Your move creep

An in-depth analysis of Ocean Software's innovative, experimental effort to combat piracy through dongle-based authorisation. RoboCop 3, published in 1992, was chosen as the game through which to test the optimistic technique. Accompanying three floppy disks was a hardware device you would be obliged, rather inconveniently, to connect to one of your Amiga system's joystick ports whenever playing the game. Unfortunately for Ocean - and possibly the fate of the Amiga as a viable platform - the copyright protection mechanism was rapidly hacked out of the code by crackers, the resultant standalone version made freely available on a global scale.

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8 piracy killers that weren't

An investigation into various novel techniques tried and tested by Amiga game publishers in the '90s with a view to combating software piracy. Did any of them deliver financial benefits, or just annoy honest gamers who purchased legitimate software?

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A life on Ocean's waves with Gary Bracey

I've been reading and writing about Ocean Software's erstwhile games development director, Gary Bracey, with great admiration since the '80s, so when he agreed to a Q&A session it was quite a surreal moment to put it lightly. That probably explains why I ended up asking an approximation of the most obvious question in the history of game development questions; which is your favourite of the games you helped to deliver? *Groan* I hope I managed to compensate elsewhere.

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