Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

The best part of this article was seeing the old computer store. It was all so much better before the internet...

Don't get me wrong. I like the internet, but...

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). "

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The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!

In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.

I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all.

(There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]."

While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.

> The packaging was actually pretty high quality for a shareware product. On my copy, a sticker on the front clarifies this is the "Shareware version" with instructions to call 1-800-669-9342 (or 1-800-ID-GAMES) to unlock the full game.

> The phone number is still active today. However you don't reach the unlock center since CompUSA went out of business. The Superstore chain closed between 2007 and 2008. Instead of an unlock operator we get an automated message to sell us elderly stuff.

I remember how stuff like that presented an insurmountable obstacle as a kid. Buying stuff in the store, sure, but calling phone numbers or writing letters to companies? No way.

I like how it has come full circle today, with the phone number being inaccessible once again...

> By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.

That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code.

I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.

How would the challenge/serial have worked if implemented correctly?

Since the challenge rotate every 5 minutes, there must be some way for a user to enter against an old challenge, right? Else they call, get a code and nothing.

But even with that out of the way, the decryption key must be the same across all discs, since there is only 1 master disc.

So the challenge/serial must combine to create a decryption key, which can be shared across users.

As soon as I saw "Quake Shareware" in the title of this post, I thought "Pray to the one you will pay!" which was what appeared on the screen when you ran QCRACK.

I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!

Surprised that it's not mentioned that the CD was also an audio CD with the Quake soundtrack..! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack)

"Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020"

Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM

From the title I was expecting this to be about them packing 700MB of data on the CD, a common thing at the time by spacing the tracks slightly closer together, as some CD-Rs did.

I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.

Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.

Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.

Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?

"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. And never attribute to stupidity what you can attribute to time pressure. -- Fab's Razor".

Surfacing this gem of a razor here, as it's buried deep in the (fantastic) blog post. Indeed, all too often, what we attribute simply to stupidity/ignorance, as per the classic Hanlon's razor, is actually downstream of market/client/management/deadline etc. pressure.

Am I reading this right, and was only the file header encrypted? Also, wasn't ID the company that did not use serials or other DRM? Maybe that explains their naivite, maybe they underestimated how easily games get cracked.

Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...

> A gamer could go to any of the hundreds of CompUSA/Computer City stores and buy the CD for $9.95.

I'm pretty sure I bought it for $6.66

Those photos of the inside of CompUSA are just stunning. Bright sodium lighting, not a dim dank cave (one of the benefits of CRTs over modern OLED screens and their color range from black to slightly-less-black). Colorful packaging everywhere (this was before fun was made illegal in 2012). Big signage, so you know where things are (the idea of a customer knowing where to find something without being diverted to an antivirus upsell by a "helpful" "associate" didn't bother MBA CEOs back then. Nowadays the idea would cause them them to spontaneously combust).

That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!

I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!

> Upon contacting the operator, users were to also communicate a "SOURCE CODE". It played no part in generating the Unlock code. It may have been a way for the distributors to claim a transaction fee. Browsing eBay, I found many with names indicative of past/present retailers. 12-BSTBY BestBuy, 24-CCITY Computer City, 22-CUSA CompUSA, 88, 11-1111, 38-EB Electronic Boutique, 44-FTRSP Future Shop (Canada), 34-EGGH Egghead Software, and 56-MCTR Media Play/ Musicland.

Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?

The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.

$55 ($9.95 CD + $45 activation) in August 1996 = $116 today, per the BLS inflation adjustment calculator.

Gold was ~$400 back in 1996. Now it's ~11 times that.

An expensive game however you gib it.

This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.

If you were to do this today, how could you make it foolproof?

Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"?

By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?

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Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide.

Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe.

Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?

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