Pirates have always been a headache for game developers. 37 years ago, a small game that hardly anyone knows about used a pretty funny way to combat illegal copies.
What game is it? Have you ever heard of “Abbey of Crime”? In the Spanish original, the game is called “La Abadía de Crimen” and was developed by just two people: Paco Menéndez and Juan Delcán.
The two based the isometric game on the novel “The Name of the Rose” by the Italian writer Umberto Eco. It is an adventure in which you have to solve a series of murders in a medieval monastery, similar to a mission in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which will soon have a sequel.
The game was released in 1987 and used copy protection that was pretty cool for the time. While other titles required code entries that were only available in the manual or used other tricks, the developers of Abbey of Crime took a more creative approach.
A much more recent game takes you out of the monastery in search of your own self: INDIKA. Here you can see the trailer:
In Indika you embark on a journey of self-discovery as a young nun
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God knows that you have sinned
How did the copy protection work? Players who acquired Abbey of Crime illegally were able to start the game without any problems at first. Anyone who was worried that a possible copy protection would prevent the software from starting right from the start could breathe a sigh of relief.
But the joy was short-lived: Shortly after starting the adventure, your character is given a tour of the monastery. At the end there is a mass that the player must attend.
During the mass, the player is judged on whether he committed a sin shortly before the communal prayer. Now you can guess three times how the story ends.
That’s right, the program has long since identified pirates at this point and is now exposing them. A voice in the game insults the character as a “pirate” – and does so on a continuous loop. It is basically the voice of God punishing the player for dishonest behavior.
Here you can see what it looks like in the game:
But that’s not all: After the voice repeats “pirate” about 10 times, the game crashes. This means that pirates are excluded and can only start Abbey of Crime again and start playing from the same point.
This system is still extremely creative today because it uses the setting of the game to expose pirated copies. Who, if not God, is in charge in the monastery, and anyone who enters it without paying for the game must face the consequences. More recent copy protection systems such as Denuvo are much more controversial and repeatedly cause anger among players.