Kids these days will never know the pain of having to copy the whole 197 pages Falcon 4.0 manual just to be able to tell the games copy protection what the fifth word from the third sentence on page 125 is

32 Comments

  1. Curious_Associate904

    Back in the day when DRM meant, dedicated reprographics machine.

  2. Toothless-In-Wapping

    Or use a wheel cipher to tell you what the par is on the third hole of The Fairbanks Club to play Jack Nicklaus golf.

  3. mind_mine

    I remember the old Sam & Max one was a dress up game where you had to look it up in the booklet

  4. Skatingraccoon

    Or trying to figure out Meryl’s codec in MGS1…

  5. Firm-Swimming-3427

    Bro giving me headache by having to even think about what this means!

  6. Koblizek361

    I suppose I’m a kid these days because I have absolutely 0 clue what you’re on about

  7. Cutsdeep-

    there was some wizard game that i spent days with trial and error just creating a passcode book to get in.

    finally got enough to cover all requests and i didn’t even like the game.

    simon the sorcerer

  8. ForbiddenExceed

    My grandma’s place has the original Civilization but the book is nowhere to be found; you do get some good practice after a while with the tech tree questions

  9. MooseTed

    Printed on red brown paper so you couldn’t photocopy it for your friends.

  10. Nknights23

    In metal gear solid you needed the manual or back of disk for a codec code for Meryl I believe it was.

  11. Mysterious_Touch_454

    Drawing with hand all the Master of Orion copyprotection Ships…

    Or writing all the copy protection answers for different games. No printers, only pen and paper 😀

  12. GestureArtist

    Holy shit I thought I was seeing things while scrolling reddit. I still have this manual and saw it the it the other day while cleaning.

  13. Marak830

    DnD goldbox set with the spinny wheel thing.

  14. lauantai21

    We learned English because 8 year old boys wanted to see Pixel boobs from leisure suit larry

  15. Sproeier

    I remember playing this game as a kid. I didn’t understand it and i kept crashing my plane. It might have been a different edition since i don’t remember looking up passwords.

    Also i don’t remember the manual at all which might explain the crashing. Not that i could have read it since i couldn’t read english at the time.

  16. KoburaCape

    I remember getting a disc drive for falcon 3!

  17. luv2ctheworld

    Sigh… Simpler times…

    When information wasn’t at your fingertips, nor was it likely something made up.

  18. kwakimaki

    It worked though. Better than today’s anti piracy shite they put in games.

  19. saumanahaii

    I lost a bunch of games to this. I had a bunch of old games because they were cheap growing up. Then my mom tossed the manuals because they took up space and suddenly a bunch of games were unplayable. That led me to memorizing the key for several games I owned later because I didn’t want to lose them. Even though I wrote the key on the CD case.

  20. kadzooks

    Battle Bugs from Sierra here, I’m just glad the anti piracy code isn’t colour coded, I had the photocopied manuals

  21. SaltyAd8309

    I bought this game when I was 12. I never managed to get the plane to take off.

  22. I love those games that seemingly worked but were somehow shittified if you were running a pirated copy. Sierra games had deadlocks that you couldn’t get through.

  23. improbable_humanoid

    I owned Falcon 4.0 and I don’t remember having to do this lol

    I do remember defragging my hard drive and doing all sorts of other optimizations to make sure the game ran well…

  24. superchu_

    I had totally forgotten about this being a thing..

  25. Falcon 3.0 had this. Falcon 4.0 didn’t, just a CD key. The manual was really, really great though if you’re into this kind of thing. Lots of indepth info about tactics, maneuvers, etc.

  26. -Drunken_Jedi-

    Lol I remember X-Wing on DOS had a similar thing. There were symbol combinations in the manual if I remember rightly you needed to access the game.

  27. Realistic-Syllabub77

    Ahh good old times 😀
    Best part (other game): Buying a Edition wich comes without manual

  28. NegotiationWilling45

    I think I recall I had a program for this and you just entered the combo and it spat out the word? Not sure that was a heap of years ago and many brain cells have died in that time.
    The cover was a memory unlock for sure, thank you op?

  29. dedge25

    My favorite version of this was Star Tropics for the NES. Had to soak a letter that came with the game in water to reveal a code. Will never forget the code being 747 though.

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