The dragon and the crack screen

Wed, 15 Jan 2003 21:09:00 -0500
/technology

While wandering around other bloggers archives - in a vain (as in unsuccessful) attempt to find others struggling, as I am, to find their writing feet - I ran across the wonderful first article of Mark Pilgrim.

It contains the following beautiful and ironic observation:

Sonys and Broderbunds of the world, pay attention: the only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized. Long after my Playstation console falls apart, long after all the original, legitimate, uncopyable Playstation discs have crumbled into dust, long after the no-doubt-teenager who cracked Spyro 3 has grown up and joined polite society and found better things to do with his time, Spyro the Dragon will be remembered. Unfortunately, it will also be associated with that damn ugly crack screen, because no other versions will exist. This is what the past will look like someday. And we’ll just shrug, skip intro, and get on with it.