Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

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Mike Davies
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Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Mike Davies »

Ocean's Robocop reviewed in January 1989 hit the charts at number one in March 1989 magazine issues and stayed in the top ten until February 1991 (dates according to Sinclair User issues). That's 23 months in the charts, covering two Christmas periods.

It's amazing how this title stayed near the top of the charts for such a length of time. Consistently out-perform even games released 18 months later. It consistently out-performed near-release spikes typical of software releases of the day, where titles had a shelf-life measured in weeks before sales tapered off.

I'm curious in the face of piracy, this game charted for such a long time -- how? Was the Speed-lock multi-load a key aspect of preventing piracy, or was it the game was so good people wanted to own the real thing instead of a copy/pirated version? Or was it the Protected by Robocop sticker?

Essentially, is Robocop an example of "build the best game ever" as a means of minimising piracy? Granted, it was a bit easy to finish (I did it a few times back in the day, and I don't complete games much). Why did it chart so consistently well in the face of apparent industrial scale piracy?
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Kweepa »

Another possibility (to be cynical) is that Ocean paid Sinclair User well to keep this expensive to make game high in the charts.
(I have no evidence for this. I don't believe it or not believe it. Just mentioning the possibility.)
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Joefish
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Joefish »

Kids spent all the money they could on games, and they wanted to spend it on the best games around. They only pirated stuff when they ran out of money, so the idea that every pirated game was a lost sale is a complete and utter lie, and always was. A good game would get good sales.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by AndyC »

Lots of money spent on advertising + actually good game = High number of sales

Doubtless there were also thousands of people pirating it too. A thing people tend to overlook is that as levels of piracy go up, you require less actual sales to sit near the top of the charts - the less "churn" in the charts, the more likely it is that there being largely driven by slow-and-steady sales and the spikes in demand that usually come from new releases are being directed in some other way (piracy, dilution of the market etc)
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PeteProdge
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by PeteProdge »

Robocop itself was a very popular film of the VHS generation. It was never treated as anything major by the TV networks, but was certainly incredibly in demand for ages in your local Blockbuster/Ritzy/whatever.
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Juan F. Ramirez
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

I can't imagine the same if it had been released in, say, 1984 or 1985, more prolific years for Spectrum games, when staying at the top was more difficult, definitely.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by PeteProdge »

Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Tue Jul 03, 2018 10:03 pm I can't imagine the same if it had been released in, say, 1984 or 1985, more prolific years for Spectrum games, when staying at the top was more difficult, definitely.
Ghostbusters did well. Not as long as Robocop, but I'm certain it lingered at the top for quite a time.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by 5MinuteRetro »

Kweepa wrote: Tue Jul 03, 2018 5:07 pm Another possibility (to be cynical) is that Ocean paid Sinclair User well to keep this expensive to make game high in the charts.
I have no idea whether or not Robocop's code development was any more or less expensive than any similar Spectrum game of the time but, if you're referring to the cost to Ocean of acquiring the license, well... I remember reading or hearing on some Ocean-related podcast that the firm picked up the rights for a relative pittance, because it was purchased based on the strength of the script -- and that there was an broad view in the industry at the time that the resulting movie might end up as a straight-to-video affair. Of course, it turned out to be anything but, so Robocop's ride through the zeitgeist probably helped to keep the game in the charts far longer than anyone involved could or would have expected.

I never much liked it, mind.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Juan F. Ramirez »

PeteProdge wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 7:56 am
Juan F. Ramirez wrote: Tue Jul 03, 2018 10:03 pm I can't imagine the same if it had been released in, say, 1984 or 1985, more prolific years for Spectrum games, when staying at the top was more difficult, definitely.
Ghostbusters did well. Not as long as Robocop, but I'm certain it lingered at the top for quite a time.
Yeah, in 1984, the closest to Robocop was Ghostbusters, definitely. But in that year software companies were releasing tons of titles, most of them classic ones so the market was more competitive than in 1988-89. Not a question of quality (Robocop it had) but of how long a nº1 hit would last.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by ZXDunny »

I never once considered that there might be piracy protection on games unless it was the old "manual/code sheet" protection. Certainly not on the tapes - I thought that stuff like Speedlock et al were just ways of loading faster. Bleepload was obviously there to help against loading errors.

From the off I had two tape decks linked together (a twin cassette hi-fi later on) so there really wasn't many games at all that I couldn't pirate.

And I pirated so, so many.
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Ast A. Moore
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Ast A. Moore »

ZXDunny wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:31 pm I thought that stuff like Speedlock et al were just ways of loading faster. Bleepload was obviously there to help against loading errors.
Well, yes and no. The primary goal of Speedlock, Alkatraz, and the like, was data protection, rather than copy protection. They used sophisticated multilayered encryption schemes and unusual loaders to prevent other people from looking into the code. Obviously, that was rendered mostly moot by devices such as the Multiface, which dumped the RAM contents after it’d been decrypted. For a casual hacker, however, loading chunks of game code from tape was impossible without reverse-engineering the decryption scheme.

Granted, early versions of Speedlock didn’t use encryption, but modified the standard loading scheme to, say, skip the flag byte, but that quickly changed.

The loaders themselves thus became quite bloated (sometimes they weighed in at 6K or more!), so, perhaps to compensate for that, loading speeds were increased.

Note, that higher loading speeds required a better tape recording setup. While original tapes that came from duplicating plants were almost guaranteed to load on low-end off-the-shelf tape players, their copies (even first-generation copies) were not. That worked as an additional deterrent.

The various tape copiers, which relied on loading game data in chunks into the computer’s RAM and then saving it onto tape—thus creating the highest quality copy—couldn’t deal with most complex protection schemes. Some games used an even simpler trick. They created a standard–speed, non-encrypted but very large single data blocks—over 48K in length. Most of the data there was just junk needed for padding. Since a tape copier would need some room for its own code, it would not be able to load a block that exceeded the size of the remaining free area RAM.

Bleepload’s idea of using the flag byte and loading data in small chunks is hardly a conscious effort to help with loading errors. Each chunk is also encrypted. After each chunk loads, it is decrypted and moved into place.

But yes, some loaders were more forgiving of tape loading errors and user intervention than others. (Some would just reset the machine if they didn’t like something—a terrible user experience decision.) Others—like Bleepload—allowed you to rewind the tape and reload individual blocks.

TL;DR: Fancy loaders were designed to protect IP, rather than to prevent piracy.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by ZXDunny »

y'know, it's almost as if I never actually wrote an emulator sometimes. But thanks for the explanation anyway! :)
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Joefish »

Not sure how that response was meant, but anyway, I didn't know all that above.

I always thought, when I read about the layers of encryption and packing when Fairlight loads, what a waste of time it all was. I guess with compression there are advantages to the load times, but what's the point of encryption? It could always be circumvented as there was no way of hiding your decryption code or algorithm, and as has been pointed out, hardware add-ons made inspecting running code easy enough for anyone who was desperate.

I just assumed most of the alternate loaders were there to hasten the deterioration in quality of making tape-to-tape copies. I certainly never saw anyone trying to copy a game with a load / save system. Though I suppose if you were an industrial-level pirate making bulk copies that might be your preferred method, to keep the quality up.

As for Robocop, don't forget the cachet associated with having anything to do with a film that most kids would have been too young to actually have seen. That immediately gives it appeal; in fact, Ghostbusters was rated 15. Just look at the fuss over kids who want to play GTA (and the moron parents that let them, ad the other idiots - including many prominent MPs - who call for a change in the law over something that's already illegal).
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Ast A. Moore »

ZXDunny wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:27 pm y'know, it's almost as if I never actually wrote an emulator sometimes. But thanks for the explanation anyway! :)
We aim to please. :D
Joefish wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:52 pm I always thought, when I read about the layers of encryption and packing when Fairlight loads, what a waste of time it all was. I guess with compression there are advantages to the load times, but what's the point of encryption? It could always be circumvented as there was no way of hiding your decryption code or algorithm, and as has been pointed out, hardware add-ons made inspecting running code easy enough for anyone who was desperate.
Sure, if you have a Multiface, it’s a piece of cake. If not, however, just the sheer amount of time spent reverse engineering something like Alkatraz, for instance, will put many people off. I have to admit, some custom loaders used batshit crazy encryption, XORing and ANDing data, “on-the-fly” changes of data loading address so it jumped from one place to another without an apparent (audible) break in a block, etc. Even with modern monitors/debuggers I gave up on quite a few of them. Now, couple that with task of creating the actual masters for duplication (i.e encrypting data and writing a “saver”) . . . an extraordinary amount of effort. Granted, Alkatraz has the best loading screen animation.
Joefish wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:52 pm I just assumed most of the alternate loaders were there to hasten the deterioration in quality of making tape-to-tape copies.
That would have been easily achieved with 3x and faster loading schemes with no encryption. (I believe the fastest commercial tape loader peaked at somewhere around 2.5x speed of the ROM loader.) Still, that bumped the upper frequencies to just over 6 kHz, and not all low-end tape recorders could pull that off. The irony is that the Spectrum is quite capable of loading speeds of 10x of the standard ROM loader via the regular EAR port given a high-quality audio signal—almost comparable to some disk-based systems. The problem was that back in the 80s, that would have required the expensive Type IV tapes and high-end tape decks (or 15 ips+ reel-to-reel recorders) for playback. The price of tapes would have skyrocketed and the numbers of users capable of loading them without errors would have been very, very low. ;)

That said, there were quite a few custom loaders that didn’t do anything crazy (well, almost) in terms of data obfuscation and merely sped things up a tad.

P.S. Nether Earth is a good example of the kind of “copy protection” meant to fool the load/save types of tape copiers and some inexperienced hackers. The BASIC loader contains a few hundred bytes of useless garbage. It then loads a simple machine code loader, which differs from the standard ROM loader in that it adds rainbow border colors. It then loads a single 48KB block of data starting at address $4000. About 20KB (20KB, Carl!) is pure garbage: either repeated bits of data or contiguous strings of zeroes. I cleaned up the BASIC loader, incorporated the machine code loader into it, and got rid of all the garbage in the main data block. As a result, I cut down the loading time from the original 4:28 to 2:52.

Crazy times they were, the 1980s. :lol:
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by AndyC »

Joefish wrote: Wed Jul 04, 2018 6:52 pm As for Robocop, don't forget the cachet associated with having anything to do with a film that most kids would have been too young to actually have seen. That immediately gives it appeal; in fact, Ghostbusters was rated 15.
Ghostbusters was rated PG (BBFC) in the UK. Though the wider point about the appeal of things with more taboo ratings is certainly true.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by Joefish »

Was it? I never got to go to the cinema as a kid. Maybe it was Gremlins I was thinking of as being a 15.
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Re: Robocop - Chart longevity vs piracy

Post by AndyC »

Yup, Gremlins did indeed get a 15 (BBFC) as another one of those films which fell into the controversial bubble somewhere between a PG and 15 rating, with another notable one being Temple of Doom which got a PG (BBFC) in the UK after some cuts (and which lead to the creation of PG-13 in the US as they had nothing between PG and R-rated, which is roughly equivalent to a UK18). Eventually that all lead to the creation of a 12 cert, with Batman being the first film rated that way and yet another classic Ocean licence.
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