Here in the land of DRM-free gaming, I occasionally think back to those "bad old days" and some of the strange or weird shennanigans we used to put up with just to play our games.

What is a "strange copy protection"? I wish I could remember the name of this game, but it came with a little cardboard box that you had to assemble and peer into, almost like a Viewmaster or a pair of binoculars. I think the eyepieces had red cellophane over them so you could read what was in the box. That was strange, and pretty elaborate.

What is "NOT-strange copy protection"? There were a lot of techniques that were used by a lot of different manufactures in a lot of different games. There were lots of manual-based schemes: looking up certain words in the manual; identifying photos or icons from the manual; etc. Of course these days CDs and DVDs may have to be in the drive to play. But even in the old days you'd have floppy disks (both 3.5" and 5.25") that were "key disks" that needed to be inserted. Often they would eventually "go bad" and you could never play the game again. There were so many of these commonly-repeated schemes that I consider them to be NOT-strange.

What other oddities can you recall?

HINT: I guess I'm thinking more along the lines of "unique" schemes rather than "common".

Wasn't it Shadow of the Comet ?

EDIT: I manage to find some photos, I am pretty sure now the game you are talking about is SoC unless Infograme uses the same copy protection for another game.

http://www.game-nostalgia.com/shadow/shadow_of_the_comet_goodies5.html

http://otherelectricities.com/neckdeep/starflight_wheel.jpg

Curse you Starflight code wheel! Curse youuuuuu!

(oh, hey, I finally found it after 20 years)

Batman: Arkham Asylum disables Batman's cape on pirated copies.

http://www.thegamingvault.com/2009/09/batman-arkham-asylum-best-copy-protection-ever/

pretty funny really.

It's not that uncommon I think. Kyrandia games had something similar.

~
Didn't Settlers 3 have something in-game involving pigs?

The game also had GFWL. People seem to forget that when commending it on its DRM.

Elder Scrolls Arena had something similar if I'm not mistaken.

Does dial-a-pirate count as strange copy protection?

Dunno about strange, but the worst (yes, even worse than Ubi) was the original Sim City on the Amiga. I don't know if it was the same on other platforms.

There was a sheet containing loads of similar, numbered symbols, and the game would give you a number to look up. Then you had to select the correct symbol...might have been a group of symbols.

Good so far. The problem is that it was printed in black on dark brown paper. You could only make out the ink if you held it at a certain angle so that the light would reflect off the shininess of the ink. I think the idea was to stop you photocopying it. Because all these symbols were variations on a few similar shapes, it was nearly impossible to discern them.

You got three tries before you had to reboot. Needless to say, I only got to play it a few times...and I had spent £25 for the privilege. That was my first brush with unfair DRM (okay, technically copy protection) and I've hated it with a passion ever since,

Yes. Pirated copies of the game would still run, so you wouldn't notice anything wrong at first. However, the game would behave strangely, with ironworks producing pigs instead of steel and trees not growing to full size, making it impossible to chop them down. Quite a creative copy protection scheme, but unfortunately quite a few people reported false positives as users with legitimate copies of the game also encountered these weird behaviors.

I do not recall what game it was, but I remember that this game had to be written on a specific byte sector of the floppy disk, so it could not be copied easily, or something like that.

The Terminator 2029's manual was full with numbers needed to be entered to play the game. I no longer have the (working copy of the) game, but I still have that manual. Really nice.

Waxworks (available on GOG) had this code wheel, too.

Not that strange but I like the copy protection in the original (1989/1990) Prince of Persia and Rex Nebular.

Those are rather common, actually. The first types of cdchecks on disk-based media used this, and I'm sure its still used. And the Sony Playstation disks used to have errors on several sectors of the disk to prevent copying, since generally when you copied the cd, the software would fix said errors, the console would then recognize the cd as copied (because it had no errors) and not play it.

CP that was likable? Prey tell us what that might be! :)

YES! I hated that! Even as a legitimate owner of the game, you couldn't answer the question correctly. That is very similar! I never owned SotC but maybe another game from the same company? But that's the idea! Crazy, haven't seen anything like that since. Thanks for the pic! Was that from one of the Monkey Island games?

I don't own this game anymore, but I still have the audio cassette that came with Lucasarts' LOOM adventure game. I'm not sure if you needed to listen to it in order to solve a portion of the game, or not. Too bad if you didn't have a cassette player, eh?

These are probably not copyprotection schemes, but I can think of two other games that came with audio cassettes... Chuck Yeager Air Combat had a cassette of Chuck giving some flight wisdom, and a COSMI game that involved finding an assassin (something about the president?) Were there others? Excellent! Those 2-level codewheels were pretty crazy. I know there were some 3-level wheels (maybe one of the LA Indy Jones adventures?) but I wonder if they got any more elaborate? Thanks for the pic, too!