8 Things All Gamers Forgot They Used To Do

6. Load Games From Tape, And Piracy Was Actually Under Control

Many older readers will remember having to load games from tape - the Commodore 64 and Vic 20 had their needlessly expensive and mandatory tape player just for this purpose. The modem-sounding cacophony of banshee screeches was a necessary evil of its time and it's how games were slowly loaded into most early 8 bit PCs. Before Bluray, compact discs, floppy disks, cartridges and hard drives, our computer games came on bog-standard and easily copyable Sony Walkman audio tapes. Thus, to thwart tape-to-tape piracy, the game's audio code was often recorded at low levels or the master tape's azimuth was just off enough that the original copy would work, but dodgy duplicates would not. That wasn't enough of a thwarting though. When launched, some games asked for a specific word in the game manual on a certain page to prove you purchased the game. Going one further, Jet Set Willy, a huge hit for its time, came with a colour-coded graph where it would display a grid reference and the player would tell the game what colours were on that square - colour photocopiers were way out of the average gamer's budget at the time. But the industry decided that still wasn't enough and gave us the gift of Lenslok - a piddly plastic widget placed over the TV screen that revealed a two-digit number that was unreadable without this perspex prism of justice. Sadly, if the gamer owned an exceptionally large TV or particularly round CRT screen it just didn't work. It also didn't help that hundreds of copies of Elite, the first game to use it, were shipped out with the wrong Lenslok and so for those poor saps it would never work. Hours of hair pulling and failed attempts to get a game that had actually been paid for to run didn't bode well for, well, anyone.