The Fascinating Story of DRM, Part One: Wario’s Woes

When I was a little girl, I loved playing Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? When my father bought me the MS-DOS versions of those games, I thought it was really cool that each game came with a reference book, The World Almanac and Book of Facts with the former, and The New American Desk Encyclopedia with the latter. Obviously, nerdy children grow up to be nerdy adults.

Admittedly I am someone who, to this day, reads almanacs and encyclopedias for fun. Wikipedia and computers that I can curl up in bed with were fifteen years or more away, so I’d take those books into my bedroom, and read them until I fell asleep. Being even messier in 1990 than I am in 2016, they’d end up lost somewhere.

I could usually guess correctly on my own where the criminal in the game went to, but I needed each book for when I’d execute those games. That’s because before either game would let me commence with my sleuthing, I’d be asked to refer to the book to answer a specific question. The screen would look something like this:

Then I’d scramble through my books and toys, desperately looking for the book.

That was a very creative copy protection measure of Broderbund’s, and it’s not the sort of thing game developers do these days. Other, apparently more sophisticated means are used to try to prevent piracy now.

Obviously, people work very hard creating games, applications, music, movies, and books. My father was a novelist. My life is full of musicians, visual artists, videographers, and software developers. I too create content for a living, as I’m doing right now. We all need to be paid in some way.

You can rely on the fact that pretty much all software that isn’t FOSS (opensource), or proprietary freeware, donationware, or abandonware has some sort of DRM, digital rights management. The employment of DRM has unique information security implications, and affects all of us in one way or another.

There are a lot of intriguing events in the past that have shaped how DRM and copy protection in general is implemented today. Let’s start with Nintendo and Sony!

A Plumber, a Hylian, and a Bandicoot Walk Into a Bar

Like millions of people my age, my first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). For me, it was a present for the Christmas before my sixth birthday. The NES was released in the United States and Canada a few years earlier, in 1985.

But Japan had the same platform commercially available since 1983, where it was called the Famicom, a portmanteau of Family Computer.

Notice how I refered to Nintendo’s third generation gaming offerings as the same platform, not the same console. You see, between the NES and the Famicom, it wasn’t only the names that were different.

If someone was able to get me a Famicom game from Japan, it would’ve been a waste of effort and money. There wasn’t just software-level region locking (as seen in some recent consoles), the damn Famicom cartridge wouldn’t even fit inside my NES. The form factors of both Famicom and NES consoles and Famicom and NES cartridges are completely different.

In the R&D that Nintendo did between releasing the Famicom and the NES, piracy and quality control were both major concerns. In addition to the size and shape differences between both consoles’ cartridges, there were also differences in the pins that connect the circuit boards in the cartridges to the circuit boards in the consoles.

Nintendo was greatly concerned about game development. They paid attention to the infamous video game crash of 1983, which affected second generation consoles in North America and Europe. Way too many games were developed by third parties for the Atari 2600, the Colecovision, and the Intellivision that weren’t just subjectively bad, they were often objectively broken, with serious technical defects. Those defects would often render games completely unplayable.

Us North American and European kids of the 1980s and early 1990s fondly remember how the art on officially licensed NES cartridges featured the “Nintendo Seal of Quality.” We may have assumed that it meant that Mario thought they were fun to play, but what it really meant was that the games didn’t have disabling bugs.

Many of the best NES and Famicom games were developed directly by Nintendo, but Nintendo licensed a select handful of third-party developers, limiting each developer to release only about half a dozen games per year each. Nintendo didn’t just try to assure quality control and copy protection from the business end, but also from the hardware end.

One feature that the NES had that the Famicom lacked was the 10NES lock-out chip, which required extra pins. Nintendo distributed the keys for the Sharp produced technology directly to licensed third-party developers. Why didn’t the Famicom have an equivalent? It may have been because buggy second generation (Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision) cartridges came mainly from outside of Japan, but probably the main reason was that Nintendo had more experience when designing the NES, intergrating lessons learned from designing and releasing the Famicom.

But there were still many unlicensed NES cartridges produced over the years, much to Nintendo’s dismay.

Tengen was a division of Atari that produced many unlicensed (as well as licensed) NES games. Their first attempt to reverse engineer the 10NES chip was unsuccessful. So, on their second attempt, in 1986, they went straight to the US Patent and Trademark Office, which held the 10NES code. They claimed they needed the pertinent documents in order to defend themselves against an infringement lawsuit. What a meta lie, indeed. But it enabled Tengen to make money by producing possibly illegal games for Nintendo’s groundbreaking console.

Tengen and Nintendo fought each other in American court from 1986 to 1992. Tengen had a few very minor victories in that timeframe, but Nintendo ultimately won.

By then, the Super Famicom had been available in Japan since 1990, and the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) had been available in much of the rest of the world since 1991 and earlier in 1992. But some licensed NES games were released well into the 1990s, the last in North America was Wario’s Woods in 1994, and The Lion King in Europe in 1995.

Tengen wasn’t the only party that had some success in cracking the 10NES chip.

Colordreams found a way to disable the 10NES receiver in NES consoles by designing their unlicensed cartridges to short out the lock-out chip with a charge of both postive and negative voltage. So, a legitimate NES console could load an illegitimate Colordreams game without checking for a 10NES key. Very sneaky! AVE’s unlicensed cartridges did pretty much the same thing.

Camerica’s unlicensed cartridges did something a little different. Their cartridges toggled the mapper a number of times with a signal of several kilohertz, to spoof the begininng of a legitimate 10NES session. Then, the lock-out chip would be crashed by a negative voltage transmission.

In addition to lacking a 10NES chip, there was another hardware difference in the Famicom that made piracy easier than for the NES.

Nintendo developed the Japan-exclusive Famicom Disk System peripheral to allow games to be developed that contained more data than Famicom cartridges had capacity for. One of the first games Nintendo developed for the Famicom Disk System (FDS) was rather, ummm… legendary. It was The Legend of Zelda, the very first game in the stellar Zelda franchise. Those of us outside of Japan got FDS titles in higher capacity NES cartridges shortly after their FDS releases.

FDS disks were Nintendo’s proprietary floppy disk format. Consumers could purchase blank FDS disks, and have the FDS game of their choice written onto their disks via one of over 3000 authorized Disk Writer kiosks in retailers all over Japan.

Nintendo did their best to implement their own DRM onto the FDS disks. A thick Nintendo logo was cut into the bottom of the disks, and the disk drives in the FDS and the Disk Writers were designed so that disks without the logo wouldn’t fit inside. They also tried to prevent Disk Writers from being usable for mass piracy by slowing down the speed in which the Disk Writers could read disks.

But alas, instructions of how to write to FDS disks in an unauthorized way were published in a few Japanese computer magazines. There was also at least one program that was designed to write FDS disks bypassing the protections in licensed Disk Writer kiosks.

The Super Famicom and the North American SNES were a lot more similiar to each other than the previous Nintendo consoles. But still, the form factors of Super Famicom cartridges and SNES cartridges were different, and the connectors of Super Famicom cartridges were usually wider. Confusingly, European and Australian SNESes had pretty much the same form factor as the Super Famicom. But overall, Nintendo’s fourth generation was pretty much technologically unified. All Super Famicoms and SNESes included seldom used connectors at the bottom of the consoles to connect peripherals.

By the early 1990s, it became a lot cheaper to manufacture CD-ROMs. In fact, CD-ROMs were significantly cheaper per unit to manufacture than cartridges were, even then. And the much increased data storage capacity was enticing to third-party Nintendo game developers such as Squaresoft (now known as Square Enix) who wanted to make games with CD quality sound, cinematic scenes, and 3D polygon rendering, as opposed to completely sprite-based graphics.

So it was good that Nintendo was ahead of the game. They had started working with Sony on a CD-ROM based console since long before the Super Famicom/SNES were even released, as early as 1986. That console was likely intended to be the successor to the Famicom/NES, but CD-ROM technology was still in its infancy in the late 1980s. So the related development hiccups and glitches may have contributed to the fact that Nintendo worked on R&D for higher capacity cartridges, and the Super Famicom/SNES were released as they were.

By the time the Super Famicom hit Japan in 1990, Nintendo’s project with Sony started to go in the direction of producing a peripheral for the Super Famicom/SNES. They may have also known that Sega was developing Sega CD as a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive peripheral. Sega already got a head start in the 16-bit fourth generation console market, as the Mega Drive debuted in Japan in 1988. Never were Nintendo and Sega closer competitors than during the fourth generation. The competition was great for kids like me, that gen was the salad days of our gaming nostalgia. The marketshare race spurred tremendous innovation between the rivals. So, at Nintendo, the heat was on.

Nintendo’s Hiroshi Yamauchi and Sony’s Ken Kutaragi met at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show. Kutaragi-sensei presented Yamauchi-sensei with the documents to legally finalize the CD-ROM peripheral or Super Famicom/SNES successor project. But Yamauchi was rather disappointed with what he read. The contract gave too much of the intellectual property rights and possibly the profit to Sony. So, Nintendo decided to stop collaborating with Sony, and went to Phillips to work on the project instead.

Sony already manufactured some consoles with a CD-ROM drive and Super Famicom/SNES ports. Nintendo was also thinking back to the Famicom Disk System’s piracy problems. After some legal battles, Sony dropped all Nintendo technology from their project. So, Nintendo may have agreed to go ahead with the Sony collaboration if the contract was re-written in Nintendo’s favor. But by the time Nintendo decided that cartridges prevented piracy a lot better than CD-ROMs, there was no changing their mind. Phillips were out of the picture as well.

So, Nintendo’s piracy concerns ultimately got Sony into the video game console business, and the Sony PlayStation was released in Japan in 1994, and in North America and Europe in 1995. It became the fastest selling console in history (at the time).

Nintendo’s last cartridge-based non-portable console was the Nintendo 64, released in 1996. Squaresoft had a real hit RPG series that you may have heard of, Final Fantasy. Squaresoft initially told fans and retailers that Final Fantasy VII was being developed for the Nintendo 64. Squaresoft had big ambitions for the game. For the first time, they were developing a game with 3D polygon graphics. Eventually, the limited data storage capacity of Nintendo 64 cartridges, coupled with the fact that cartridges couldn’t be swapped in the middle of a game session, led them to switch development to the Sony PlayStation.

Final Fantasy VII was released on two CD-ROMs in 1997. So fans of Japanese RPGs (including millions of consumers outside of Japan, especially in the Anglosphere) torn between buying a Nintendo 64 or a Sony PlayStation now pretty much had their decision made for them. The PlayStation was already selling beyond Sony’s expectations, and Final Fantasy VII accelerated the pace.

Nintendo had a number of popular first-party titles for the 64, but by the time Final Fantasy VII was out, most major third-party developers jumped to Sony. The Nintendo 64 still sold pretty well, but Sony ultimately won the fifth generation console wars.

Now, Sony’s PS2, PS3, and PS4 have all had major marketshare. Their first portable, the PSP, did alright in Japan, even though the Nintendo DS had more Japanese marketshare, and significantly more international marketshare. Even though the PS Vita hasn’t been doing very well, PS3 and PS4's sales keep Sony going strong. (I have many games for my Vita. It’s a damn good console that people are overlooking.)

Nintendo is still very competitive in the video game industry, but so is Sony. And to think that if it weren’t for Nintendo’s earlier experiences with piracy and copy protection, Sony may have never become such a major competitor.

In my next article, I’ll talk about EA and Activision’s more recent DRM problems. And what about that time when Sony produced a DRM system that was actually rootkit malware? Stay tuned…

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