Originally published at: VHS viruses! Tapes used to come with bizarre lies and threats to dissuade copying | Boing Boing
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I recently learned that porno VHS tapes cost more than $100 back in the 80’s (captive audience I guess), but even in the late 80’s a new non-adult Hollywood VHS tape was $30-$50 new (I know because I got hit with a bill from my local rental place when someone stole the copy of “Evil Dead” we rented for a party.)
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These would be the initial prices offered to rental stores (and very committed/impatient collectors). Generally prices would drop to about $20 for most titles.
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I heard that girl from the video tape in The Ring got her start as an anti-piracy warning.
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My mom was told by a friend that my Atari 2600 would destroy our TV.
A few times she brought this up… seeing the console sitting on the TV… itching to disconnect it herself. “It isn’t good, it will damage the set”… then she went on about the evils of video games on young minds, this was bad parenting, I’ll amount to nothing… and it became quite clear where she was coming from. Mom told that judgmental B to take a hike.
Sometimes these ‘warnings’ are very pin-point to the application, other times it’s just some vile old biddy with an agenda.
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That was only later into the 90s, actually. Initially at the start of the video rental industry (1980s-ish), studios didn’t want private owners to have their tapes. They priced them absurdly high (over $100) for no reason other than to discourage individuals. I think the worry was the nightmare of “private showings”. The idea that a group of people might watch the film who are not in a theater paying them royalties.
I can’t find a reference for this now, but IIRC there was one particular small studio who decided to try selling the tapes for cheap ($20) direct to consumers, and it was such an instant monstrous success that everyone else soon followed.
Some software did this too. I’ve seen loading screens that said things along the lines of “if this copy is pirated, your computer may be damaged and you must shut it off now”. As tech-savvy teenage hooligans, we used to have a very good laugh at those.
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I take your point, but perhaps move that date to the late ‘80s when my family definitely bought many new mainstream titles (meaning not cheap public domain items) and certainly didn’t pay even as much as $30.
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Yah, for sure I’m uncertain about the timeline there. I read an article about it a while back and was fascinated to learn that they had to be bludgeoned into accepting this enormous new revenue stream of direct video sales. These big media companies resist every new thing and every new thing always ends up making them more money than the old business model did. I find this phenomena interesting.
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Along the lines of the Lenslok, plenty of mid-late-80s games would do things like freeze up and require you enter the nth word from page k of the manual.
I guess the thinking was that copying bytes was cheap, but photocopies of a physical manual at 10 cents/page was going to be prohibitive to pirates. Needless to say, it didn’t stop us.
Then I also remember playing (a legit purchased copy of) the Temple of Apshai, and having to leaf through the manual, because the descriptions of the rooms were all in the manual and not on screen. So to know what was going on and where to go/what to do, you needed that info.
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They were also thinking that manuals are difficult to distribute on BBSes. They underestimated how much free time teenagers have to simply type in entire manuals to text files and upload them. 
The Knights Of Legend manual spanned hundreds of pages (this was when RPGs were valued by how thick the manual was). My pirated copy came with a cheerfully typed-in copy of said tome. Whoever you were, mystery typist, 13yo me thanks you.
Off-disk protection schemes like this had to get increasingly sophisticated, since they were losing the on-disk war badly. Games like Bard’s Tale III used elaborate three-layer code wheels (which were also transcribed into charts in text files). SimCity used a look-up table of abstract shapes (difficult to represent in a text file) that were printed in dark yellow ink on a brown background to fool photocopiers. Of course, all off-disk protections can also be defeated on-disk anyway. There’s always a check somewhere in the code that can be bypassed.
If people are interested in the extent of copy protection schemes (virtual machines, one-off programming languages, spiral track layouts, non-deterministic flux patterns, and so much more), follow 4am on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/a2_4am
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I remember some of the early 5.25" floppy-based games had intentionally nondeterministic sectors written on the floppy disk. The game would read it multiple times and if got identical results, it identified it as a a copy and ceased working.
Of course, solving that problem just involved firing up the disassembler, tracing through, and patching the code that performed the check.
It’s really hard to believe how much free time I had on my hands back in high school. I guess I still would today if I didn’t have house maintenance, a job ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Twitter, the web, …
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Yes! This is called Weak Bits, and it’s an element in a number of different schemes. A lot of schemes tried to take advantage of physical things that factory production drives making commercial disks can do that home floppy drives couldn’t. It was all bypassable, of course.
For anyone who isn’t familiar, Weak Bits is fiendishly clever. You have the factory drives simply not write anything to those areas of the disk. Being unwritten, they are noise in the analog circuitry of the drive and will give a random different value every time you read them. However basic disk-copying software doesn’t know which areas these are so it reads them and whatever values it happened to get that time are written to the copy. The game then reads the area multiple times and finds the same value each time, so it knows it’s a copy.
1980s software protection schemes are super interesting (especially on the Apple II where disk geometry is 100% under CPU control) and I wish more was written about them. 4am (linked above) has amazing write-ups about the totally unsung technical wizardry that went on in that secret space.
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To continue playing, please turn to page 47 find paragraph 5. What is the 3rd word in the 5th sentence of the paragraph?
Those were annoying, but the spin wheels like the one for Monkey Island were the worst. My little sister thought the spin wheel was neat because you could “make” different pirates faces by turning it. So she would constantly take it and wonder off and then leave it in bizarre places like in the crisper of the fridge.
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I remember being a terrified young teen in 1984 when a message showed that copying the game “SUPER TANK” for my Commodore 64 using the standard 1541 Backup program would ruin my floppy drive.
It was effective. We played it only at a friend’s house rather than copy it for ourselves…
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Yeah, I remember getting our first VCR and buying titles was a non-starter. They were for sure that kind of price.
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I believe that the rental cassettes were made with more durable and higher quality tape as well.
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They weren’t really that much better quality, but most video rental places didn’t actually “own” the tapes, they leased them. So if a tape snapped/broke and it was under lease, they’d just return it and get sent another copy. It’s also why if you ended up losing a copy of it in the early days of video rentals, you’d be charged the “buyout” price of the lease, which was usually in the realm of $500-$1000.
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My wife had a PC copy of, I think, Tetras, which used the "enter from the manual protection. However, the manual was printed in black on dark RED paper, making it impossible to photocopy on then-current copiers.
As I recall, she hand-copied all of the entries onto a piece of paper which she taped to her monitor.
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