And in a matter of a few hours a single guy will have read the manual, figured out the clue and put it on a wiki or a Reddit post so that none of your other players have to rtfm
Personalized, matched to that specific instance of the game, and the clue gets the Star Tropics treatment but with paper that dissolves after 60 seconds.
Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.
Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).
King’s Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn’t beat it.
A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.
My childhood family computer had the old D&D games from the gold box where you had a wheel you had to pull out and align it every single time you played to get the code symbol to put in in order to play the game.
In retrospect, that was kind of cool, even if it’s diabolical.
I remember Street Fighter II asked for page x, paragraph y word z. Once it even pointed to the German section of the manual where the word “mitten” was used. I found that clever. You can’t just copy the English part.
Also, Leisure Suit Larry did something similar, and they sold more copies of the manual than they sold of the game.
If I ever make a game I’m including at least 7 pieces of deep lore in the manual and one clue that you would only figure out by rtfm
And in a matter of a few hours a single guy will have read the manual, figured out the clue and put it on a wiki or a Reddit post so that none of your other players have to rtfm
Every manual is personalized
Personalized, matched to that specific instance of the game, and the clue gets the Star Tropics treatment but with paper that dissolves after 60 seconds.
Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.
Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).
King’s Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn’t beat it.
A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.
My childhood family computer had the old D&D games from the gold box where you had a wheel you had to pull out and align it every single time you played to get the code symbol to put in in order to play the game.
In retrospect, that was kind of cool, even if it’s diabolical.
I remember Street Fighter II asked for page x, paragraph y word z. Once it even pointed to the German section of the manual where the word “mitten” was used. I found that clever. You can’t just copy the English part.
Also, Leisure Suit Larry did something similar, and they sold more copies of the manual than they sold of the game.