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Monica Harrington / Medium
In a post-talk interview with PC Gamer, Harrington famous that her ex-husband remembers the authentication scheme being in place earlier than they found their nephew’s newfound love of CD copying. Regardless, Monica stated their nephew’s expertise positively cemented a brand new understanding of how on a regular basis gamers noticed sport piracy.
“He was 19 years outdated. He wasn’t serious about issues like firms, enterprise fashions, or something like that,” Harrington instructed PC Gamer. “He wasn’t serious about mental property. He later apologized profoundly, and I stated, ‘Oh my God, you don’t have any thought how useful that was.'”
Sadly for Valve, the CD key system utilized in Half-Life DRM was fairly simple to bypass when you knew the fitting code to make use of (as our personal discussion board members circa 2001 can attest). Nonetheless, it is easy to see how the additional layer of safety Valve placed on Half-Life helped encourage Steam’s considerably extra sturdy DRM system for Half-Life 2 years later.
The remainder of Harrington’s GDC speak contains much more insider details about the early days of Valve, together with a dialogue of how rights points with retail writer Sierra virtually precipitated Valve to desert Half-Life 2 in the course of improvement. VentureBeat has an extremely detailed write-up of the speak in its entirety, which serves as an important follow-up to Harrington’s personal prolonged weblog put up remembrances from final summer season.
