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Remember CD-ROMs? Those were the days, ey? You had to put a spinning disc in the front of your PC to install the games you physically bought and paid for. Actually, in the case of the Quake shareware CD-ROM, it was stuffed full of games you didn’t buy, too.
That’s according to Fabien Sanglard, who’s written a blog post on the curious case of the Quake shareware CD release. The game itself took up a mere 22 MB of a CD-ROM’s 640 MB capacity, leading John Carmack to joke that if there was ever a CD version of Doom, it would come with a “Making of Doom” feature film to use up the entire capacity.
However, it was decided that all that extra space could be put to better use instead—by including locked versions of id Software’s entire back catalogue of games. The idea being, you could gain access to the games by calling a hotline, paying for them over the phone, and then putting in an unlock code. Just like you could when unlocking the shareware version of Quake into the full release.
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In the days before proper digital game distribution (and for many, decent internet connections), this was likely seen as a stroke of genius. However, there was one fatal flaw. Yes, you guessed it. Those dastardly pirates have struck again.
Just 39 days after the CD-ROM’s release, Quakecrk.zip emerged on the interwebs. Contained inside was Qcrack.exe, a tool which allowed users to merrily generate codes that would decrypt every single game.
The technical details go a little bit above my head, but I’ll try to explain it the best I can. When attempting to unlock a game, the CD-ROM’s GUI provided a code number, which was then supposed to be relayed to a phone agent. The agent would then provide a serial number, which the user would enter, granting access to a game.
However, the serial number obtained over the phone was merely a way to inform the unlock program that payment had been made. Said unlock program was capable of generating valid serial numbers all on its own, and merely checked to see if the locally-generated serial and the serial entered by the user matched.
Which meant a cracked program could create a valid serial using a generated code number in the same way, and voila, access to id Software’s entire back catalogue (in 1996, anyway) was yours.
Sanglard has also found a quote from David Kushner’s Masters of Doom regarding the whole fiasco:
“Gamers wasted no time hacking the shareware to unlock the full version of the game for free. Worse, all the mundane aspects of distribution and order fulfilment were spinning out of control. In a desperate measure, id tried to put the brakes on the retail shareware, but it was too late. They were stuck with almost 150,000 CDs sitting in a warehouse.”
So, the whole thing was pretty much a disaster. While gamers could pick up the shareware release of Quake for around $10 from retail stores, those in the know could use it to gain access to not just the full version of Quake, but a whole heap of other games for no extra cost.
Worse still, the pirated experience was technically better than the legitimate one. Sanglard has dug around inside the Quake shareware CD file structure and found several glaring errors, including the fact that Final Doom could not be accessed by calling the unlock center because of a small typo in the filename:
“There is a typo in SKU.17 which makes GAME-ID 12 correspond to codename ‘Final’ (with a capital F). This makes the serial generation retrieve the wrong doc. The correct value was ‘final’. This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers.”
A scenario that may ring true for some today. Anyway, lessons were learned, and I’d imagine that many curse words were used in the id Software offices when all this was discovered. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I might go and have a blast through Quake myself. It’s been a while since I’ve played the original, so I think I’m ready to make up for some lost time.
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