For ages, pirates have been causing headaches for game developers. Even 37 years ago, a small game that hardly anyone might know used a rather amusing way to combat illegal copies.
Which game is it? Have you ever heard of “Abbey of Crime”? In the original Spanish, the game is called “La Abadía de Crimen” and was developed by just two people, namely Paco Menéndez and Juan Delcán.
The two were inspired by the isometric game from the novel “The Name of the Rose” by Italian author Umberto Eco. It’s an adventure where you must 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 utilized a cool copy protection for its time. While other titles required entering codes that were only found 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 the self: INDIKA. Here you can see the trailer:
God knows that you have sinned
How did the copy protection work? Players who illegally obtained Abbey of Crime could initially start the game without any issues. Those who feared that any copy protection would prevent the software from launching at the beginning could breathe a sigh of relief.
But the joy was short-lived: Shortly after starting the adventure, the player’s character receives a tour of the monastery. At the end, there is a mass that the player must attend.
During the mass, the player is then judged on whether they committed a sin just before the communal prayer. Now you can guess three times how the story ends.
That’s right, the program has long recognized pirates at this point and exposes them. A voice in the game calls the character a “pirate” – and does so on a loop. It is practically the voice of God punishing the player’s dishonest behavior.
Here you can see what it looks like in the game:
But that’s not all: After the voice has repeated “pirate” about 10 times, the game crashes. Thus, pirates are excluded and can at most restart Abbey of Crime and play up to the same point again.
This system remains incredibly creative to this day, as it uses the game’s setting to expose pirated copies. Who, if not God, holds sway in the monastery, and those who enter without paying for the game must face the consequences. More recent copy protection systems like Denuvo are considerably more controversial and continue to cause trouble among players.
