chris Kohler at Wired feels the same way. He recalls buying an Indiana Jones game — just for the included “Grail Diary”:

The downside to this form of copy protection was that if you ever lost the manual … you’d render your game unplayable. …

I just find it interesting, in this day and age of protests against DRM, to look back on a time when game publishers occasionally found solutions that gave the consumer some notable benefits to make up for the fact that they were being inconvenienced by the copy protection schemes. I read the diary cover to cover before even installing the game.

I hope that the transition of everything to digital doesn’t mean we’re going to completely leave physical artifacts behind. In fact, I’d argue that the fact we’re wired into virtual stuff so much actually leaves us hungrier for “authentic” things. Companies would be wise to exploit that.