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Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else. Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I thin
by eszed 5mo ago
Of course they do. Only fools expected anything else.
Does else anyone remember the "age verification" on '80s video games? Some of them were hilarious. I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I was the local history nerd, so I remember getting calls from classmates, like "we're trying to get into a game; when was JFK assassinated?" If I didn't know I'd ask my dad, who never knew he was contributing to the delinquency of (other) minors.
- distances 5mo ago> I think it was Leisure Suit Larry that asked multiple choice history questions that I guess were meant to be impossible for fifth graders to guess. I'm from a non-English-speaking country. We didn't understand the questions at all, but all us kids in the neighborhood got into the game just fine with some brute forcing. Also, coming up with the expected commands in the game was way beyond our skills so we'd only advance to a point where someone had seen and memorized others play. Didn't matter, as it was one of the only games in the system so we'd play it anyway. I still remember how hard it was to type "ken sent me" in the allotted time window.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoNowhere does the us "center of the universe" mindset shine more through, then when to expect the world to remember the presidential dogs name.
- distances 5mo agoWell, the main hurdle was that we were 7-9 years old iirc and didn't know any English at all, beyond the memorized "knock knock" etc. So the topic of the questions wasn't on the table :-)
- lazyasciiart 5mo agoI love this story. I remember seeing two pre-literate kindergarten kids playing on a gameboy or similar handheld, one of them teaching the other strings of button presses for things like “save game” - just navigating through all the menus by memory.
- gambiting 5mo agoI played through the entire Pokemon Yellow without understanding a lick of english. You just remembered what the commands did, and you learnt by experimenting.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoEven as an English speaker the Pokémon all sounded gibberish to me so it wouldn't have been much help
- AyyEye 5mo agoThanks for this comment -- it dredged up a memory I had almost forgotten. I did this but inverted. When only pokemon red/blue were out in the US I downloaded a rom for pokemon yellow (discovered on whatever p2p I was using at the time) when searching for pokemon to play in an emulator. I didn't know it existed at the time and it was in Japanese. When I told my friends "pikachu follows you around!" None of them believed me.
- gambiting 5mo agoHaha, that's incredibly cool too! I actually played through a rom of Pokemon Green for the exact same reason - it was cool, no one at school believed me Pokemon Green was a real thing.
- riffraff 5mo agoI think everybody does this to some extent. Like, I remember someone telling me at one point that the thing in Head over Heels was a Dalek with prince Charles head. I didn't know either of those.
- yazantapuz 5mo agoI don't think that the larry games where to be released to the whole world.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoLife is sweet, when you life in the cultural nexus that is a English speaking country and do not have to pay the translation tax.
- yazantapuz 5mo agoI live in south america.
- throwthrowuknow 5mo agoThat wasn’t the era of global releases via the internet. You had to either buy it in person or, order by mail or get a copy from a BBS. It was an American game made for Americans.
- gschizas 5mo agoRetail stores existed outside the US, even back then.
- cassianoleal 5mo agoSame same! My brother and I had a notepad with all the questions and possible answers, and we'd run the game several times until we got through, then make a note of the answers. Eventually we had all of them. "Ken sent me" is buried in my brain for that same reason. :) Thanks for bringing back the memories!
- Akasazh 5mo ago> Ken sent me I also remember the joke that was written on the same wall 'it takes leather balls to play rugby'. I didn't get the joke till much later, but somehow it stuck with me.
- palata 5mo agoI learned to read very early because I really wanted to be able to start the games on the family computer (instead of having to ask an adult to do it for me). And only then I realised that it was all in English :-).
- foobarian 5mo ago> I'm from a non-English-speaking country. Same, our solution was to pirate Softice, then step through the startup to find the checks and replace them with nops or point at the desired location. Sierra games were not that amenable to this though because of the interpreter.
- lkramer 5mo agoLSL 1 EGA specifically is pretty much how I learned English. It was certainly much more efficient than my teachers :)
- noufalibrahim 5mo agoThere were so many of these wink-wink things I wouldn't know about if not for trying to brute force LSL.
- bko 5mo agoOf course rules are circumvented. Maybe even frequently. But that doesn't mean on the margin none of this stuff has an impact and is not worth the effort. It's the whole "kids are going to drink anyway so I may as well buy them booze" brain rot.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- belorn 5mo agoThere is one thing I do not remember, and that is if Leisure Suit Larry was advertised toward children and how much of Leisure Suit Larry revenue sales came from 0–12 years old, adolescent of 13–17 years old, and then adult customers. It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.
- teeray 5mo agoIt’s hilarious when adults forget how smart a motivated group of children with an ocean of free time can be.
- forlorn_mammoth 5mo agoSolution: make sure the kids don't have any free time. Let's schedule their days for optimum productivity instead.
- vavos 5mo agoAh, The steryotipical asian parent approach
- mrguyorama 5mo agoThe vast majority of children are not motivated. They will implement any workarounds they are directly told, but have zero understanding or skills required to develop a workaround themselves and no intention or desire to become technically literate. The vast majority of kids are stuck when you've blocked the first two returns for a google search for "Proxy" HN is in a crazy bubble. The vast majority of kids live normal lives, and don't spend their time trying to get around filters and things because that's boring to them. Most children don't have an ocean of free time. They are playing their video game or watching their shows or whatever.
- dec0dedab0de 5mo agoWe had as much fun trying to answer those questions as we did playing the game. They knew what they were doing. offtopic, I would love remakes of all the old sierra games, with a local llm doing the text interface.