The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.

I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    That was vintage copy protection. They would print the answers and stuff in the back of the manual, so you could only start the game (or get past a certain point), if you have a legitimate copy of the game (or just a copy of the manual lol).

    There were all sorts of creative copy protection schemes prior to DRM.

    • rautapekoni@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, I’m aware of all the manual and code wheel based copy protections, but I’m pretty sure that the quiz in Larry was just a rudimentary age check. There’s even a button combination to bypass it, which would have been nice to know at the time.

    • frunch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I remember AD&D Hillsfar had a decoder ring that you had to spin to match up the pair of symbols on the screen and type in the decoders output. It was actually kinda cool! I loved that game…