The Secret of Monkey Island · PC / Amiga / Atari ST · Lucasfilm Games · 1990
LucasArts' most famous copy protection was a cardboard wheel of severed pirate faces — match the top half to the bottom half, read the hanging date through a window, and the joke was funny enough that players kept the wheel for decades.
The Secret of Monkey Island, designed by Ron Gilbert with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman and released by Lucasfilm Games in 1990, shipped with one of the most beloved objects in the history of game packaging: the Dial-A-Pirate wheel. Included in early floppy releases, it was a cardboard disc assembly that functioned as copy protection while being genuinely, memorably funny — a combination the industry has almost never managed. The mechanism was ingenious. The wheel consisted of two independently rotating cardboard disks. The front disk displayed fifteen bottom halves of pirate faces around its edge, with seven island-shaped windows cut into its middle; the back disk carried fifteen top halves of pirate faces along with a matrix of years. On starting the game, the player was shown a complete pirate face — a specific top half paired with a specific bottom half — and asked in which year that pirate had been hanged at a named island. The player rotated the wheel to align the matching top and bottom halves, then read off the year visible through the window for the correct island. What elevated it above every other code wheel was the humour. The pirate faces were grotesque, gap-toothed, eyepatched cartoons, and mixing halves at random produced absurd hybrid faces — an activity that players cheerfully engaged in for its own sake, entirely apart from the game. A copy protection device that people played with recreationally is a genuinely singular achievement, and it perfectly suited a game whose central pleasure was its comic voice. Dial-A-Pirate is probably the most well-known example of physical copy protection in any PC game, and its influence was immediate: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge shipped with a similar wheel, the "Mix'n'Mojo," which required aligning voodoo spell reagents. Both wheels are now prized collectibles, and digital recreations circulate online so that players of modern re-releases can still perform the ritual. Like Infocom's feelies, Dial-A-Pirate demonstrated that anti-piracy measures need not be resented if they are witty enough to become part of the game's charm.
Being the most famous physical copy protection in PC gaming — and the only one players enjoyed so much they kept it as a toy.
The Dial-A-Pirate consisted of two independently rotating cardboard disks. The front carried fifteen bottom halves of pirate faces around its rim, punctuated by seven island-shaped windows; the back carried fifteen top halves plus a grid of years. When the game began, it displayed a complete pirate face and asked in which year that particular pirate had been hanged at a specific island. The player rotated the disks to align the matching top and bottom halves, then read the answer through the window corresponding to the named island. It was simple, tactile, and impossible to circumvent without the physical object — precisely what copy protection needed to be.
What made Dial-A-Pirate legendary was not its effectiveness but its wit. The pirate faces were grotesque cartoon caricatures, and spinning the disks to random positions produced hilarious hybrid monstrosities — a pastime players indulged in purely for amusement, entirely separate from the game. Anti-piracy measures were universally loathed in this era, experienced as punishments inflicted on paying customers; Dial-A-Pirate was instead a toy that people kept for decades. It suited a game built on comic voice perfectly, and its success prompted the similar Mix'n'Mojo wheel for the sequel, cementing LucasArts' reputation for making even its DRM funny.