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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium, was a CD-ROM drive. With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds.

...

By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.

The concept was implemented. The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.

Original Submission