5 Anti-Piracy Strategies That Screwed Over Regular Gamers

Since the dawn of the home gaming era, unscrupulous people have been pirating games, and unscrupulous companies have been trying to stop them. But just as video game graphics take a significant leap forward with every generation, so too does the increasingly inept technology behind copy protection. Only, you know, in the opposite direction.
We've talked before about some of the best ways developers have messed with pirates -- now let's look at the other end of the spectrum, in which developers aim for the pirates but instead screw over their paying customers in increasingly ridiculous ways.

#5. Lenslok Games Required a Little Plastic Decoder Gadget (That Didn't Work)

Nijmegen 2010, via MSX

A pioneer in the "only making things worse" approach to video game copy protection was the Lenslok: a little plastic contraption powered by tiny prisms that apparently sought to negate Atari-era piracy by making the simple act of playing a game so fucking tedious that you'd end up throwing your primitive console out the window.

Via Wikipedia
Nearly 900 people were killed by a rain of Commodore 64s the first year it was out.

The way it "worked" was that at certain points in the game, the breathtaking 8-bit graphics you were previously enjoying would become scrambled into an unholy mess of pixels at the center of your television and could only be descrambled by holding the Lenslok up to that part of the screen. Simple, right? Oh, and first you had to calibrate it, adjust it to account for your screen's anti-glare or flatness, and hold the thing precisely at arm's length or else it would only show gibberish. You'd know it was working once you saw the letters "OK."

Lenslok, via Torrent Freak
Or, like, a gaping vagina and a K.

And you're done, right? Nope! At this point you had to reach for your keyboard (while still holding the Lenslok perfectly still with your other hand) and press a key to reveal a two-letter code on the screen. Enter the code and voila, you are now allowed to continue playing the game you bought, assuming you didn't break your arm performing that last move.
But wait, what if your TV was too big or too small for the code to be seen? Then the manufacturer's official solution was "Get fucked," because the Lenslok was only compatible with the most medium-sized of televisions. Not that it said so anywhere: You had to assume as much after spending hours trying to get the thing to work to no avail. This is all, of course, assuming the packager bothered to put the "extremely easy to use" instructions in your box and that you didn't get the Lenslok intended for a different game (hundreds of people did).

Lenslok, via Torrent Freak
The game apologizes and wishes you luck, knowing that this may be the last time it sees you.

Right, so, anti-piracy efforts in games didn't get off to a good start. And somehow, they were about to get worse ...

#4. StarTropics Made You Destroy Your Copy Protection

Nintendo

Another early method of screwing with pirates consisted of including a code in the game's packaging so that at some point the pirates could get locked out of the game for not having it ... as would a shitload of honest buyers, inevitably. An especially bad case was StarTropics for NES, which seemingly went out of its way to make the code as easy to miss (and throw away) as humanly possible.

Nintendo
We're not sure why copy protection was necessary with this cover.

Say you're halfway through the game when you get stuck on a puzzle with only this clue: "Tell Mike to dip my letter in water" (you're Mike, incidentally). Fine, OK: You've been asked to do weirder things in Nintendo games. So, you go through every pixel of the game trying to pick up anything vaguely resembling a letter, but you can't find it -- because it's not in the game. It's a physical sheet of paper that came in the game's box, between all the safety warnings, subscription slips, and other shit that your mom probably threw out the day after you opened the game.
But let's say you find the damn letter, and let's say you figure out you have to expose it to water to reveal a secret password. In that case, you'd better make sure you apply the exact amount of water needed -- add too little and the code won't be readable; add too much and the letter will fall apart, as wet paper tends to do.

Nintendo, via Destructoid
Especially in the hands of pissed off preteens shouting "FUCK YOU, UNCLE STEVE!"

Even if it works, we hope you remember to write down the code in case you ever want to play this game again, because as time passes the writing will fade out. And if you rented or bought the game secondhand and it came without the letter? Then your options are: A) call Nintendo's hotline, where Nintendo officials will slowly, and seductively, tell you how to progress through their titles for a small fee; B) waste money on a strategy guide to get a single password; or C) wait for that World Wide Web thing to catch on in a decade or so and ask the Internet what to do.
Today, you can buy StarTropics on Nintendo's Virtual Console, where you just submerge a digital letter on a drawing of a bucket.

Via YouTube
It isn't the same without the anger and frustration.

#3. James Bond Hates the Colorblind

Delphine Software

At least the previous two examples graciously let you play your game for a while before unleashing the overzealous copy protection terror. The 1990 PC game James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair cockblocked you right from the start, which is kind of ironic, considering that this game started life as a shameless Bond ripoff and only became an official product when it was rereleased in America.

Delphine Software, via Wikipedia
Turns out Daniel Craig wasn't the first Bond with blond hair, or with a magical chest.

You start up the game, hoping to be greeted by the classic image of Bond shooting you in the face through your monitor. Instead, you are prompted with a terrible example of MS Paint cubism in black and white. You also find a color version of the same picture in the manual:

Delphine Software
OK, we're pretty sure we got a D+ for this thing back in seventh grade.

At this point you're asked to identify the color of a certain piece in the picture by looking at the manual. Easy enough, right? It would be, if the red boxes that tell you which shape to identify didn't stupidly encompass several pieces at once. Oh, and you only have two chances to get it right, because absolutely no one thought this thing through.

Delphine Software
It's either the circle or the smaller circle or the even smaller circle or the triangle or ...

On top of that, the colors printed in the manual were apparently a little bit off to begin with, so even if you picked the right color, the game might still tell you it's wrong ... and then it's back to trying to guess if you're clicking on the right shape at all.

Delphine Software
Just ... something in this general area. The game has already decided that your choice will be wrong.

Of course, you've probably figured out the biggest flaw in this system: If you're one of the 10.5 million men in America with red-green color blindness and you happen to like James Bond, then tough shit, because this game is unplayable for you.
Also, what the fuck does any of this have to do with James Bond? At least the makers of StarTropics made an effort to use something related to the plot of the game, but Bond solves problems by shooting and screwing things, not looking at pictures until his eyes bleed. It could have at least been a picture of some ample-bosomed, ridiculously named vixen, is our point.