Its odd that DRM had existed since the Apple //e days. I remember returning EA's "Seven Cities of Gold" because it wouldn't load right because the protection was so exacting it just wouldn't run on some machines. Twice it went back, I gave up playing that game. So annoying.

Then came the hackers who cracked games (and put banners up on game load..), copy tools to get around the copy protection. Locksmith was one I remember. My friend had a card with a button that would dump memory (machines only had 64Kbytes or 128) to disk, perfect for copying those games that loaded completely into memory and didn't go back to disk. You needed the card reload and play the games though.

I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.

While some are fun to replay and important in context, The memory of those games is sometimes better than the reality. Though I miss mind-strike for intellivision though. Haven't seen anything like it.