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Comment by vxxzy | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! I once lost my original StarCraft CD Key. In a desperate attempt to simply install and play the game I tried converting “StarCraft” to numbers using A1Z26 cipher. Honesty didn’t know it at the time what to call what I was doing. I was just a kid! But, guess what? It worked! It only worked for local play. BattleNet did not see it as a valid key. I like to think some SWE somewhere hid that in there on purpose. Whoever you are, if you see this, thank you!

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I once used the example key shown in a software manuals how to register section. It worked. I was rather chuffed at the time.

My brother bought CorelDRAW for Win95 and only kept the CD, forgetting how important the paper with the key was. On a reinstall he than entered 11223344556677889900 and it worked. I used that method multiple times as a teen on software from different manufacturers. It worked quite often. Though sometimes you had to play with the numbers at the end. (sometimes 000 other times 011 etc.)

wtf. he entered that number just out of nowhere and it worked? what a wizard!

The way this worked was there's a very large amount of keys accepted by the installer and a very tiny fraction of them are actually issued / valid for online play.

There wasn't that much value in having the installer keys be that narrow; if you have a legal cd it'll have the key printed right on the case (and there's no way to stop sharing). If it's a burned cd either the person who ripped it can just include the key or they can edit the installer itself to accept any key.

My standard strategy for installing StarCraft (at LAN parties I often had to do it a few times in a row) was just to mash the keyboard a few times until I got through. It usually took somewhere between five and ten tries, in my experience.

There’s also a valid key pre-brood war that was something like “1234567890123”

Brood war didn't have its own keys. Both 1234567890123 and 3333333333333 worked for StarCraft.

All 'G' was valid for Quake 3. I was surprised to find this out from my friend's 11 year old little sibling.

I used a key gen for quake 3 when it came out. Was surprised when I was able to play online. Told my friends who were not able to play online. I guess I was just lucky my key was an actual key!

That feels like some dev being lazy and adding backdoor easy to type keys for testing stuff

StarCraft was my first attempt and success at "cracking" a game!

Apparently it had a bug where it didn't recognize the CD on Windows 98 but it worked on Windows 95!

Didn't have internet, so I fired up Visual Studio, stepped through the .exe, and tried flipping each JE/JNE or JZ/JNZ instruction that came before the copy protection error showed up.

It worked!! I searched for the sequence of instructions in a hex editor and modified the exe. And it led me to one of the best games ever to this date. :)

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