Gamers of a certain age are reporting warm, nostalgic feelings; rumours of code book/manual-based copy protection sadly unfounded.
Remember when games used to come on 3.5″ floppy disks? That was fine when graphics were light and games were tiny, but as the ambition of development teams grew, so did the size of the titles they produced. Before long, one 1.44MB floppy disk wasn’t enough to cut it, and games had to be spread over multiple disks. X-Wing and Tie Fighter were 5 disks. The Secret of Monkey Island was 7. Good times.
Younger readers might need to suspend their disbelief for a moment. Yes, that really does say 1.44MB. As in MegaBytes. As in, one-thousandth of a GigaByte. Or one-millionth of a TeraByte. You genuinely could fit whole games into the footprint of a mid-sized PDF back in the eighties and early nineties. If you were ever wondering why the save icon looks like it does, that’s what floppy disks looked like, and they were all we had.
Anyway, back to GTA V. While people with both feet planted in the digital age are having fun dragging down their 60GB download, then waiting for it to unpack and install only to find it doesn’t like their Windows username or worse, having their licence key stolen while live-streaming the install, some of the community are going old school. When you purchase GTA V on physical media, it comes on seven DVDs. Yes, seven.
Will this get your GTA V up and running any quicker than the downloaders? Not likely. You might have to wait for your copy to arrive in the mail or had to pop out to your local game store (whereas the downloaders have been able to pre-stage their acquisition) but to those of a certain age, that’s just not the point. There’s something nice and tangible about having a thick book of disks in your hand and it harks back to the good old days where purchasing and installing a game was an event in itself, not just a standoffish ethereal web transaction. We just wish that to go with its multi-disk install, GTA V had gone full-retro and also included manual-based copy protection…
Copy protection 1/3 – please input the fourth word on the seventh line, on page 96:
> crack-whore
Copy protection 2/3 – please input the last word on the second line, on page 212:
> low-rider
Copy protection 3/3 – please input the second word on the last line, on page 65:
> carjacking