King's Quest Omnipedia
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Copy protection is used in King's Quest games I, II, III, IV, V, and VI as a way to prevent theft and/or counterfeiting.

Background[]

Sierra On-Line had spent millions of dollars developing and marketing the King's Quest saga, and it makes a good effort to protect the games from people who try to make copies for their friends-otherwise known as software pirates. At the same time, the company wanted to inconvenience legitimate players as little as possible. All King's Quest programs have some form of copy protection.[1]

Copy protection in King's Quest I, King's Quest II, and King's Quest III[]

King's Quest I, II, and III use a key disk which must be inserted when you first start the program. This form of copy protection can occasionally cause problems, particularly with unusual brands of computers and unusual disk configurations, so when King's Quest IV came along, the programmers developed a less electronic scheme.[2]

In early versions of King's Quest I and II, the game had to be loaded from the floppy disk, and the game checks the size of the floppy disk to see if it matches up with what it should be. If the game was copied to another floppy disk or hard drive, the file check fails. A floppy copy of the these two games were made possible with the introduction of the Copy2PC Option Board which required the hardware card inserted into any available ISA slot in the PC motherboard and cabled between the floppy drive and the floppy controller interface.


Pseudo-"Copy protection" in King's Quest III[]

The page numbers of the spell book which are needed to eventually escape from Manannan are sometimes viewed as copy protection by some fans. Depending on the sources this was not 'considered' true copy protection, and often got reprinted in various official strategy guides complete with page numbers. Even the Official Book of King's Quest (which obscures the spell numbers, instead listing them in regular numerals), does not consider the spell book to be one of the forms of copy protection but rather a key component to the game's gameplay.[3] It after all makes up 90% of the games actions, between giving the player a checklist of ingredients to collect, and spells needed to beat most of the puzzles in the game, tend explaining, when, where and how to use those spells.

The ingredients are listed in the booklet that came with King's Quest III, but in case you lost it, here's what you'll have to find. Check off the ingredients as you find them.[4]
First, you must type TURN TO PAGE n, where n is the page number of the spell in the original Book of Spells. The number is listed here after the spell name. One complication: You must type the page number in Roman numerals, and you'll have to figure those out for yourself because Llewdor College doesn't teach Latin. Then enter the recipe exactly.[5]
You have to mix them exactly according to the formulas found in the great book and reprinted in the King's Quest III booklet. You've lost that, too? OK, here are the directions, but take great care to type and spell everything exactly as it appears.[6]

The book only leaves off two chants, which has no bearing on the gameplay, and won't hinder players:

Eventually the spell wears off, but you can end it early with a special chant. Unfortunately, that chant is missing. You should have bought the game.)[7]
(There is a way to cause the storm to stop early, but the paper on which it was written became wet and is now illegible.)[8]

Copy protection in King's Quest IV[]

...so when King's Quest IV came along, the programmers developed a less electronic scheme. King's Quest IV asks you to look up a word located on a specific page, paragraph, and line in the user's manual. If you don't have a manual, you can't start the game.[9]

King's Quest IV uses excerpts from a group of paragraphs as copy protection. For example, page 1, 3rd paragraph, 1st word.

Copy protection in King's Quest V[]

King's Quest V incorporates the latest thinking in copy protection: The password is built directly into the gameplay. Indeed, it is possible to complete about half of the adventure without providing a password. The folks at Sierra know that no matter what they do, pirated copies are going to circulate, but they're betting that pirates will be hooked enough after playing half the game to buy a copy so that they can finish. After overcoming the witch, the bandits, and the treacherous mountains, one sure would hate to leave poor Graham stranded beside a rowboat.[10]

At times during the game, you may be asked to cast some specific spell that appears in the game's documentation-the instructions and stuff that comes packed with the disks. This happens a lot on the beach by the hermit's hut, when Graham attempts to launch a boat. Just match the onscreen symbols to the ones in the documentation, and then use the letters you find to spell out the spell (so to speak). This acts as the game's copy protection. If you don't have the documentation, you can't play the game through. REMEMBER: It is illegal to make a copy of someone else's software for your own use.[11]

King's Quest V uses special rune spells that had to be answered from the manual after every major section of the game, although the number of times and where it appeared in the game was randomized. This was removed in the CD-ROM version.

Copy protection in King's Quest VI[]

The Ancient Ones alphabet from the Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles is used as the copy protection. You must have the alphabet to ascend the Cliffs of Logic successfully. Other puzzles in the game also required clues printed in the guidebook to solve them -- for example, the floor tile trap in the Catacombs. However, many of the solutions are simple enough to be memorized.

  1. TOBOKQ2E, pg 33
  2. TOBOKQ2E, pg34
  3. TOBOKQ2E, pg 34
  4. TOBOKQ2E, pg 86-87
  5. TOBOKQ2E, pg 88
  6. TOBOKQ2E, pg 88
  7. TOBOKQ2E, pg 89
  8. TOBOKQ2E, pg 92
  9. TOBOKQ2E, pg 34
  10. TOBOKQ2E, pg 34
  11. KQC2E, pg
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