The "magic" behind the Quake Shareware CD

A long time ago, a group of people decided to make the most groundbreaking first person shooter of all time. Thrice. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and of course, Quake. Now out of all of these games, I would consider Doom to be the most influential. 90% of us would never have THOUGHT of using a shotgun in a FPS if it weren't for Doom.

 ♪ THE BEST OF TIMES~!!!! ♪

Then Doom 3 made the shotgun dogshit, because we can't have nice things in this world. But why am I talking about this, instead of getting straight to the point? Honestly, I do not know. It might be because I don't have much to say about Quake, for I never got that far into the game. If I can say anything, however, it's that the game is way too frickin' brown.

Still fun to play, though.

Quake was released in 1996 on CD for MS-DOS/Windows machines. Much like the last game of theirs, they chose to release a full $40 version with all of the levels, and a shareware version with only one episode.

Imagine buying Quake thinking it was the full version, but in actuality it was the shareware version minus the sticker :(

Little did people know, there was actually a FULL version of Quake on the shareware disc. And even better, full versions of other id Software games, like Wolf3D and Doom.

An example of one of the encrypted .MJ3 files. (Why is it named that?)

They were encrypted, and in order to decrypt them, you would have to buy the game by opening the Windows only "Quake Unlock" app, clicking on a "buy now" button for the specific game you wanted. Then you would get a code, which along with your info you would have to send to a specific phone number. The person on the other end would give you a unlock key to input, you'd be $45 poorer, and viola, you have the full version of Quake.

Admittedly, the way I have described this is a bit concise, but I will explain it in greater detail later when I talk about the crack program. Wait, what am I talking about? There couldn't be a "crack program" for such an ingenious idea! It's just nonsense to imagine crackers cracking this totally not exploitable system in, say, just a month!

They did crack it in a month. :|

The security of the system (which was made by a company known as TestDrive) was practically nonexistent. An offline program could be made to generate unlock keys, without needing to pay, as long as you knew what you were doing. Obviously, an average Joe wanting to try out a FPS on his brand new 166mhz Pentium wouldn't know about this, but it was the mid 90s, Usenet and BBS forums were popular, and people finding and sharing ways to get games for free was just part of that culture.

Not that people don't pirate nowadays...

CLICK FOR PART 2