Spyro Had One of the Coolest Anti-Piracy Measures Ever | Tech Rules

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okay so anti-piracy may not seem like the most interesting thing to talk about at first glance but hear me out yeah usually anti-piracy just consists of using some sort of simple check or third-party DRM implementation and then either not booting or shutting off your game with some sort of intimidating message but those aren't the ones people usually like talking about sometimes games behave and more interesting and sometimes downright strange ways when they detect you're using a pirated copy your gun may start shooting chickens a terrifying unkillable crab demon may hunt you down through the entire game or your precious video game company may meet an ironic end sometimes a game might even hurt the legitimate Islanders experience just to crack down on crackers that ones always with all these great examples some of you may be surprised that I wanted to talk about spyro Year of the Dragon of all things I understand it's not exactly the most notable example of cool anti-piracy and those of you who are familiar with it might not find the effects incredibly noteworthy over some of the more popular ones but it's subtlety is what made it so incredibly effective the other examples of kohli anti-piracy and games art it's an anti-piracy okay we'll do it that way the other examples of cool anti-piracy in games are pretty self-explanatory so there's not exactly a point to making an explanation video I'll let you witness those yourselves if you want here's a list of my personal favorites but Spyros clever coding requires a bit of explanation and I happen to know way too much about it so welcome to tech rules before we get to the good part we need to go over some of the Playstations background which suffered from a modding problem a few years after its release to put it simply there was a huge growing interest in mod ships for the PlayStation you simply install these things into your console to bypass the security checks allowing you to play whatever you want on your PlayStation notice how I didn't specifically call it a piracy problem that's because there is more to the mod chip demand than just piracy all PlayStation consoles unfortunately were region-locked meaning they couldn't play any games outside of their specified region a u.s. console can only play us games a Japanese console can only play Japanese games and so on obviously this was a very frustrating restriction considering there were a lot of games that were only released in one region I have to admit though the method Sony used to accomplish this was nothing short of genius every playstation disc had an intentional imperfection designed in its groove while a normal disc would have a pretty straightforward groove with small imperfections a playstation disc looks like this now the wobble doesn't stop normal CD drives from reading the discs in fact they wouldn't even pay it in mind a Playstations disc drive however not only does it make sure the wobble exists but it's able to convert the frequency of the wobble into data intentionally inserted by Sony if that's confusing to you think of it like Morse code taken to the extreme anyway this data indicates what region the disc was meant to be played on if the data in the wobble didn't match the Playstations region or the wobble was missing entirely the PlayStation wouldn't boot the disc no consumer CD burners have the ability to replicate this wobble so making identical burned copies of PlayStation games is more or less impossible and actually still is to this day I know my quick explanation may be a bit hard to follow but the only thing you really need to understand is that it's impossible to make an identical backup of a PlayStation game if you guys are interested I might go more in depth on this in a future video anyway this meant that if you wanted to play a bootleg copy of a game or one from a different region you needed a mod ship the mod ship simply intercepted the request for the information present in the waffle with information of its own to a modded PlayStation every game inserted looked like a legit disc with the correct region indicator this is where Spyro Year of the Dragon comes in year of the dragon was one of many PlayStation games that had its own protection in the form of mod chip detection most mod ship detection methods took advantage of the chips biggest flaw it does its job a little too well at some point the game would tell the disk drive to grab the game's region information from the Wobble data in theory this should always fail because the drive isn't designed to get this data once gameplay is started a mod ship however is able to give the game this information just fine because it's only pretending to get this data from the disk this means that if the game actually succeeds in getting this information it knows a mod chip is installed in the console this kind of protection requires a little more work to get around without the use of a stealth mod chip that many people didn't have the game needs to be manually correct most release groups were able to do this around a week or two after a games release depending on the game's popularity interestingly enough the UK version of Spyro 2 also had this kind of copy protection which was cracked about as quickly oh and some of you might be wondering why developers even bother with this kind of protection if it is correct so simply put a large amount of videogame cells happen very shortly after our games release so it's still worth it to try to protect those early sales this is why big game company still shell out millions of dollars for good DRM even though it eventually does always get cracked knowing this insomniac games wanted to try to make something that would keep pirates at bay a little longer the idea they came up with was simple but very effective the best way to stop hackers from cracking the game was to make them falsely think that they had successfully corrected by the way a lot of the insight information you're about to hear comes from an interesting article by Gavin Dodd one of the developers of Year of the Dragon there's a link to that in the description if you want to check that out it's a fantastic read here's the gist of their idea the copy protection would still function the same way as it did inspire our to halting the game if a mod chip was detected but they also decided to add crack protection to the game which was designed to detect attempts to bypass the first floor new protection if that one was triggered the game wouldn't immediately stop or do anything that would lead you to believe and know something's up instead gameplay continues normally the theory behind this was that the cracking groups saying that the crack they designed made the game successfully boot but assume they bypassed all the security measures and move on to the next copy protected game however after players finished a couple levels and checked out the balloon Zoey would have this to say I'm sorry Spyro but you seem to be playing a hacked version of this game this may be an illegal copy since this copy has been modified you may experience problems that would not occur on a legal copy but despite that weird message the game would continue normally well maybe normally isn't the best word to describe it because weird things start to happen after finding this message Jim start to disappear from the levels eggs that you collected suddenly remove themselves from your egg count the game starts to randomly crash and the weird effects only get worse the longer you play the game the goal was to make the game so irritating to play that you just gave up but here's the big question was it effective I would say yeah everything went according to plan and paradox the group that attempted to crack the US version released a crack shortly after release which sure enough completely failed to remove the crack protection even after paradox realized they had more work to do they still had a huge amount of trouble actually finishing the crack the code was incredibly off you skated with countless checks and then checks for those checks yeah playing the game wasn't the only thing they made intentionally frustrating it was a apparently such a difficult feat that paradox ended up taking around a month to finally crack the game they even thanked the coders for giving them such a difficult challenge so yeah I would say that was a pretty successful plan but I wanted to see exactly what happened when you played an incorrectly cracked copy of Year of the Dragon so I found a crack online and tried it out the experience was not fun to put it lightly the game was normal at first despite Zoe's ominous message but after playing for a little while I noticed an egg straight-up disappeared for my collection okay that was weird but no big deal I went back and got the egg again but it kept happening and it was always with the final egg of each stage where you play as someone besides Spyro meaning I had to go through the entire level again every time I wanted to get one of these eggs back eventually it even started happening with random eggs it seemed like every time I turned on the game more eggs were missing at some point you start spending more time getting eggs back than finding new ones speaking of Sheila moneybags tried to con me out of more gems to release her a second time despite the fact she's very clearly not there agent 9 also somehow managed to free himself later down the road but moneybags still demanded compensation poor guy was desperate I guess by the way I played the US version of the game which was missing one distinct trick that the UK version did where it would change your language randomly here's what that might have sounded like guy's murder yes I feel ok here I'm here to heaven man I can't match my Knicks game these are clear to us I imagine changing that back would have been very difficult if there were anything like the US version because my pause button straight-up stopped working at some point but much more infuriatingly this was around the point where sparks randomly turned green as I left a level I thought this was weird but it was easily fixable by eating some butterflies to get him back to full health at least that's what I thought no matter what I tried sparks his health would never go higher than Green for context that means I'm only ever able to take two hits before dying effectively making the game twice as hard the only way I could bring sparks back to full health was to let him die and then find a one-up I imagine this was an unintended glitch rather than the game going easy on me but I had to make sure not to accidentally let him eat any more butterflies because it actually damaged him the game did a lot of infuriating things but taking damage because I instinctively killed a creature for health that one was up there speaking of infuriating you never knew where you were going to end up when entering or exiting a stage there are countless times where I would try to enter a stage and I would end up in one located in a completely different world it was really hard to keep up with what eggs I needed when all the stages were scrambled like this and that's on top of them randomly disappearing sometimes I would even get on the balloon or rocket and land somewhere completely different or exit a stage into a different world entirely and what's the most baffling of all I managed to somehow crash the rocket into the hot air balloon the rocket straight-up stopped working after that but what was worse than all of this was the crashing this game would crash at any time for any reason trying to enter a stage crash trying to switch worlds crash trying to enter the water yeah it's a crash and every time I would boot up the game after a crash even more eggs were missing it was so much more infuriating than I ever would have expected but with a little luck I can say that it's 100% possible to struggle all the way to the final boss of the game the sorceress I figured after all the torment the game put me through along the way this would have been the easy part unfortunately the boss fight in question contains the most evil trick of them all in case it wasn't clear what just happened there I immediately got booted out of the stage with no warning this alone wasn't out of the ordinary for an incorrectly cracked copy but the worst part of this is ending up in Sunrise Springs looking in my egg collection and finding that every single egg I had collected over the course of the game was gone all the gyms were gone all the purchases were gone the game had essentially cleared my save file I would like to tell you what happens if you try to go through it all again but I don't think I have the mental fortitude to go through all this again unfortunately this is where my playthrough ends so did I have fun ah it was fun at the start but by the time I finished the game I was more infuriated than anything if I were playing the game for the show I probably would have stopped shortly after the second or third world at the most if someone were to play through this version of the game for fun they would have a lot more willpower than me despite this Gavin Dodd stated that in the long run they felt too much of the game was playable to quote the article if the protection had kicked in faster perhaps the crackers would have realized sooner that they hadn't been successful with the first crack but in the end we were perhaps a little too cautious we could have reduced the amount of the game that could be played with an incomplete crack in the long run though it seems the developers thought their crack protection was a great success and to this day I consider it one of the greatest examples of effective anti piracy ever or anti piracy I'm still not very clear hey guys thanks for watching the video and thanks so much for the overwhelming support on the previous video I'm sorry this video took so long to make but I'll hopefully be able to make the more consistently now who knows maybe the next video won't have something to do with piracy seriously though like a lot of people were mad at me over the 3ds video because they thought I had this like immense burning hatred for pirates I don't I just really don't like gateway anyway a lot of you wanted me to open up a patreon to support the show so I went ahead and did just that I threw a few rewards in there too if you're interested that kind of stuff I promise the first thing I plan to put the money to is a mic that doesn't crack oh all the time thanks again and I hope we'll keep an eye out for more tech fools [Music]

Info

Channel: Tech Rules

Views: 3,315,486

Rating: 4.8941803 out of 5

Keywords: Playstation, Modding, Hacking, Modchip, History, Documentary, Copy Protection, Crack Protection, Spyro: Year of the Dragon, Insomniac Games, Paradox, Gavin Dodd

Id: 4GYSeXLr5sY

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019

Reddit Comments

i know youtubers stretch to get over ten minutes but this is ridiculous.

he spends a full minute describing why this is not a great topic for the video and then 90 seconds in goes "before we can get to the good part..." 5 minutes in he shows it is basically just info from an interview that you can read, then just minutes on end describing the same thing over and over with random game footage showing

this is a terrible video

👍︎︎ 202 👤︎︎ u/grshealy 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2019 🗫︎ replies

Interesting topic, bad video.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/naimina 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2019 🗫︎ replies

Anti-piracy is anti-piracy. I don't know why he's confused.

👍︎︎ 16 👤︎︎ u/NewClayburn 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2019 🗫︎ replies

I feel like i've seen a video on this subject before. I thought this was a older video and was surprised by the date. I liked the video.

👍︎︎ 11 👤︎︎ u/oxgon 📅︎︎ Apr 07 2019 🗫︎ replies

I thought this was cool. Watched the whole thing and subscribed. Used to own all these games as a kid and am now trying to decide whether to buy the remastered ps4 versions.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/tightlyRobust 📅︎︎ Apr 08 2019 🗫︎ replies

Coolest? No. Pretty effective? Probably.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Waswat 📅︎︎ Apr 08 2019 🗫︎ replies