By the time the third installment of Spyro the Dragon hit stores, in PlayStation they were already fully aware that modifying consoles to play copies of games had completely gotten out of hand. The shadow of piracy was unstoppable.
However, against all odds, a study rocked an entire cracker community. Many years before it fell under the Sony umbrella, long before Marvel’s Spider-Man and Wolverine, Insomniac Games he managed to beat the pirates on their own ground thanks to his cunning copy protection system in Spyro the Dragon.
The PlayStation anti-copy system
PlayStation he had an anti-copy system that seemed most successful. Sony’s strategy to prevent discs from other regions or home copies from being able to run on its machine was to make its CDs unique, creating a brand that conventional recorders could not replicate and introducing key information into rarity.
When starting the console, the first thing it would do would be to go to that mark to check if the information is as expected. If it is, the game continues. If not, it will warn that the inserted CD is invalid. Not being able to replicate that weirdness, homemade copies couldn’t work without help.
That’s exactly when the chipsadditions that modified the way the console worked so that, when requesting the data of that brand to make sure that the disc is the right one, the expected information would be sent automatically without having to go to the CD to look for it.
Together with the anti-copy system of the console, in Insomniac Games they had tried to add some more protection in their previous games. as in reality PlayStation It only did that check when starting a game and there was no way to replicate it after that first step. The idea of many companies was to redo that process afterwards.
If the machine didn’t fail when trying and returned the information automatically, the game would know that it was running on a console with the chip installed.
Game crackers had to analyze the code on the disc and modify it to avoid this check so that homemade copies could work without problems. A sufficiently banal change so that, in little more than a week, all the games that clung to that system already had a patch to avoid it. They had the process so by hand that in Insomniac
A strategy up to par
And if there were more than one verification of that style? What if it was hidden enough that patchers didn’t notice it? In Insomniac Games They had the brilliant idea of making that first test accessible. Thus, those who stand before the game with the idea of cracking it, could do so without too many headaches.
After that, the game would work in a completely normal way, so at the first check to see if the change had been successful, the creator of the patch would see that everything is correct and would automatically share the copy ready for distribution with the community.
Pirates would rush to download and share it as they start playing without any apparent problems. They would say “works 100%”, without knowing that after that first verification there would be other hidden ones and that, after each one of them, the game would gradually break down without being too obvious.
Eggs and gems collected in previous levels would magically disappear, the language would be changed, Spark’s life wouldn’t improve despite feeding her butterflies, the game would crash every two by three, and when the gameplay had become unbearable due to errors, the game would tell you with a message that, indeed, you are playing a cracked copy.
By the time the patchers realized the mistake, the falsely patched version had already run like wildfire and their community forums began to fill up with people complaining about the lousy job they had done patching the game.
The strategy was clever enough for Insomniac Games could reach stores with several weeks to spare, the most important in the commercial life of a game, before Spyro: Year of the Dragon had a fully functional pirated copy.