Believe it or not I actually think that Digital Rights Management is better today than it was twenty years ago. These days all you have to do most of the time is remember to keep ahold of a CD key and you’re good to go.

It wasn’t like that in the old days, but most people don’t remember that dark time since it was well before computers became ubiquitous.

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s we weren’t allowed to have a Nintendo in the house. My brother and I protested this injustice but my parents stood firm saying that we had a computer and that was more than enough gaming machine. With the benefit of hindsight I know now just how right they were at the time and how lucky we were to have a PC in the house. My dad said that it was there for his office work but the desktop (we also had a 286 Tandy laptop with a blue-tinted greyscale screen) was mainly used for gaming. Commander Keen, Wing Commander, F117A Stealth Fighter, the real SimCity, Wolfenstein, we had the best that gaming had to offer at the time.

And there were two ways that DRM was handled back then. The first was through the shareware model where developers would release samples of their games, often in the form of a fully playable first “episode” of the game, to the masses via the miracle of floppy disks. These games were supposed to be distributed for free, but you could often find them for sale at flea markets or local fairs. Heck, there was one local business in Muncie near where I grew up that made a pretty penny selling shareware games and handling orders for full versions until the Internet dried up their business in the mid ’90s. If you liked a game enough then you went to the post office, bought a stamp, and mailed a check to the company of your choice and they would mail back the complete version of the game. The idea of giving people a taste has recently resurfaced in the app store, but it’s hardly a new idea.

The other type of DRM was closer to what people today would recognize as DRM, though it was still delightfully anchored to the real world since there was no way to authenticate things over the Internet. The solution was far more elegant and ultimately far more frustrating: game designers would ask you a question that could only be answered by consulting a game manual that was packed in with the game. Commander Keen 6 had a simple gameplay manual with a picture of all the enemies featured on the bottom right corners of each page. To play the game you had to give the name provided in the book for a random enemy. Wing Commander had an elaborate set of in-universe technical manuals and magazines that you had to consult for specifications on the fighters you flew to gain access. Microprose’s F117A Stealth Fighter, a glorious game that made me want to join the Air Force growing up, had a thick manual that taught a basic course on evading enemy radar with an identification sheet of enemy and friendly aircraft that you had to use before the game would let you play the full version. Perhaps the most insidious version was in an old DOS version of Arachnophobia where they had a book full of lovingly drawn illustrations of various nasty spiders that you had to identify before you could play the game.

Sure that might sound easier than some of the digital authentication schemes that have come out since, but there was one big problem with this model. If you lost the manual then you lost the ability to play the game. Some of the games like F117A or Arachnophobia gave you at least a chance to guess the right answer from a list. Others like Commander Keen or Wing Commander left you well and truly screwed unless you had the manual and could type in the exact answer that the program was looking for. So back in the day you either guarded your manuals jealously with elaborate schemes to archive them and keep them safe or you memorized them.

That might explain why I ultimately got a degree in library science and can still pick most of the aircraft from the F117A manual, run down the specs of the Scimitar fighter in Wing Commander, and name every enemy in Commander Keen 6 from memory.