[SUBJECT] is a [THING] from [COUNTRY].
Communism killed 11 bajilliondy people and ruined the world forever, also pls report your lefty neighbors to the FBI.
Early Years | In [YEAR], [SUBJECT] attended school at Chornhole Highlementary etc etc. . .
Have a look for yourself. Also TIL that CDP literally started up by enticing gamers away from pirated games with extra fucking treats in the "legitimate" copies, and making a ton of money off it. Modern AAA publishers must have taken notes from them lmao
??? DRM wasn't even a thing back then, was it
DRM back then was literally stuff like calling a phone number to get a password so the game would start, or deciphering a code with a cool pirate decoder wheel
I've had to hunt down PDFs of the manual to get some old dos games running.
I installed an ancient dnd game recently that asked for a word "s___" from the manual based on chapter, line, number or something. I guessed "skill" and it worked!!
As others have mentioned there were various anti-copying tricks back in the '80s. But none of this was really "DRM" as we might think of it today, and the phrase wasn't really used until things like DVDs in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the DMCA in the US which made DRM stripping illegal for Americans - and nobody else. To say that Communist-era Poland was rampant with DRM stripping of media is not only a bit strange and anachronistic, but it's also still not a crime in Poland today, or anywhere else outside of the USA. If you live outside of the US you can strip all the DRM you like, so long as you don't widely share or sell those liberated DVD movies afterwards.
iirc DRM wasn't but games still had copy protection usually in the form of like the game asks you to look up a line from the game's manual and input it. I know there was even more sophisticated measures too.
Wikipedia is just too chicken to mention cracking by name, you heard it here first
As far back as the NES at least, video games have had copy prevention in the form of the console validating a "legitimate" copy. Still, that's only 7 years before the fall of the USSR. On PCs it was much more hacky with things like entering passwords from the printed manual.
Most commercial videotape releases had a form of copy prevention that would fuck up the signal when you try to record it onto a second tape, but it really isn't that hard to bypass, as VHS bootlegs were not uncommon at all.
Copy protection in the form of information in a manual or a special wheel with a secret code was common. A floppy disk is easy to copy. For films you could fuck up the vertical blank interval of a signal so it would play on a television but can not record. For console games the NES and Mega Drive have a chip in them which reply a code sequence, but can be crashed by clever tricks to bypass, and is not included in clones like Dendy.